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Language: en
the following is a conversation with
jason calacanis
who's an entrepreneur investor author of
angel how to invest in technology
startups and
as many people may know he's a fun
brilliant
long time podcast host of this week in
startups
and co-host of the all in podcast with
chamath palahapatia david sax and david
friedberg
who all happen to be poker buddies and
self-proclaimed besties
the result is always a great listen due
to both
the love and the heated disagreements
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as a side note let me say that i've been
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in the past few months
to give you a bit of context on the side
i've studied trading from an algorithmic
trading perspective
as a machine learning and a game theory
problem off and on for a few years in
undergrad and grad school
i found the distributed complex system
aspect of finance and economics in
general fascinating
but now i find even more fascinating the
human side of the whole thing
ideas of greed power freedom and truth
wall street bets robin hood and the
whole beautiful mess around this topic
allows us to have great conversations
about human nature
and the systems that underlie the rise
and fall of civilizations
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at lex friedman and now here's my
conversation
with jason kilikanis i have a million
things to talk to you about but we
do happen to be living through what i
would think of
as a historic event in in terms of its
impact in terms of
like almost philosophically thinking
about the role of
people and how they can fight power with
this whole wall street
bets and game stop situation i was
wondering
you've covered in your uh amazing all-in
podcast you guys have been having
fascinating battles over this whole
situation
i was wondering if you could tell maybe
from your perspective
as it's unrolling uh the the saga of
wall street best in gamestop what are
some interesting
insights yeah uh that you have
about this whole set of events in full
disclosure i was an angel investor in
robin hood before they launched
and when i met the founder vlad and his
partner
you know they pitched me at a a bar not
too far from where we are right now in
palo alto called antonio's nuthouse
and my friend adeo it's a really good
story
my friend adeo had asked me to speak at
his founders institute which is kind of
like an
accelerator for people who are thinking
about starting a company yes and so i
gave a talk and then he said hey let's
go to antonio's nut house and
um we'll meet elon for a drink uh and so
elon met us for a drink there and it's
it's the divest of dive bars
like you'll take a beer love the image
of all of this
you hang out with elon yeah i mean it is
the
worst bar in the peninsula
like just garbage on the floor and like
cheap beer
and warm beer and like you pick up your
pine glass to be lipstick on it
it's just brutal classy not your
lipstick you understand
somebody else's lipstick yes and so
we're sitting there
and vlad walks up with um
his partner and he says you're jason
calacanis and i said tell me about your
startup he said how do you know i have a
startup i said you recognize me
and i mean that's the only way and he
goes is that elon musk and i said yes
elon come
say hi and he came over and said i said
tell me what you do he said well i'm a
quant
i said what's that and he said
quantitative
analysis and i was like oh yeah i know
about that that's like you guys make
algorithms and then try to beat the
market right he's like yeah i was like
so you're gonna pitch me on a startup
and you're gonna sell your algorithm to
other people
and if it was so good why wouldn't you
just use it yourself and print money
he's like yeah no no that's not our
business our businesses we're going to
create an app to get millennials to
trade stocks
and i said you do realize there's no
retail investors anymore like the dot
com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis
eliminated any individual's belief in
participating in the stock market
and he said that's the opportunity i
said okay i like it tell me more
he said well we're going to get these
millennials to trade i said the same
ones
who live in their mom's basements and
take uber and lyft and
are on their parents have no money got
screwed and
you know went 250k into debt for school
and now can't get a job those people
and he's like yeah i'm like okay they
have no interest in their future but
they're going to trade stocks he said
yeah that's the opportunity i was like
how do you how are you going to make
money
and he said well that's the best part
it's going to be free
and i said so your idea is to get a
group of people who have no interest in
saving for their future
to trade and your business model is free
and he said yes i said i'm in
because in almost all cases the crazy
outlandish ideas
that nobody believes in are the ones
that have the greatest returns i mean
uber
i introduced to about 25 investors and
three of us said yes
so you know a full 12 percent of the
community
who saw that deal decided to do it so
the your sense about this idea being
good
had to do with the fact that this guy
was just uh crazy and ambitious and bold
thinking or was it that there's
something here in uh
allowing a much larger magnitude of
people to be able to be investors
yeah the way to do really well as an
angel investor or
just in technology or in life is to not
say what could go wrong but to say what
could go right
and then to just imagine for a moment if
it does work what would the world look
like and so when elon was investing
in tesla and some other guys were
running it
and he was trying to save the company
you know
it wasn't is this gonna work it was
almost
positively not gonna work it was and he
knew that um
but if it does work what does the world
look like and so that's really what
you're looking for is
not the chances of success but if it
does succeed
does succeed what would that look like
and
you that's what the world needs more
people doing and so when you looked at
robin hood it was like well if he does
succeed what would the world look like
and now we've seen what it looks like
you have a generation who are so
financially sophisticated
that they know how to do puts and calls
and shorts
and research at a level
that dominated the hedge fund industry
so let's pause for a second
these traders sitting there on a
subreddit in a discord server
are able to do analysis and research and
then act in unison
to say we're going to beat in the robin
hood sense
uh you know this group of sophisticated
insiders who have
more access and more access to capital
but we will
figure out how to solve this problem and
you know things
most things don't work it's like the
wikipedia like
there's no way no way the wikipedia
would ever work right
except it did yeah right like you're
like how is this ever going to work
you're not paying anybody but it's both
the largest corpus
of an encyclopedia ever so i think
robinhood actually succeeded and then
what we saw was
this system and a lot of the systems in
our society
whether it's the political system the
constitution of the united states
uh education higher education which
you're involved in
and then even the financial system we
have not stress tested and
stress tested it and we don't actually
know all the edge cases and how it works
so trump was able to just really put
this crazy stress test like
it is the democracy going to hold
are we going to break this two or three
you know 200 someone-year-old experiment
and then we looked at the financial
markets and it turns out there were more
people shorting the stock than stocks
where
the shares were available i don't know
how that's possible and then i'm trying
to uncover
where can i see a list of people who've
shorted the stock and it's like you
can't
but we can tell you sort of how many
every two weeks or maybe twice a week we
can create a report
maybe we know i was surprised that
nobody knows
the list of people who were shorted and
you guys were trying to figure that out
yeah there's no transparency on a lot of
these systems
and if you call to try to shorter stock
like it's almost like they'll tell you
on the phone like let me see i think i
might know a guy who has shares to loan
out
so it's like am i calling to like try to
find like a
73 mustang grande in you know gold
you know you're gonna call around it's
like shouldn't this be like on a
ledger somewhere and be completely
transparent so
now we're seeing those things and i
think the investigations will make it
super clear but of course
in a vacuum without information there
are so many investors in these startups
that conflicts can start to appear and
then you know how it is with people in
conspiracy there is
the mind starts to wander right and so
in some cases there is actually a
conspiracy and then in other cases
uh people's mind will fill in like oh my
god there's some grand conspiracy here i
can tell you robin hood's only goal is
to get more people to trade stocks
and to democratize it even more and they
apparently
were on the brink of you know seizing as
an as an entity if they didn't get more
money
to cover all these trades i mean they
were on the brink and they raised three
and a half billion dollars or something
like that in a week
yeah so in some sense robin hood enabled
this very like the magic of this
distributed system of wall street bets
right you said wikipedia which is
another which is probably one of my
favorite websites and one of my favorite
examples of like a distributed system
somehow coming together in a way
just like you said at that crappy bar
you i would have guessed it would never
work
but if it does work it changes
everything and it did
and robin hood in that same way probably
enabled or was one of the major enablers
of wall street best of giving
power uh like empowering young kids
to learn about how this whole messy
financial system works
and take on the big elite centralized
players
yes and you know it's very easy when
these companies get big
um one thing that's changed is the
footprint of these startups and the
velocity at which they grow
so something like airbnb is another
perfect example of something that should
really not work
in practice but it does like i'm gonna
rent my
couch or my extra room to somebody like
a serial killer or
i'm gonna stay in somebody's house like
a serial killer's house and
you know it's like it really sounds
scary but it actually works and
and it has not destroyed the hotel
business
it has added so the best startups induce
a market to exist
if you look at you know uber or airbnb
people replaced their cars and uber was
not
competing ultimately with taxis they
were competing with car ownership
public transportation walking or just
not going out
and then you look at airbnb a lot of
people who stay in an airbnb would not
be
taking a trip to kyoto if not for the
fact that they could get a 75
beautiful room with great reviews in
kyoto for
three weeks it inspires people and it
manifests a market because the product
is so transcendent right
and i think that's one of the things
that robin hood did you can't learn how
to do this options
trading and puts and calls and all this
sophistication stuff
unless you actually do it it's just too
hard to learn except in practice
just like poker if you want to learn how
to play poker or guitar
or tennis or skiing like you could talk
about it you can watch youtube videos
but at a certain point you got to get on
the mountain at a certain point
you got to put some chips in the pot and
it's going to be painful
yeah like poker is going to be painful
you're going to lose a lot of money
that's why you should play at the small
tables first and
you know even in trading like you look
at people who are doing this
crazy trading and gamestop a company
that's worth
you know maybe a couple of billion
dollars but certainly not tens of
billions of dollars of course the people
who are throwing their money in last are
gonna lose it
i think everybody knew that um and so it
was a momentum play and
you know they're betting against the
hedge funds um so i think it's good for
people to learn
and become financially illiterate and
just always understand
the concept of the risk of ruin yeah um
the good news is for a young person the
risk of ruin might be like they lose
five thousand dollars or something and
then they have to build their stack back
up
right but that's really the the only
thing i am concerned about is
there are people who will play poker or
blackjack or sports betting or whatever
it is and lose control
just like there might be people who try
alcohol and lose control
but we can't build a system based upon
limiting
you know the average person's behavior
based upon somebody who can't control
you know their ability to drink you know
two glasses of wine instead of 20.
how does this whole thing end uh
probably in tears
for who yeah who's crying is everybody
crying
who's crying when so i think there were
some of the hedge funds that were crying
initially
that maybe some of the wall street bets
people who bought last would be crying
and then eventually there's an probably
another set of hedge funds or even the
wall street bets
mob and you know that army some of them
might have broke ranks and then shorted
the stock
yeah so nobody knows so everybody has to
be aware of what's happening in the game
so if wall street vets said hey let's
squeeze these hedge funds because they
have too much short interest
let's all buy the stock then some of
them might have said okay you know it's
not
two or three hundred dollars maybe i'll
join the short movement now that they've
covered and they could have shorted
their in been like double agents so
people have to understand like this
stuff is gnarly and it's a it's a
free-for-all
i mean it is a literal free-for-all
there's a kind of morality
like a big statement that wall street
bets made in terms of like the elites
can't just push us around they can't
bully around
but at the same time you know they're
also interested in making money
right yes is uh what's your sense you
said that
some of the people in the wall street
best might have broken off and shorted
the stock
sure are they more interested there was
an emergent
like morality that emerged and said like
we're not going to put up with the
centralized elites but
is that going to continue are they going
to fight the power structures that are
bad for society
are they going to now like i mean are
they ultimately going to introduce more
chaos that's going to damage the economy
and damage the world or are they going
to continue being the good guys and
fighting the uh
the the the evils that manipulate uh the
market
what's your sense you know it it really
feels like the dark knight series of
films where like
some people just want to see the world
burn yeah i think there is a contingent
of people who just
literally want to see chaos yeah like
you know that contingent
on some of these you know forums who
just want to create chaos
right um so there's certainly that chaos
contingent but i think overall what the
arc will show is
a group of people getting massively
educated you see it in crypto as well
there was like a three-year period where
all of these failed entrepreneurs who i
knew who couldn't
build companies were then coming back to
me
after their companies has failed or
after they gave up or couldn't clear a
market raising money with the venture
capital community
and they were doing icos and i was like
i met you before right and they're like
yeah yeah no i'm doing an ico now i'm
like okay
where's your company at and they're like
here's a white paper and i was like
this white paper with spelling errors in
it that says you're going to destroy
airbnb because everybody's apartment is
going to be on immutable ledger
yeah like wouldn't that be better in a
regular database that was private and
not public
like why does it need to be an immutable
ledger so it can't change i'm like
not changing the database is a feature
that's that does not seem like a good
feature
and they couldn't explain it they're
like well just people are interested in
icos and there was that ico mania
and what it showed was there's a global
appetite for risk people
want to try new things this is one of
the great things about the human spirit
is one of the great things about
capitalism
and one of the things that concerns me
most about we're at society is
the sort of socialism communism
you know entrepreneurship is bad
technology is bad
and polarization of wealth and you know
people getting rich is a bad thing when
i grew up i'm 50 now but when i was a
gen xer growing up we kind of
maybe too much idolized bill gates and
people who are doing interesting things
in the world
and we thought capitalism was a force
for good i still believe capitalism
is a force for good because when a group
of people builds a product or service
that changes the world and and it gets
globally distributed whether it's
tesla or spacex or google or airbnb or
uber or robinhood
you know everybody gets to benefit from
that product or service
having to compete and if you look at the
places where there's no competition like
public education or less you know profes
you know uh you know established
you know colleges and stuff like that
less competition for accreditation
degrees
like things tend to get a little weird
don't they yeah
and people tend to be protected and
that's not good you need
you need competition um does it mean
that
you know people shouldn't have global
health care it doesn't mean that you
know we shouldn't have a safety net but
we need to keep capitalism vibrant
especially because china
has now co-opted capitalism and created
their own version of capitalism
which is communism with capitalism it's
like this weird operating system like
we still want to keep communism so we
can take any of your gains at any time
yes but we'd like you to be
entrepreneurial yeah and then you have
somebody like
you know um you know the founder of
alibaba jack ma
who disappears for a couple of weeks
who's that
exactly like who's jack he kind of
disappears for a couple of weeks and
then he comes back and he's really sorry
about the things he said and
then he disappears again and like you
know we have to be very careful if china
wins
capitalism yeah this is going to be an
existential threat for humanity yeah
the chinese are no joke i mean they are
seriously focused
and they are picking the winners it's a
very weird system because it is in fact
i don't know what you call it like
communism capitalism in such uh
overloaded terms but they do encourage
entrepreneurship
but they and they do a good job of it oh
yes but but then they're like
they're like the surveillance thing and
they're controlling things in a way yeah
it's it's weird
because it seems to work really well for
them
uh in the short term yes it's definitely
got short-term benefits
so the question is like what what uh how
that gets distorted and becomes worse
and what's worse
what should potentially might be and i i
think on
you know the the entrepreneurial spirit
which
you have apocalypse all centered around
the entrepreneurial spirit it
is one of the magical things that makes
this country great i don't know if money
is deeply tied into that
i do get bothered by people you know
treating the word billionaires if it's a
bad word yeah
but in general like all the hard things
all the difficult things we're going
through in this country it seems like
the way out is going to be uh
making the the entrepreneur the hero of
society of like
letting that young kid with the big
dream and the guts to take the big risks
and build something totally new
uh make giving them a chance and
whatever that involves
i i don't think it's about taxes i don't
think it's about like
uh regulation all that stuff it's about
us and just public discourse saying
that that kid that guy that girl they're
bad asses
like encourage them to do it we have to
have people buy in
to the fact that they have that
opportunity and i think one of the
problems in society is
there's a group of people who actually
don't believe that they
can succeed or they don't believe even
more perniciously
that other people can and that's the
group of people that i think are
highly vocal but a small group of people
which are
generally people of incredible privilege
rich parents
white city dwellers liberals they kind
of look and say
poor people cannot change a lot and
their they're battling in their minds
to protect poor people and but they have
this very weird patriarchal kind of
approach to it which is
they think that they're not capable of
changing their lot in life and they're
like it's not possible
and then once in a while i'll tweet
something where i say you know it's
really incredible that
every piece of knowledge you could
possibly want is now available for free
on youtube
and every course from mit and harvard
and stanford is available on edx or
coursera
and all that information is there freely
available and you can take the lectures
this is amazing and then people will be
like yeah but people don't have access
to it i'm like
they do it's free here's the link and
they're like
yeah but they don't have internet and
i'm like here's the chart of internet
penetration in america like
and they're like well poor people don't
have internet and i'm like really
find me any downtrodden person without a
smartphone
with a high-speed connection that
capitalism provided
for 12 a month or 15 a month like it's
very hard to find that
and and we have it so well in this
country and there's so much opportunity
um but people don't believe it
and that's actually one of the problems
see the average american still watches
four or five hours of television a day
and often i meet people they're like i
need a technical co-founder
and i you know but all i need is a
million dollars and i'm like okay well
what is your skill and they don't have a
skill
right and i'm like well are you a
designer no
are you a product manager no are you a
developer no are your sales executive
no okay what are you it's like well i
have an idea well
as my friend sam harris i think your
friend as well says like
everybody has like a million ideas an
hour like you don't really get credit
for those even when you're asleep your
idea is spewing ideas
like zero credit for your ideas it's all
about execution
you have to believe that you yourself
can be the core of that execution you
yourself can build the thing and every
no matter what your circumstances are
and you could talk about like structural
racism and all those kinds of things
that very fast
but from the individual perspective when
you just like are coaching or giving
advice to an individual
you can literally change the world i
mean wall street bets is an indication
of that in the financial space that you
yourself
can have can change the world that
that's why this country is
is amazing still the best country in the
world right i mean it still is
amazing the opportunity provided to
people all this educational experience
is online
and the ability what i tell young people
who are looking for advice
i say you know your the skill you need
to refine is the ability to learn new
skills
like if you become good at learning a
new skill
and tim ferriss a friend of mine has
really pioneered this like
he can get to 60 or 70 percent
of like the knowledge in a skill in some
incredibly short period time now i'm not
saying he's gonna become a virtuoso
drummer
or a great basketball player but tim and
i were on vacation together in
like a group vacation in italy and there
was a basketball court
and uh i said let's go let's go shoot
some hoops i never shoot shot before and
i was like okay come on
i'll teach you and tim is fabulously
uncoordinated people don't know this
yes like he tried to dribble a
basketball and do a layup yeah and it
looked like
he had a blindfold on i mean you've
never seen something
less elegant than tim ferriss doing a
layup in basketball and then he watched
me do it three or four times
and i watched him study me and i listen
i i've been playing basketball in
brooklyn since i was a kid
i got a couple of moves and he was just
taking notes and taking notes and taking
notes and by the end of a couple of
hours of doing this
i could just watch him checking his form
and figuring it out
that's every skill in the world now and
what i tell people is like
i'm like have you did you watch game of
thrones and they're like yeah
watch breaking bad like yeah i'm like
okay that's about 400 hours
yeah how about you don't watch the next
two
and you put that 400 hours into learning
how to be a graphic designer
a ux person a developer whatever it is
and learn how to add skills that's what
i did my whole life i was a kid from
brooklyn
went to school at night but i was very
quick to get to maybe 50
of the knowledge base of graphic design
or being a writer or being a sales
executive whatever it was a developer
even
and i was just good enough to not have
people be able to bullshit me like when
i hired them
and that was a big unlock when you know
enough that people can't snow you that's
a really good one and look at yourself
like
you figured out how to set up an entire
podcast people don't know this but
you don't have a team around you i have
a team of like five six people working
in my pocket you see even knowing
enough about to set this up you would
then be able to hire a team
correct and you'll be able to call them
on their bullshit if they're not doing a
good job
and that's really important and i don't
know that much about this whole thing
but i know enough to be able to
see who knows their stuff or not you're
absolutely right and then
the process of learning how to learn is
uh
is essential there because uh like i've
uh i did martial arts uh jiu-jitsu and
so on
and it's so funny to watch i did take
one yeah definitely that was awesome
it's funny that there's some people that
do an activity for years
because to sort of elaborate on
something you were saying about
uh hours it's not always the
amount of hours it's the quality that
you put in deliberate practice versus
just doing some behavior i mean
literally i've been playing chess and
and trying to get that going again after
watching queen's gambit and i got
chess.com
and i realized i was just playing and
i'm not getting better and then i was
like oh wait there's a little analysis
feature here at jazz.com
where we'll show you your blunders and
mistakes and i'm like oh
i'm spending no time reviewing my losses
in chess
and i just want to play the next game i
should really review these losses and
figure out what mistakes i made when i
started doing that i was like oh
i'm getting better yeah right so some
deliberate practice really well and if
you want to take it all the way uh
magnus carlsen
uh shout out to the guy he has an app
but there's a few other coaching apps
where you like focus on the end game you
focus
drilling a particular it's you basically
don't play the game at all you're just
focused on drilling the
the different apps the openings the
openings yeah yeah and there's different
kinds of puzzles so you can really make
it into a
deliberate practice not to make this
episode uh sponsored by chess.com but
they literally have puzzles
yeah so i was like oh and it's a hundred
dollars a year for this product and i
just thought to myself
this is capitalism they don't need to
charge you a hundred dollars an hour for
a lesson
they can charge you a hundred dollars
and they've created the ability for you
to play chess 24 hours a day
against opponents who are perfectly
matched against you based on your rating
and they analyze every game and they
have puzzles and they have tutorials and
they've got everything else
it's like just think about how
much value is being provided to society
because of capitalism and because
competition if you want things to get
better
and you want to step up your game just
make it slightly competitive it is one
of these things
in human uh existence that is
so powerful i don't know did you see the
michael jordan documentary the last
dance
like half of it okay i'm still working i
mean he's so
competitive yeah and petty yeah it's so
inspiring that
all he cares about is just winning
to the level of which he literally
there's like this running meme
i took that personally and i took that
person i don't know if you've seen the
images of him
sitting smoking a cigar looking at like
an ipad or a video clip and it's like i
took that personally
and you can make a supercut of every
time he took something personally he
literally takes everything personally to
give himself that competitive motivation
to win that's capitalism and when people
are competing
man look at what elon did to the the
the space of cars like every they were
literally laughing at him in the first
10 years electric cars ha ha
that company will go out of business and
now every single company is like
we're going fully electric by 2035 and
he
kicked their asses so brutally
that they had no choice but then to step
up their game
and that's what we want right and this
virus and this pandemic
i think the the the great thing that
will come out of this horrible
experience that we've all had
psychologically death learning just so
many bad things occurred the economy
people losing their jobs
but we also got to see the human spirit
with these mrna vaccines
and and just how if we
took out some of the regulation and
people were super motivated
we might actually be able to eliminate
all
uh pandemics from ever happening again
and before that bill gates was banging
his fist and jeff skull was doing
the movie contagion i mean for two
decades people have been banging their
faces we have to be prepared for this
yes and everybody's like yeah whatever
yolo
it's not gonna happen and now it's
happened and people are like
we need to be able to destroy every you
know
pandemic and virus before it happens and
you're listening you know a lot more
about science than i do but this mr mrna
has been around for a while
we've just never gotten aggressive about
doing it and then you think about
challenge trials
i don't know if you've been following
this but they're doing challenge trials
now in the uk this month
where they're introducing covid into
healthy young patients
and then giving them the vaccine or you
know and that is against all
yeah rules and regulations about
you know do no harm but then you think
about it
we kind of celebrate people jumping out
of planes and we got that one guy alex
honnold who's climbing up mountains
without a rope and they give him a north
star
you know back page ad and a a you know
an endorsement deal
yeah and we celebrate that we celebrate
people
surfing with sharks we celebrate people
doing deep welding we pay them extra to
go
200 feet underground and weld stuff and
people do dangerous stuff all day long
astronauts yeah but we won't
soldiers firefighters but we won't let
people
get paid to be do a challenge trial yeah
we're weirdly risk-averse in certain
areas that completely don't make any
sense
and this is where the world needs to be
we could have said these thousand people
young people who we know are in all
likelihood not going to have a bad
outcome
but there's a possibility this is a
possibility but it's very low and it's
certainly lower than
riding a motorcycle right it's lower
than riding motorcycles people riding
motorcycles everywhere we have ads for
motorcycles
we could have just said to those
thousand people we'll give you a million
dollars each
to do this okay there's your billion
dollars
we we're printing trillions of dollars
of money to deal with this if we had
just done
a thousand people for a million dollars
each to do a
challenge trial in march april may when
they had the mrna vaccines ready
we could have deployed the vaccines in
the summer we would have been done with
this
it would have been over by now so we get
to challenge all of that thinking i
think that's what the great pause did
it's letting everybody challenge that
thinking is why do we have that rule
okay yeah we don't want to have people
you know like
give up their organs for money like we
obviously understand but there's a
reasonable discussion about
well maybe there's a level of risk in a
global pandemic i mean we fought the
nazis
right we defeated the nazis that took a
lot of deaths to do that but we had to
kill that evil this is another evil
which we must
fight and it's going to result in it's
already resulting in thousands of people
dying a day but
we could have actually stopped it
earlier if we just had a reasonable
discussion this is why podcasting as i
respect what you do
this is why intelligent people are so
drawn to podcasts because you and i
can expand on this yes and not cancel
each other
over this very suggestion when i make
this suggestion that are challenge
trials reasonable or not
if i were to do that on twitter they'd
be like oh calacanis wants to
give poor people corona virus in order
to save rich people
yeah no i didn't say that but
we you and i could have a reasonable
discussion about a challenge trial is
something we should consider
in a acute situation where millions of
people are going to lose their lives
right so you know that's an example of
capitalism and competition working
really well
there there's one of the to me sad thing
to see about coronavirus is that for
example testing
at scale should have it seems obvious
i i was a little clueless about it but
because i thought there's no way you
can have like antigen tests at hundreds
of millions
like order hundreds of millions of them
and make them cheap but actually
i realized recently that there have been
available since about like may
yeah you were able to in korea in
finland all over the place
you could have done mass manufacture so
there
there's a little bit of a failure of uh
of capitalism to step up yeah and i
don't know if you agree with this but
it seems that the blame is to be placed
at the regulators
yeah and the the the various
institutions
crony capitalism and all likelihood is
what stopped it here in america
i mean i had friends who had imported
them from other countries
the testing kits and you've probably
been to parties where people had these
kind of testing kits from other
countries
and we're sitting here and they're just
approving them now really in february
month 11 of the pandemic in america
we're going to have testing online
really
i mean even if these tests were 80 you
know
effective and they're 95 effective mass
producing them we should have sent them
you know in every postal anybody with a
post office box should have
you know with the mailing address should
have had 10 of them put in their mailing
address just for free from the
government
and then everybody would be testing and
we would have contained it we don't have
test and trace here in the united states
all the countries that
are on the other side of kovid did it by
having testing
tracing and closing their borders and
masks
that's the combination that works the
the problem with
the coronavirus is uh while there's a
lot of institutions did not behave their
best
it's also the case that there's a lot of
uncertainty so i tend to give a little
bit of a pass
to everybody involved for the
uncertainty
we were all i give them that until june
i wonder how history will remember this
whole period i'd love to ask you
because you were an early investor in
robin hood and you're sort of
you're in a very nice place
of uh being a huge supporter of the sort
of wall street bets
kind of distributed power of the people
and at the same time
uh because of you being an investor like
intellectually giving a chance to robin
hood in this kind of chaotic time of
conversations
to think about like well what did they
do right what did they do wrong
yeah so you have a kind of a balanced
view on the whole thing which is really
nice
is there we've talked about what
robinhood did
right i think can you uh sort of
steel man uh charmata's argument
of uh what robin hood did wrong in the
last few days
yeah i mean there communication is
always the number one issue with these
startups right
and if you you have to get ahead of any
problem
and you have to put all the bad news out
immediately and in the case of robinhood
it seems based on what you know has been
in the papers and what robinhood said
publicly
is that they had this kind of liquidity
crisis right where
they were being uh because of these
exchanges telling them you have to put
up this amount of money in collateral
and them being pinned at number one
in the app store there were so many
people trying to buy five shares of this
stock five shares of this meme stock
that it kind of broke their system and
then the people who clear the trades for
them
they said you got to put up a billion
dollars 2 billion 3 billion so you can't
do that overnight
and i think that they were an
uncomfortable situation of
like going on tv and saying uh we have a
liquidity crisis
like that could be like a run on the
bank everybody then logs in at the same
time to
robinhood and tries to sell every share
they own because they're afraid that the
whole thing's going to collapse right so
i think there was this kind of like
black swan event and they probably
didn't communicate it all that well
at the center of that this is this is
really interesting maybe you can comment
on the nature of communication
uh vlad the ceo yeah the guy you met at
the bar
yeah i think at the center of the
communication right yep
so elon is an example of a guy who also
is at the center of the communication
for his particular set of companies
and that you know on twitter seems to be
a really powerful way to communicate
yeah and there was something this is me
saying it yeah there was something about
vlad that sounded like he's
hiding stuff that yeah as opposed to
elon it doesn't sound like he's hiding
stuff it could be the nature the the
the beat the timing of the conversation
same thing with mark zuckerberg he
mark zuckerberg for some reason often
sounds like he's hiding something yeah
and then there's like jack dorsey is
much less so
yeah and i don't know what that is about
the ceos it makes you
trust them and not it might be the perm
point in time
um like in terms of escape velocity uh
you know there might be non-disclosures
in place that we're not aware of
where they're not allowed to talk about
certain relationships i see and
and and that results like in vladimir in
this case and that results in you being
like
acting weird or nervous or nervous yeah
it could just be the person is nervous
you know so
it's it's really hard to be building one
of these companies and you're at scale
and
you know oh my lord the entire thing's
coming apart and you're the most hated
person for that day you know how the
rage cycle works and the
the media is just so crazy when they
get their hooks into something i saw it
happen with uber we saw it happen with
facebook
and even tesla you know there were times
when auto
people did stupid things with autopilot
and it's like yeah okay somebody's
watching a movie
and sleeping in their car yeah or
leaving the driver's seat against all
the rules of autopilot
and somehow tesla's responsible for that
it's like we have people who stand on
top of their motorcycles and drive down
the road on a motorcycle
and we don't blame yamaha for or harley
davidson for some idiot
standing on the seat of their motorcycle
on a highway going 60 miles an hour we
just say
that person is an idiot but when new
technology comes out
we blame the technology not the person
operating it
yeah and if you are going to operate
uh we basically vilify and demonize i
think that that is part of it like when
the person at
i remember airbnb we always thought what
if somebody trashes your apartment
and then sure enough a bunch of meth
heads rented this poor woman's apartment
she left all of her stuff in it and then
a bunch of meth heads had a drug party
destroyed her apartment ripped up all
her photos and went crazy
and we knew that day would happen but
nobody remembers it now but it was the
number one story on
every news channel because wow that's an
exciting story
and i just thought to myself i wonder if
there are
any parties in hotel rooms where the
hotel room is being trashed and people
are doing drugs and
and crazy things like yes that's
basically every hotel in los angeles
right now is being destroyed by some
rock band that's throwing a tv out the
window
like we expected in uh you know a hotel
we just didn't expect it in somebody's
house with airbnb and then airbnb
created rules around you can't rent an
airbnb for a party
uh and they learn so i think there's a
learning curve with these companies and
they do get to scale
at a level that is unprecedented it used
to take
decades for a company to become an
international phenomenon now it happens
in two three four years
i mean look at clubhouse this thing went
from being you know a private beta six
months ago to being the number one app
in germany
and in japan and here like just like
that boom
and it's because there's an ecosystem
that has never existed
the app store then there's uh payments
online
everybody and then everybody has a super
computer in their pocket when we
the thing people got wrong about
entrepreneurship technology
uh and business you know over the last
couple decades was just how big the
market was
and then how quickly you could um you
know
achieve relevancy in these markets
we thought the market was like the 60
million homes would broadband
and originally it was like maybe 10 or
20. then it became 60 million
then i was like okay well how many how
many hours are you at your desktop
computer well like probably at our
computers for five hours a day ten hours
a day at work
three hours a day on our own and then i
was like yeah nobody's on their desktop
computer everybody's on their mobile
phone
and oh and by the way they have it with
them so the people with mobile phones
are now using
this high-speed device with an app store
with their credit card in it yeah
in the early days of the internet people
were scared to put their credit card on
the internet that was considered a
really dumb thing to do if you put your
credit card on the internet you're gonna
lose all your money they're gonna
they're gonna hack you or whatever and
now it's just amazing to me how quickly
when a company hits
how quickly it can get to a million
subscribers or 10 million or a billion
users right
and there's all these networks like
social networks that allow the spread
of uh the viral spread of like a new
startup a new
company uh a new app to be announced i
mean
anything was an idea a podcast right
like i mean single thinking just as a
single meme could change the world
speaking of clubhouse i mean yeah i just
wanna we're saying so many interesting
things but
there there was a magical moment with
vlad and elon on clubhouse
yes is there do you have thoughts about
that
interaction uh which felt like
so many uh aspects of this whole
situation feels like
totally novel surreal like it's defining
world
era like it is yes like a billionaire
the richest
human on earth is interviewing uh
the person at the center of one of the
most
interesting mass scale like uh
power battles in finance ever
you know perhaps by the way seven movies
have been sold
and two weeks just think about how fast
things are moving
this thing happens yeah like people had
the idea to short the stock six months
ago
they start doing their research they
build an army they execute the trade
the system goes down robin hood raises
three and a half billion dollars in four
days
elon is interviewing them on clubhouse
on sunday after the wednesday it
happened and now here we are
it's ten days later yeah doesn't it feel
like it's been 10 months yeah it's been
10 days lex
it's been 10 days 10 years there's like
a new president
all these things that and everyone
forgot like it was an insurrection
by the way we also almost had a
revolution at the capitol where
a bunch of crazy people who have guns
and body armor and then a bunch of them
who are just yoloing in cosplay
yeah took over the capitol well so and
the other more dramatic thing to me is
that was one month ago that was one
month and the pres the president of the
united states got banned
from every major social network and uh
which i think i'm still uh deeply
troubled by
is parlor being removed from aws that
changed the way
i that changed a lot of things as
somebody who's an aspiring entrepreneur
that changed the way i see the world
that little maybe i'm
being overdramatic but no you're not i
think you're paranoid for a reason
you're paranoid for a very good reason
which is as big as these companies can
become
they are beholden to the mob and if the
mob says
hey this person needs to be canceled
they're going to get cancelled because
you can't lose your entire audience you
could lose your whole customer base and
you can lose all your employees
i think what's interesting about your
fear about parlor and aws taking off is
we went from being like a social network
which is
you know the software layer and then we
went to like the infrastructure layer
you know and they'll even go after like
cloudflare which is a cdn provider right
they're just like
a plumbing you know it's like sort of
like the telephone
so we're basically holding everybody
responsible
on the whole chain of events here what
that's going to do is you know
i'm not a huge believer in crypto but
distributed computing
um where nobody and decentralized and
distributed
computing platforms um and open
standards podcasting's an open standard
the web is an open standard ftp was an
open standard but twitter
and you know facebook are closed
captioning not
where everybody available and i invested
in a company that tried to do this and
um got sold and it didn't work out but
take your hard drive on your computer at
home you give
you know a terabyte of your 10 terabyte
drive over to the cloud
and then everybody else does their
terabyte and then all of a sudden you've
got this virtual cloud
and anybody can store stuff on it and
it's all encrypted and then nobody can
stop it
and that could be tweets it could be
videos and so this idea that
you know youtube will be able to tell
people to kick people off because
they're skeptics of
i don't know the pandemic or the vaccine
or they've
you know uh they'll make things that are
more censorship resistant i think
that'll be the reaction to all of this
what this is my question for you going
back to that crappy bar and people
pitching you
is is there do you like with clubhouse
do you see
competitors do you think it's possible
that another
perhaps more decentralized or another
kind of social media will emerge
that will take on twitter and facebook
it might be able to replace something
if you look at the whole landscape yeah
uh with clubhouse and everything else do
you think
some other company might emerge there'll
be ten versions of clubhouse we looked
at social networking we thought
friendster
was it like friendster was so good
nobody be able to compete with that it
was growing so quickly
and then myspace was a juggernaut and
they hit 100 million in revenue and 100
million users and it was like well
that's game over and then facebook
and linkedin and snapchat and friend
feed
and countless others you know so there's
usually 20 people
who will win in a category and
80 of the category will be owned by the
top two or three players
but will those players change do you
think what's your sense oh yeah for sure
i mean if we
if facebook hadn't bought instagram it
would be a company in decline right now
people would be shorting the stock right
facebook peaked and then was sort of
heading down um and instagram saved them
and whatsapp saved them so
you know that's another kind of weird
moment in history that they were able to
accumulate that much power
and consolidate that much power
instagram should have never sold to them
that should have gone public they had
just raised money from sequoia
and they had raised 50 million dollars
at a 500 million
valuation and they didn't need to sell
and that was a big mistake to sell
they should have kept going and they
should have take took on facebook and if
instagram was a standalone company right
now it'd be worth
500 million do you think 500 billion
yeah do you think
uh facebook might buy clubhouse has been
uh oh they'll probably copy it
i mean zuckerberg has no moral compass
or ethics or anything i mean he's a
marauder i mean
he basically copied snapchat seven times
yeah like he did poke and he just kept
trying and trying and trying
part of the reason why the whatsapp
founders and the instagram founders left
is they found zuckerberg so distasteful
in terms of his ability to copy what do
you think makes
a great leader in that sense because
okay so when i look at zuckerberg
he's a great executor is he a great
actor i don't think he's a great leader
i was bullish on
i was excited about facebook in the very
early days uh
i thought it was an exciting opportunity
to connect people and stuff started
going wrong
in certain kinds of ways and again maybe
it's
our human nature but i attribute a lot
of that to the leadership
absolutely and i mean the guy started it
because he was unable to ask girls if
they were single and on a date i mean
that was this excuse to be a good
motivator that could be a good i mean it
does i mean
the motivation of 18 19 year old manners
yeah
pretty clear um he was just trying he
had no game
he had no game and he needed to know who
was single so
he could you know at least have a shot
at getting
creepy hello creepy yeah you know he he
i think was so obsessed with
engagement and winning and he's he's
kind of like one of those friends you
have who's just really good at playing a
video game
but maybe doesn't see the bigger picture
in life and um i mean there's a reason
why everybody who worked for him hates
him and doesn't talk to him anymore and
then actively derides them like
so many this the people who sold
whatsapp
to him then backed other projects like
telegram and said horrible things about
him on the way out these are the people
he made billionaires
um and they really don't like him uh so
i think there is something that he does
that does not breed loyalty
but he's very successful in his focus
which is growth is all that matters he's
a marauder
and taking friction out of products and
processes
is the playbook of silicon valley for
the last decade or two so whatever the
friction poetry what you're saying right
outside you're speaking so fast that i
almost forget that you're
you're dropping bombs but so removing
the
removing friction and you're saying
facebook is exceptionally good he was
the best at it
i mean at uber they were like we're
going to take out tipping
we're going to take out the need for you
to take out your credit card and do
payment it's just going to be in your
wallet
you got picked up you leave that's it
and i was like we should have tipping
and they're like
it adds a step and we're trying to have
no steps you put your address in
you click the button and you do nothing
else and so we've been obsessed here in
silicon valley is how many clicks can we
take out of the process
i guess amazon is incredible at that as
well absolutely one click was the start
of it and
then you look at clubhouse as an example
you open clubhouse and you see rooms
you click on it you're listening so in
one click you're listening
and then in one click if you raise your
hand you get invited
and you say yes you're speaking so it's
two clicks to speak one click to listen
i mean the only way they could make that
app work even faster is if you opened it
up and your microphone was turned on
and you which is yeah that's kind of
scary but that is the next evolution
and what happens when you go that fast
is you get unintended consequences
and so one this is why facebook has had
more fines than any company in the
history of silicon valley just giant
fines for doing stuff like this
and one of them was i don't know if you
remember when they created groups or if
you have a group for your podcast
but you know you can just add people to
a group without their permission
and there was this famous case when they
first came out with it um
somebody created a nambla fake group
national man love boy association or
whatever like
pedophilia association and they added
zuckerberg mike arrington myself and
like 20 other
famous people in silicon valley and i
was like and then somebody takes a
screenshot of it and they're like you're
right
and i'm like no facebook last year and
then zuckerberg's response was well if
your friends put you in that
namla group you should get new friends
and it was like you got put in there too
yeah and then the sad part about it was
there were a group of young men who were
gay and who were in college
and there was a gay choir in their
college and the person who was
coordinating
their facebook group added them yeah so
zuckerberg it wasn't enough for
zuckerberg to
make it so anybody could add anybody to
any group because it will grow faster
let alone you have to confirm you want
to be added to the group what it also
did was posted it on their walls to
increase
engagement and what they inadvertently
did was they outed a bunch of 18 19 year
olds in college to their families
because they joined the gay men's choir
at some college
and this is the kind of way you know
this is where silicon valley needs to
check itself and to do better
is you have to really think well there
is my incentive to grow faster
and then there's what's right for
society and for the individual you got
to think it through
think it through it's sometimes very
difficult
this is where vision is required to
anticipate the
uh unintended consequences and let's see
it seems like
mark zuckerberg is not very good at that
i you've talked to
so many great leaders in this world
privately and
and publicly what do you think makes
a great leader of these tech companies
is uh do you have an exam like
is elon to you a great leader he's also
a controversial one right there's
yeah there's a love and hate
controversial in the sense that there is
and i know a lot of people work with him
for him
that there's also a love hate uh
relationship
the the hate comes from the fact that
they get pushed extremely hard
it's a it's a very competitive
environment but
it's a positive one because it's on
there's a vision that's underlying it's
similar to the steve jobs thing
and it has to do with the back to our
michael
jordan discussion as well that there
seems to be this
the demons involved in tension and just
and yeah
anxiety all those kinds of things if you
want to do great things
um there will be some suffering and
you know there'll be some pain and it's
not easy if you want to change the world
and then some people have this
expectation that it's going to be easy
and what you'll typically find for any
great leader
who's trying to do something super
ambitious like if you want to be like
if you're a rich guy and you start like
a restaurant and you don't care about
making money and
people have made restaurants before like
you could be high fives and everybody
could love you or whatever
but if you want to change the world you
want to do something hard driving
there's going to be sacrifice involved
and so the problem is people are looking
at something
that is an olympic caliber sport or
a navy seals like effort in other words
an effort that requires
massive sacrifice we would not look at
somebody who wins a gold medal
like michael phelps and say oh my god he
had to get up at 4 a.m every day and he
had to swim and he had to do an ice bath
yeah oh my god that poor guy he suffered
he was tortured he
people were super mean to him they put
him in an ice bath it was like
no he wanted to be the greatest swimmer
of all time and he knew what the
sacrifice entailed
and then what happens in work in
business
is that people conflate like oh well i
went to work to make a living to pay my
bills
versus michael phelps approach to
getting gold medals
or michael jordan or pick the person
elon or jeff bezos and when you look at
the reviews of like a place like
amazon there was this incredible story
in the new york times where people were
i don't know if you remember it
this is the worst place you could ever
work amazon and they
we talked to 200 people and they all
told us they all described for us in the
new york times
a culture of cutthroatness and brutality
that has never before been seen and then
you see all these people who work for
bezos for 24 years from when they
graduated
with their mbas until today yeah and
they've never left the company
and they are ride or die forever
and what you're seeing there is there's
a mismatch of
people going to work in an extreme pla
sport
or an extreme endeavor who should not do
that there are people
yes who should go out into the rice
fields and pick rice yeah
and then there's another group of people
who are samurai
and who wield a sword and who take on
missions that are dangerous but if
you're a rice picker and that's what you
do
and you feel safe just you know getting
a couple grains of rice put them in a
basket cleaning it and then you know
whatever that that's valid work
no big deal i'm not deriding it i'm sort
of but that is one group
and then there's people who are samurai
and you can you cannot conflate the two
you cannot compare the two
and that's what is happening right now
in business whenever you see these
stories about
this person at this company is like a
tyrant and they're so horrible and they
yelled at somebody
like if you're in the field and you're
taking the beach at normandy and it's
d-day or
you know you got to take the hill or you
got to whack osama bin laden and you're
the navy seals and like a rudder
a rotor gets knocked off the back of the
blackhawk
like this is serious shit like don't do
it if you're not serious
yeah and if you're not serious about
changing the world why would you go work
for bezos
why would you go work for elon musk
don't do it don't go work there
this is this is uh let me just sit back
and enjoy
the beauty of uh i mean it's all of that
that's music to my ears but
i'm not sure what to do with it because
ah
it com it's conflicting to a lot of
things i hear from
the way you're supposed to kind of act
in uh
i think in order to do great things you
have to
i always admired people that lose their
shit a little bit because they're so
passionate
yeah and and like you know you know and
apologize and all those kinds of things
but like there's a tension
there's a drama to the creative process
when especially in the early startup
you know you're not this is not like the
work-life balance
idea it doesn't even apply work-life
balance it's ridiculous
a ridiculous concept like the idea that
there's like work-life balance
in a startup is ridiculous if you're
looking for work-life balance
do not go to a startup or any kind of
ambitious company
there is a series of places you can work
in the world
yes where you do not need to do
anything more than what's put in front
of you and you just
put the round peg in the round hole in
the square peg in the square hole
pole and you go home and you get your
like you know
you get your little you know bits and
grains of rice and
you go heat them up and eat them that's
it there's this other thing which is the
extreme pursuit
of changing the world and sacrificing
and we have a generation of people multi
generations of people
who are soft they're just soft i mean
what is the big struggle we've had to
deal with in america in our lifetimes
like 9 11 and we didn't have the vietnam
war and then we had this like weird iraq
wars and
middle east wars that were kind of like
a small number of people went and we
sent drones like
we have not had to sacrifice gen xers
you know maybe the talented boomers
experienced the vietnam war regrettably
but you know we've had a couple of
generations now three i guess
that just haven't had to suffer yeah and
so we're soft as americans we're soft
and then you look at people in china
and we're like oh my god these poor
chinese people are living in these tiny
cramped apartments like
they were living in like essentially
lean to's
in northern china with no running water
or like one spigot of ice cold water for
the entire village like
they're thrilled to be joining the
middle class even if it's the bottom of
the middle class right
they've taken hundreds of millions of
people in china and moved them into the
middle class
and we're like oh my god these people
are suffering it's like you know they're
up to four dollars an hour three or four
dollars an hour in the factories there
and they were just two decades ago at
you know
i don't know it was probably 50 cents an
hour something crazy like that
and now they've improved the quality of
life there so much
just like america did 200 years ago or
100 years ago they've improved it so
much in china
that now they're getting out price for
factories from vietnam
sri lanka pakistan india and people are
moving
and people in china are moving the
factories out of china into other
countries
yeah because the chinese are now
outsourcing to vietnam
and other countries so this is the way
of the world you know people move up and
they get a better lot in life for their
families and just in america we've
gotten soft and there's a generation
how do people die in america now suicide
obesity
heart attacks anxiety i mean we're
suffering from things
that if you told people 100 years ago
that the number
the top ways americans would die would
be overeating
and suicide they'd be like what you're
literally killing yourself or eating
yourself to death that's what's
happening in america
and and when everybody not everybody uh
unmasked there's a large number of
people who become softer and softer
uh capitalism creates an environment
where there is people that still step up
amidst that with a big dream and
challenge the conventions
that human spirit just to rise above
that as elon's example that uh jeff
based as an example
countless examples and and they push
you know the limits of those of human
beings that are willing to step up
and you know i i you know i think about
sort of
how to create a company that uh that
emits all of the softness yeah still
creates a revolution
it's not it doesn't seem trivial it
seems like
how do you build a culture that's once
healthy but also
unhealthy in the way that it's all the
olympic pursuit is
it's all top down everybody just you
asked earlier what leadership was and i
never answered the question i think
you know what leaders do is they set the
example they set the bar
and if you look at someone like elon you
know we're personal friends for 20 years
um and he is into fatigable like i mean
the guy
has a stamina that is just phenomenal
like he does not get tired he works
relentlessly
and he sets that standard for the rest
of the team
and and i i think you know bezos is very
sharp and likes to debate stuff and is
very con
you know and jobs was just incredible at
design
and figuring out how to bridge that gap
so they just leaders set the standard
they set the standard and you know that
your time is over as a leader when you
can't set the standard
and that's when you have to pass the
baton right and bezos did that brilliant
and bezos now is saying you know what
i'm 57
i'm the richest guy on the planet uh
depending on the week
and uh i would like to do some other
challenges but i don't want to grind it
out at amazon for another 25 years
i want to do other things and so he
passed the baton and that's the healthy
thing to do in that regard
i do think there is a time period in
which you can run that hot
and then at a certain point you have to
then change just like an athlete
might go to be a coach right and you or
a commentator
and so you know being an entrepreneur is
brutal
it's you know seven days a week 12 hours
a day anybody who says anything
differently is kidding themselves
you're going to have to sacrifice if you
and this competition
and america has to fight if america does
not
win capitalism and china does it is
literally the end of the human species
it's it's over for humanity
right now everything has been going
really well in terms of the number of
people living in poverty is
plummeting a life uh you know lifespans
have been rising
science is booming the economy is
booming all these things are incredible
the one thing
that's kind of stagnant right now is the
number of people living in democracy
versus
under authoritarian rule it's flat so
when you look at all steve pinker's
charts and he's really excited
yeah there's one you're going to see
that's flat and i think we peaked with
53 or 54 percent of people
on the planet earth being in a democracy
and now it's going below 50.
and it's because some of the democratic
you know western countries
don't have the population growth of some
of the communist and socialist countries
uh in authoritarian countries and we
have to make sure that
we're pa we win capitalism we must
win economically that is the battlefield
the battlefield the science technology
and money and economy finance
that's the battlefield china wins
authoritarians win and at any time
xi jinping can pull jack ma into a room
and say
it's time for you to be re-educated or
they can put three or four million
people
uyghurs into prison camps and say you
know what this religious thing
that's counter to what is productive for
us therefore we're going to shave your
heads
and we're going to have you literally
pick cotton in the fields they have
uyghurs with no sense of any kind of
arc of history in the fields picking
cottons as
slaves in what can only be described by
every humanitarian organization as a
concentration camp and every jewish
person i know
takes great offense when somebody uses
the holocaust as a metaphor
except in the case of the uyghurs right
now and every jewish person i've talked
to
has said to me that is a holocaust that
is
millions of people going to genocide
because of their religious beliefs
and i'm an atheist but if people want to
believe a certain religion
fine but you know china's approach is we
need to win capitalism so bad
we need to win on the global stage so
bad we can't have
any of this religious stuff going on
here that is a distraction from winning
and beating america
and then in america the people who are
going to make us win are the
entrepreneurs
and the scientists and the technology
and our education system and finance
and we're vilifying those things so it's
pretty dark
it's dark but i i still believe that the
uh the vilification is just in the space
of twitter and the space of ideas i
think that's probably
good and entrepreneurs win out in the
end they they don't listen i believe in
that
and they'll build we'll get the right
some of them do actually in their
darkest moments i can tell you that they
turn off their twitter accounts and they
i've had to sit down with a number of
entrepreneurs and say turn off twitter
this is not healthy for you this is not
a healthy pursuit because
don't read the comments if you do it's
like a full contact sport you should
just take it as like
professional wrestling or something but
stay focused on building companies
and you know advancing the human species
through science and technology
i mean as you're describing you've
hosted uh this week in startups
for uh how many episodes 11 years
almost 1200 now 1200. yeah so you've
talked to some of the great
leaders in business saying general is
there a
common thing that you see or
uh really relationship with their
parents like just
find me a great entrepreneur i will show
me the trauma
their dad was like you're not good
enough in the teenage years is that is
that truly is there something
there is definitely something hardship
of at some point in the life yeah
i think so i mean and there's definitely
something uh with immigrant parents
um that is a a bit of a stereotype out
here but i've heard from many investors
like that's like their
oh did you were your parents immigrants
and that they beat into you that you
have to succeed and
you feel the need to succeed because
they suffered to get you to this country
like
there is an archetype there that i hear
when i started investing i heard from a
lot of people was like
yeah you want to find those immigrant
founders who are coming out of stanford
because they had to fight to get there
and their parents had to fight right so
it's like two huge
fights and there's so much at stake as
opposed to somebody who's fifth
generation and like
had everything handed to them and they
were legacy and got into schools for
free but
i think in general the ability to get
people to join you on that journey yes
is so critical so you have to be
charismatic and it doesn't mean like
you're an extrovert there are
introverts who are super charismatic uh
and there are soft spoken people they
don't have to be like
super vivacious or rambunctious people
they could be just quiet assassins but
you need to be able to get people to
come on the journey with you you have to
be that storyteller
and you have to have that passion and
you have to transfer that enthusiasm
to investors the press to customers to
all the stakeholders
and if you're enthusiastic about it and
you're engaged
then it's easier for people to come on
that journey yeah and that's why people
really start to think about what is the
purpose of what i'm doing
and it sounds corny and i when i first
heard that i was like it's kind of corny
but then i read this book by
i've got his name rick something um he
wrote the purpose
driven church and he had spoken out of
ted or something and
everybody went crazy about it and he's
like a church should have one purpose
one single thing they do and like his
church which was like one of these mega
churches
in san diego just wanted to do education
for this specific country and that's all
they did and they just
they benchmark those i think it's very
important to have a purpose and a
mission not everything
uh but you know a specific purpose of
some kind of joy that you want to put
into the world you want to solve some
kind of big
hard problem and then everybody knows
why you're coming to work every day
and then for the founder when you dread
going to work that day
and you don't feel like solving that
problem anymore that's the that's the
tell and a lot of times i meet young
founders i'm like why are you doing this
and they're like
well i was looking for an idea and this
is the one i came up with because i
think i'll make a lot of money
and it's like you're going to quit
you're going to get to month 9
or 10 of this and you're going to run
out of money or like your cto is going
to quit then your cfo is going to quit
and you're going to lose your biggest
customer and
you're just going to say this is not
worth it you know and
if you know using you know bezos
or um you know ilana's examples they
they just needed to see this the world
change first in very specific ways
and steve jobs you know they needed to
see a change and it doesn't matter if
they made money or they were losing or
winning they just went to work every day
and they had to change it
it's almost like they didn't have a
choice no choice you know that makes it
sound like his torture his whole journey
but he can't help but
having been a witness to it um you know
just as friends for
for that long i have never seen an
entrepreneur suffer more than him
and uh you know he's been public about
that like you do not want to be me
um he has suffered to for those
companies he has suffered to get them
where they are
it has not been easy can you analyze
elon
in that aspect like is there is it just
he can't help but
he must see the change that he uh hopes
for in the world
he's just incredibly hard working and uh
he's very talented as well
uh and i don't think people understand
that he actually is a really brilliant
engineer at the end of the day
he actually knows what he's doing um and
he asked the right questions i mean
people were kind of aghast that he was
asking vlad such good questions
and they're like oh my god elon's the
best journalist on the planet
and it was like that's what he's anybody
who knows elon knows he has great
questions i mean i've been i used to
have dinner in la and my book agent also
was sam harris's agent sam and i met um
through john brockman and we became
friends because we lived near each other
and i was friends with elon
and then i used to invite them to both
dinner in brentwood because one lived in
bel air one lived in santa monica and i
lived in brentwood and we go to this
place popone this italian restaurant
and every tuesday for years we would
just the three of us every other tuesday
or so we'd have dinner
and uh i'd sit there and sam wanted to
know about ai and elon's talking about
artificial intelligence because he's on
the board of deep mind and
elon wanted to know about atheism and
meditation and
all this other stuff that uh you know
sam was an expert on i got to sit there
and like
just listen to these two guys and they
have both
piercing intelligences but elon he goes
straight
to the to the gut like the the the
questions that no engineer wants to hear
it's like just the basic stuff that like
why the hell are you doing it this way
yeah when the obvious solution is like
much easier or
or this or that like why haven't you
tried this you can figure things out i
mean he's a problem solver
i mean and that's another thing like
that i think the great entrepreneurs can
look at a problem
with very fresh eyes like almost
consistently and
bezos described that as day one thinking
right like just pretend this is day one
every day
yeah um and then other people use the
term first principles
yeah but it basically means like when
you see a problem
pause for a second and really think
through
what is the best possible solution here
what are some alternative solutions and
get from everybody like how do we solve
this problem what people do sometimes
they get in a rut
they just come to work and they just go
through their email they do whatever
they did the
day before they don't think why are we
doing this yes and is there a better way
to do it
now you can get so obsessive about that
that you can over engineer stuff
and you can never actually ship a
product so there have to be some
pragmatism
and some goals and some dates associated
with that but
it is a very cool thing to really think
like
i wonder if we actually made the
batteries ourselves what that would look
like or
i wonder if we could get to two-day
shipping you know
or i wonder if we could do same-day
shipping like you need to have somebody
who's willing to say you know what fuck
it
let's set a crazy audacious goal uh
two-day shipping
of any product anywhere in the united
states and once you throw the gauntlet
down like that now everybody knows
they're
rolling in the right direction two-day
shipping amazon prime
and that's what people didn't realize
about amazon the business wasn't
the shipping of those products it was
getting you to sign up for amazon prime
they have you know hundreds of millions
of people doing amazon prime for 10
bucks a month
i think globally it's probably cheaper
but that was the driver of that business
was
all of those people because they would
you're an amazon prime subscriber
do you know how much you pay no exactly
it started at 50 and i think they even
had like 40 50 60
was like the testing in the early days
and now it's i think 149.12
wow 13 a month if you pay for the year i
think it goes down to 10 bucks a month
120.
and you're like wow and it's like yeah
you're paying 13 a month for the
privilege of shopping
at amazon yeah but you wouldn't you say
it's the greatest
thing in the world because anything i
need you know if you forgot a microphone
or a cable goes better a camera goes bad
you get it here you know within a day or
less
yeah it's pretty amazing you've already
been dropping bombs incredible advice
on startups in general but let me maybe
uh
go straight in and ask is there advice
for somebody that wants to go big
to build the big startup to help them
succeed yeah
it's very similar to the advice i give
to investors because now i
i teach angel investing because so many
people want to invest
and so i wrote a book on that angel and
then i do a course called angel
university that i teach six times a year
and then i have a syndicate called the
syndicate.com where i invest in
companies there's 6 500 people who are
members of that it's the largest
syndicate in the world in fact the first
deal we ever did was com.com
the meditation app we put 378 thousand
dollars into it when it was a 5 million
dollar product
a 5 million company so we bought 6 or 7
of the company it's now worth 2 billion
so you can do the math on that we still
own 5 percent what year was it uh six
years ago so
probably seven yeah maybe 2015
uh 2014 and nobody else would invest in
calm yeah
but sam harris was the reason i did
because i asked sam
tell me about meditation and he's
explaining it to me and i said what
about this like do you have to have like
a mantra how does it work exactly i know
possibilities like well you know you
should just go to ucla and talk to diana
winston and like
there's this whole project there and i'm
like ucla does meditation
it's like yeah there's a mindful
institute there like teaching people to
be
tahiti meditation and they're doing ptsd
and i'm doing brain scans
and i was like oh and then i talked to
the ucla people and they're like it's
real yeah like we
we taught phil jackson and kobe bryant
and shaquille o'neal did
you know that's how they won their
championships they meditated and i was
like
hmm if ucla is doing it sam says it's
cool
well fuck it i'll put money into that
and that's the second biggest investment
in my career
after uber and it will in all likelihood
become the biggest i mean it's between
uber
robin hood and calm
and long story short when i'm teaching
people to angel invest there's really
two things that you cannot
cannot fake one is a product that is
built really well
so if you look at com robin hood uber
tesla amazon
these products are transcendent
they're well constructed there's
craftsmanship to them they're they're
great products
so you're saying not fundamentally like
the idea but the execution of the actual
of the construction the actual product
is amazing
then um there's customers
and that every business has ultimately a
customer and that
customer if they are in fact delighted
by that product
that's the magic because
you need a team to build the product and
then you need customers to use the
product
and really those three vectors are
undeniable now
you can have great teams that build a
bad product doesn't happen too often
um or you have customers who don't like
the product but generally speaking
a great team will build a great product
or a good product and iterate
and then eventually delight customers
and so
most people say the team is the most
important but
there's a lot of smart people out there
and let's assume that you can have
you can raise money for your idea or you
have money or you can just convince
people to do it for free
if you make a great product and it
connects with users that's the magic you
look at clubhouse it's actually a really
well designed product
and that product is connecting with
customers and if you were to talk to the
customers or look at the product
you would see a well-constructed product
and a delighted customer
and you can tell the delighted customer
by just the amount of time they use it
that's called engagement
just a fancy word for how much they use
it and snapchat when that was going
around
and they were trying to raise money they
had a fraction of the number of users
but the top maybe third were opening the
app
every hour and that nobody had ever seen
that before people were using facebook
you know a couple times a day the top
users
but nobody had ever seen people using it
every day for a hundred days in a row
every hour
and i was like what's going on here it's
like oh the ephemeral messaging
and then the streaks they had created
these streaks between people where
you know every day and then people would
be like on vacation like i just have to
open my streak and keep my street with
lex that we chatted every day going
and so they had this like addictive
nature to it and that's why clubhouse
was able to garner so much investment
is the number of hours people were using
it every month
uh was just unbelievably off the charts
some of that is execution but some of it
is the weird little magic of the
product market fit yeah so there's
something i mean clubhouse
there's a it's still a mystery to me
because i also use discord voice
there's an intimacy to voice oh for sure
you have people's
yeah tent well but like the
video gets in the way actually in a
weird way there's a privacy
when you just use voice people are not
taking showers now lex i mean yeah this
is
a pandemic and people just roll out of
bed and the hair thing nobody's getting
it nobody's hair is good nobody's
getting haircuts
people are wearing gym clothes i mean
zoom is just
horrific to be on zoom for five hours a
day it is exhausting
well it does make me wonder what the
what uh once when we emerge from the
pandemic or their
uh pr product market fit how that
evolves with the uh with clubhouse and
all those kinds of things yeah i know
clubhouse is a beneficiary of the
pandemic for sure
when do you think uh depend when do you
think
debts will be under let's say 200 a day
and
we'll have 200 million people on the
other side of this because that's kind
of what it takes right you got to get to
150 200 million people on the other side
in america i haven't you know i
personally stopped
deeply thinking about this because i've
been frustrated for so long
that you checked out i almost checked
out because
it uh psychologically allows me to carry
on
because i thought for many months now
that testing needs to be done at scale
and it still hasn't gotten done
it has so we gave up basically and
testing we gave up
because we're and we're all sitting
there waiting for vaccine to come along
and the distribution of the vaccine is
not
you know it's struggling from the same
kind of things as the testing it's going
to take
quite a bit of time so it does if
everything goes great
meaning there's not a second strand of
the virus that's
going to create a second major wave
that i i'm cynical enough to think that
it won't be until
mid-summer that we start opening back up
yeah i think it's going to be may june
i'm a little bit earlier than you i've
been tracking it's like 1.5 million
shots at arms a day
i think this vaccine has been undersold
i mean it's a miracle
not one person who was in the trials
died who took it
and only one went to the hospital and
they weren't even put on a ventilator so
and the hospitalizations are plummeting
and we're at 10 now in the united states
at the pace we're going at 1.5 a day
i think when the johnson johnson one
comes out next month it'll be three
million a day maybe two and a half
and we already have 100 million people
who've likely had it so i've been doing
the math i think we're like
60 days away february march yeah
sometime in april i think
anybody's gonna be able to get a shot
and the number of deaths is going to go
below 200 a day
and once that happens i think people
have had enough of this they're just
going to go yolo
i but see the the crucial piece for me
that i've been focusing on is the
the social media aspect of how the
it's not just about the reality of
deaths it's about
the state of the uh collective
intelligence of the human species which
is determined by
our communication on social media so we
could yeah we can be
collectively afraid the fear can spread
or it could be
yolo can spread or it could be
like all different kinds of
misinformation and of course
during the election year the politics
influences
our perception of what is true and not
but you know having real rigorous
nuanced conversation about this kind of
stuff is the way
is the way out of this and that's where
social media really comes in because
social media has drives
division where the people form tribes
and so on and
it feels like it's honestly a technology
problem
you know people say it's a human problem
but it just feels like
i believe people are good technology can
enable them to be
thoughtful we talked earlier about um
you know this the magic of silicon
valley and then maybe going too far
with the facebook groups example where
you know you take out all that friction
what happened was we used to have
something called arcron
reverse chronological order that's how
you consumed a feed
so any kind of social feed like twitter
was in reverse chronological order the
newest thing was up top and you would
just work your way backwards
and so it gave this a really fresh
feeling and then a guy named dave morin
and
the team over at facebook realized you
know there are some things
that got a lot of attention two hours
ago and the stuff
since then has not been as important but
if you missed that there was a really
good tweet
where there was a really good update
like somebody had a baby
let's that's kind of can we get the baby
one at the top
and i was like well how would we do that
how would we know that that's the
important one it's like
well it's let's put a like button on it
and let's see how many comments there
are so if it gets a lot of likes or
comments or retweets
let's show those first and then we'll
kind of mix in the most recent stuff
and so when you're on twit and then when
facebook did that
facebook became so addicting because
facebook was on
what has got the most engagement put
that first so
every time you open up facebook get the
dopamine hit and then what happens when
you see the
bar mitzvah photo or you know the
enraging story about some injustice in
the world
you retweet it you write a comment you
share it on your wall
and thus this addiction to the
outrageous the outlandish
the inspiring occurred and it used to be
like inspiring stuff puppies or some
heartwarming story and then it got dark
and then people started to realize if i
want to show up on the top of my
friend's feeds
if i say something controversial or i'm
outraged
i get to the top and then that's when
outrage culture came in and then that's
when cancer culture came in everybody
started to realize
if i try to cancel that person for being
a racist
or a sexist or a horrible human being or
whatever they did that's wrong i get to
the top of the feed
and we all collectively started playing
a very weird video game
which is how outraged can we all be and
to get to the top of the list
and then of course with trump he
realized it he's like
okay yeah i'm just gonna make fun of a
celebrity and i get more retweets
okay i'm gonna make fun of rosie
o'donnell for being overweight or
something and he just starts attacking
people
yeah and people like oh my god what did
he say and he copied that from howard
stern
because he was in new york and he used
to be on howard stern and howard stern
took over all the dialogue in the 80s
and 90s because he was outrageous
and then trump did that and then social
media incorporated that
into the operating system it became the
actual device of social media
was the ding ding ding ding we've got
something incredible for you everybody
salivates like pavlov's dog you know
oh my god i can be outraged that's
what's got to be undone
and the only way for that to be undone
is these things can't be billions of
people where
uh the most outrageous thing that
happened in the world today
in the last five minutes is now in front
of you and that's why people have
anxiety
they don't sleep and they do scroll all
night it's because the human mind was
not meant to process this much suffering
pain
anger and that's why we have all this
mental health issues
also you know young girls or even adults
watching other people post their private
jets and their vacations
and you know yolo adventures on their
instagram
to the point at which young people are
now faking
being on private jets to put on their
instagram
and creating like this crazy fomo around
their instagrams like now we wonder why
people are unhappy
like if you think everybody's on a
private jet going to some michelin star
restaurant or whatever the coolest thing
in the world is today
yeah like going to the grammys going to
whatever
coachella burning man like you're like
oh but i'm home
i'm in my house yeah and i'm not at
burning man
getting inadequate exactly so this whole
system is is uh creating the wrong set
of incentives
i tend to believe it's possible to still
have extremely high engagement
and create a successful profitable
business while
encouraging personal growth like
encouraging people to be the best
version of themselves i just
think we haven't we got the first
generation of social networks i think a
new generation needs to absolutely
is that your plan for a business to do
so well i have a longer-term plan in
terms of
ambition which is uh i believe in
being able to have deep connection
between human
and ai systems like partners friends
there is a connection to their with
social media i do think
ai ai has a strong role to play
in representing us in guiding us in how
we
consume social media so this algorithm
that controls the feed for facebook
is a somewhat centralized algorithm but
instead to give more power to the people
individuals to where each one of us have
our own algorithm bring it
together making your own ioa byo
well i mean if you thought about it if
we came and said i want
when i look at my twitter feed i would
like to see the people with
who are the most helpful in the world
generous kind
intelligent considered you know
commenting on things that i don't
already know about
because i want to open my world view
that could be a beautiful thing for
society and actually jack was talking
about
potentially on twitter letting people
bring their own algorithms and sort
their feeds themselves
this would be a wonderful thing i think
it's one of the reasons clubhouse has
resonated
is it's such a diverse group of people
that i've been able to drop in
on conversations with people who are
nothing like me
yes and listen in and and hear
conversations that i wouldn't
normally be privy to and i my
everybody's like oh
come join as a speaker i want to do a
room with you i get asked every day can
we do a room can we do a room ask an
angel investor talk about startups
and i'm like my usage of clubhouse
is going on my peloton treadmill putting
clubhouse on
taking a room and just listening yeah
it's so delightful for me as a podcaster
where my job is to talk to sit back and
just put in a couple of miles and play
chess
and listen to a clubhouse discussion
that is about relationships
and or you know some fashion or hip-hop
or whatever it is that i'm not part of i
just sit there and i listen
and you learn it's like such a
delightful thing i always think about
these kids to go to college
and always been so jealous of these ivy
league kids they go and they're like i
gotta go to class and i'm like
i would just love to sit there and
listen to professor lex talked yeah you
know like
what a privilege to sit there and let
somebody else drive and talk and listen
and learn
yeah that's the beauty of podcasting but
of course clubhouse creates a whole
nother experience where it's
conversations is different
i think it's gonna be the in-between i i
like it as a
you release your podcast like you and i
are gonna release this podcast right
and then at some point i'll have you on
my pod when you launch your startup and
then
some point somebody's gonna be like uh
you and i were running
and i ran into you i saw you were on
clubhouse the other night and i
i was busy but i was almost going to
click on you and say let's start a room
together
but you and i will start a room together
with eric weinstein or somebody or sam
harris will jump in or ela
and we'll have a different experience
which will just shoot the shit and
it'll act as like a fabric uh and a
little
filler between the tent pole podcasts
right like you and eric you've done
three i think with eric yeah was your
four
yeah i haven't released the fourth year
okay so i i watched all three uh because
i
i really thought your you way and him
like
giving you advice is very interesting
dynamic i thought it was a very
interesting dynamic
um and i find him like a fascinating cat
we know everybody in common except we've
never met
it's very weird because you know you you
think about the social graph in the real
world this is why i think
augmented reality is going to be such an
amazing
product i just have one killer feature i
want for augmented reality
we wear our glasses and when i look at
you
above your head i see the relationships
we have
and the things we've done together yes
right so i see
oh you both know sam harris or you had
elon on the podcast
on this date or you and i were both at
burning man in
2006 the most meaningful element of our
connection
network yeah and then because we would
discover that through small talk but
imagine you're like at a party
and you look and it just people glow
and you just see a glow around a person
and like green means you have some
financial relationship blue means you
have some friendship one
yeah or yellow means you have friendship
one blue means you
know nothing about each other you have
no connections you're like wow these
blue people have no connection to
yeah these people that one's glowing red
we know seven or more people in common
yeah and those are the seven people oh
we should go talk about how we know each
other yeah
that could and that sort of happened
with facebook remember or myspace where
you were like oh you know that person
friend of a friend
yeah but that's what there's going to be
ars like
this is why i think if apple figures out
ar
or snapchat and they just have those
glasses you know forget about vr
it's just nauseating and whatever but ar
where you put the glasses on you see the
real world but you augmented
well you make uh just like you were
saying you make it frictionless
a very low friction to make a deep human
connection because you you have all the
basic elements there already
now think about the unintended
consequences of what i just described
it could get creepy and weird the
privacy thing yeah
i mean people will opt here's the thing
people
your privacy is an illusion like all
this information is there and then
people are more than willing to give up
privacy in exchange for
some value you know it's a value trade
yeah and giving if
if my tesla when i'm driving in the
direction of my house just starts the
navigation and saves me three clicks and
that friction's gone
i'm willing to give tesla my location
and my home address
right yeah i'm not willing to give
zuckerberg anything i don't trust him
but
you get the idea i mean it will be that
way with like dna and other things at
some point we'll just be like yeah just
take my dna like i don't
yeah sure people can look and see that
i'm a mental midget and my iq is like
lower than
i don't want to bring the bell curve up
or whatever but but
you could you could figure out like if
we all put our dna in the sequence
online and like oh yeah you know
lex has got 10 more iq points than j-cal
and yeah
you know sam's got 10 more than lex and
all of a sudden people are like all bent
out of shape about it but what if they
we did that and they were like and by
the way you also all three of you are
gonna get parkinson's unless you do x y
and z
yeah unless you eat more blueberries or
whatever we figure out they're going to
accept it pretty quickly yeah that's
brave new world brave new world i i
have to ask you you're just like you
were saying you're one of the
world experts in investing in in uh
instruments
in startups uh yeah uh the vc and so on
from the perspective of the startup i
was
always kind of skeptical of raising
money
it feels like people do it too quickly
too easily
but i don't know what the hell i'm
talking about
when is the when should a startup
raise money and from the perspective of
the investor
when should the investor invest in a
startup
like is there a timing thing here is
there um
what yeah it's a it's a very important
question because
the venture capital community is only
going to fund
you know sub one percent of enterprises
started in the in
the united states every year like maybe
10 basis points of them like one in a
thousand
and the reason is it's jet fuel
you only want to take that money if you
really want to build something big and
you want to build it fast
and when you put jet fuel behind a
startup
as we've seen with other rockets things
can blow up and people can die you know
it's not people literally dying but the
business can go up in smoke
right like rockets get blown up all the
time at spacex
as part of their ambitious plans and
startups seven out of ten startups we
invest in
go to zero now if you were to start the
business and only build it off customer
revenue and use your own money and go
nice and slow and grow ten percent a
year
the chances of you blowing up the rocket
are very low because you're riding a
bicycle
you can go a little faster but the
bicycle can only go so fast
and once you start taking that money the
way the portfol
the way venture capital is constructed
as
a um in the mix of like mit or harvard's
endowments is
you know we're gonna put some money into
uh safe things and then we're gonna have
these really binary things over here
and they probably put five percent uh in
venture capital traditionally it's grown
to twenty percent
just as a function of how successful
it's been so
you know the harvards of the world and
mit is probably one five or
ten percent in venture but it's grown to
because you know companies like airbnb
and uber have grown so big in tesla
but the goal is in these venture funds
we're going to invest in 30 names
and one or two of them are going to
return three times the capital we've
deployed
so it's a 300 million dollar fund and
there's 30 names and each got 10 million
that means one of the 10 million is
going to return
the fund plus so that means it has to
grow
30x and then 60x to double the fund and
you're really supposed to be
doing three times cash on cash so that
300 million dollar funds
the expectation is in 10 years to return
900 million
triple the person's money as opposed to
the stock market which doubles your
money in the same period
so you're supposed to do 25 percent
annualized returns in order to
triple the money and maybe i have an
outlying chance of four or five times
the money which does happen sometimes
when you have an outlier in your
portfolio like uber or facebook was
and what that means is the venture
capitalist
behavior on the game they're playing is
different than you as the founder you as
the founder you may really care about
this
and it dying really matters to you and
then you got a venture capitalist who's
like we're betting on 30 names we need
two of them
to hit it out of the park maybe three
and nothing else is meaningful
so now you start thinking about the game
theory there
you're dealing with you know money that
is coming in
that only cares about you going 100x
yes it's a whole different ball game
whereas if you build off revenue you
don't have to do that and if you look at
a company like com.com we invested at 5
million the next round they did was 250
they were so capital efficient
that they grew from 10 000 a month in
revenue to millions of dollars a month
in revenue
over those four years since we invested
and they didn't raise money in between
wow it was unbelievable and i've only
seen this happen three or four times so
it doesn't happen all this capital
efficient meaning
uh based on customer revenue alone plus
some
small amount of fundraising you're able
to go like
how hard is it to do that it takes
extreme product market fit you have to
have a great price for your product that
has a great margin um
yeah and if you're doing something in
hardware it's probably impossible
because it's super capital intensive so
it's probably got to be a software
business
software hardware businesses take a lot
more do venture capitals get in the way
at all of the business or do
so it depends to get out of the way yeah
if you if you get young venture
capitalists who are starting their
career
they're very nervous and scared because
they're putting all these bets
yeah and then there's a very weird thing
that happens
the bad news comes first so yeah
companies that don't work out go out of
business immediately
yes so if it's not going to be com or
robinhood or uber
those take sev you know you have a one
of those great successes somewhere in
your five six seven eight as an investor
what is the first five years like the
first five years you feel like an idiot
because you let's say you make these uh
10 bets
in year two two or three of them come
back and they don't have product market
fit and they're out of money yeah and
they say can we have more money you say
no we have to go get it from somebody
else because you have to prove that
there's still a market for it
we may keep our pro rata we may put a
little bit in to maintain our percentage
ownership
but we're not going to give you another
big chunk of money yes
and that company dies so now you've got
10 million poof up in smoke boom 10
million up smoke
so this is called the j curve where your
performance goes down
and then it's only in years four five
and six it starts going up and what
you're seeing right now is the people
who started like i did in 2000
you know just 11 12 years ago in 2009 i
started investing
we all look like geniuses why we're at
the end of the cycle
we invested after when the stock market
was on the floor after the financial
crisis and it's gone straight up since
so everybody look there's a couple
little blips in there but
generally speaking there hasn't been
like a major crash uh with the exception
of the pandemic crash but that bounced
right back
and so you know it takes a decade to
figure out if you're good at it
and then if the market crashes again
everybody feels like an in again the
cycle starts again so you are now
as a founder you are now inserting
yourself into that casino
yes and now you've got all these other
forces pushing and pulling
and you're growing let's say your
company was growing 50 percent
you feel like wow i'm successful i made
a million dollars last year now i'm
doing a million and a half
and and the first thing that vc's going
to say is how do we triple we're
we're growing too slow see but that's
like you said that beautifully uh is a
rocket fuel
it's uh in in the sense it's a kind of
motivation it's a drive i mean
it's a positive so if you want that yes
if you want that
if you want that if you want to go to
navy seal school
you're going to be in pain and they're
going to put that hose in your face
while you're underwater with your hands
tied behind your back in the pool and
you're gonna be choking
and you may have to do cpr and you in
like every couple of years
tragically somebody dies in navy sales
school
yeah well it doesn't mean we're getting
rid of the navy seals rocky if he dies
he dies i don't know if you know what
david goggins is by any chance i do
i mean i don't know him personally but
oh my lord so i'm i'm running 48 miles
together with him in person
in a month you're doing an ultra
marathon
with him and probably other stuff
because he enjoys
just breaking people making them cry so
my god i'm so jelly
so you know i well i offered we we
agreed a while ago to do a podcast
and he's like oh yeah come we'll do it
this day and this is all the bay area
uh i don't know where the hell he is but
we're doing it and
uh i don't think i'm supposed to say
where it is it's not anywhere close to
anywhere
it's in the middle of nowhere but he
seems to be in a bunch of different
locations
like he he's uh in oregon or something
like that like what does he do for
outside of writing books and being
inspirational does he actually train
people or like
no no he's doing just he's a full-time
insane like he
fights forest fires like for a few
months a year wow
as a farmer like unpaid labor like he
you know there's a bunch of
people who are like him like navy seals
and so on
that kind of make a career out of
motivational speak and all that yeah
he's not interested in any of that he's
literally interested
in uh just doing hard shit all the time
breaking himself breaking himself he
seems like he wants to break himself and
that that book is amazing and
the audiobook's amazing when he's
talking about how fat he was
and how he just had to go and keep
running and his
like legs are broken and he's just super
pain and he just goes through it it's
really inspiring
thing also are you going to videotape
yourself doing this yeah i can't wait to
see you get destroyed
yeah well this guy is so entertaining
for the lex audience the pain
uh but the other inspiring thing is he's
happily married
oh good and there's a partnership there
that's you know everybody finds a um
this attention as a push and pull that's
beautiful i think uh
but and speaking of uh beautiful push
and pull uh
how about that transition yeah here we
go uh you're in chemat
uh on uh he's a friend of yours bessie
besties yeah yeah good friend i mean
he's there's very few people in my life
him elon david sacks john brockman's
very few people have supported me as
much as those folks you know i'm a huge
debt
so he's also a co-host on the all in
podcast we taped episode 21 today
oh today every friday now they want to
do every friday they're addicted like me
and you are the podcast so you're going
to release it when
it's probably released as we're sitting
here that's okay beautiful yeah i can't
special guest on it
we had draymond green from the warriors
phone in so we had our first guest
awesome yeah so it's really funny
because he plays poker with us and we're
all besties so
yeah beautiful so uh you guys went
pretty
heated uh yesterday against each other
versus rob uh on robinhood yes maybe
uh there's just two things i want to ask
first
on the actual robinhood discussion and
the wall street best discussion
can you steal manna's argument what was
the nature of the disagreement where
so where yeah what what is the littlest
because i don't think it's as big as
spaces it came off as sounding what is
the nature of the disagreement
he felt that robin hood
turned off trading because
the hedge funds told them to and that
they were bowing down
to the pressure of the hedge funds
that's not true but in a vacuum of
information
you know what happens to people's minds
conspiracy theories abound and
sometimes there is a conspiracy theory
and sometimes there's just
the appearance of impropriety or
a bunch of related things like when you
look at the trump situation with russia
like
was trump trying to coordinate with
russia or were the russians just
screwing with a bunch of like neophyte
idiotic
dipshits like you know donald trump jr
who don't know any better
and they don't know that you shouldn't
meet with the russians
and if you do meet with the russians you
are probably a useful idiot you probably
should tell the fbi
like they're just a bunch of idiots in
all likelihood who knows
and it's a vacuum of information and
there's a vacuum of information we don't
know and
the russians are trying to compromise
everybody so would you call it a
conspiracy or would you call it an
attempted
you know uh conspiracy there was no
conspiracy here what it was was
robin hood needed to raise billions of
dollars to say solvent
in all likelihood uh and they weren't
allowed to talk about it
so they were forced into not talking
about it in all likelihood
and had to come up with that money or
shut down and then what got me upset
with
chamoth and we had a talk afterwards
that people don't know about i'll talk
about it here for the first time on
sunday
we had to have a little we had to air it
out yeah in the episode after you guys
sound like you've had a private you made
up we had a private discussion just one
on one
and we said listen we love each other
we're besties we've always been there
for each other
what happened here and what happened
there is i'm fiercely loyal to my folks
whether it's chamath or
travis from uber or sax or whoever i'm
just a loyal guy
yes and i'm always ride or die with my
founders if i invest in them even if
they make a mistake and uber made plenty
of mistakes i always went on cnbc
on my podcast and said hey we're going
to fix these things i'm in touch with
the team
mistakes were made we're going to solve
them this is a group of people with
great intent
who want to make the world a better
place and you know what i was hated for
for a period of time with uber
i was hated for it last week with robin
hood i got a lot of
blow back but i think in both of those
cases eventually i was right uber's
doing great stuff in the world
robin hood's doing great stuff in the
world and i like to be loyal to my
investments and my partners to to just
i feel like if you invest and you're on
the team
you know you have really three choices
you can either fight for your team you
can go silent
uh or you can throw your team under the
bus and i've watched investors throw the
team that they invested in that made
them a bunch of money
under the bus not acceptable to me and
being quiet it's not acceptable to me so
i always ask the founder do you want me
to
is it okay if i go out and defend you
publicly if they say yes i do it
and then beautiful by the way because
what else do we have in this world if
not friendship it's
loyalty means everything i grew up in
brooklyn where if you were not loyal
and you you know and you were not loyal
to your crew then
you were a ronin you were you know out
there on your own flailing in the
you know trust me you do not want to be
on your own in 1970s 80s brooklyn
manhattan like you need to have a crew
with you i've gotten into
you know you don't want to get into a
fight with 10 guys and be alone
or just be with you you need a crew to
survive so i just learned or
earlier my dad who owned a bar um just
drilled into me being loyal
and so for whatever reason i'm a bulldog
when it comes to loyalty and chamoth
came out and said
you know these guys need to go to jail
and they're scumbags
and i and i'm trying to defend them and
i'm in a position where i can't defend
them
because i don't have complete
information there is no complete
information it's in the heat of the
moment
and then it becomes the number one story
yeah and it's my number three investment
yeah and chamath has a competing company
sophie
yeah and he's killing my guys and then i
started killing his guys
yes and then all of a sudden we're like
wait a second we're best friends
yes and we're swinging our swords at
each other
and we're a group of the seven samurai
who fight together
when did we turn on each other and then
everybody else who's on the pod the two
davids
who you know both on the spectrum a bit
like a little aspergers or whatever
no effects left none taken
i'm not saying you know yeah there is a
yeah if you're into a.i
you know you might be somewhere not a
coincidence yeah might not be
coincidence anyway we upgraded the two
david's firmware we're going to upgrade
your firmware after this i'll give you
yeah you haven't you're on the 1.5 you
have the three emotions now or should we
add fourth no you want to go with joy
yeah i'm going to play 2.0 or you're the
2.0 you got the joy
yeah how's it working difficult it's
difficult you'll get there
just let it happen lex just let the let
the joy happen
so anyway we just talked about it
offline and we decided like listen
we didn't pre-game that episode and i
would happen to be skiing with my family
i had taken the first like vacation
since
goddamn pandemic started and i was
having a wonderful time and then this
whole thing blows up i'm coming off the
mountain
just you know having a great time with
my daughter skiing and you know and then
i'm mixing it up with him and
you know he had a short fuse about it
because he was triggered he told me
because
he really feels like he's fighting to
defend you know the everyman and i was
like
that's what my team's doing that's why
they named the company robin hood
yeah we're on the same side here and
then over time we've started to see the
explanation come out and
you know people who are friends are
going to have disagreements
in the podcast it happened to happen
very publicly and we didn't know it was
going to become the number one story
in the world if trump still had his
twitter handle
this would not have been a story trump
would have said something
about gamestop and he would have
co-opted the entire conversation
so in a way going back to our censorship
discussion
i might actually be in favor of trump
being censored
only because only because how delightful
has it been since january 20th
that we can all focus on something other
than him
yeah he was exhausting i mean the amount
of cycles he took on our processors
and now this is a little bit more of a
distributed like this yeah everybody
gets a chance to be the number one news
story
everybody gets a chance to discuss it
but so on a scale of one to ten how much
do you love uh
chamath oh it's eleven i mean i love
chamoth i mean we played cards last
night
we're besties and you know i would i
would i would literally jump in front of
a bullet for him
i mean what's the lesson in that
discussion because it was super i
wouldn't
i think the love was felt and the
respect was felt throughout even when
you guys are going pretty vicious on
each other
i uh is there a lesson to be learned do
you regret any of that conversation i
mean i think
he he he told me that he regretted some
things he said he said publicly on the
podcast like listen i was a little hot i
may have said things
in the heat of the moment but i don't
live with too much regret because i
always think about intent
it's one of the new nuance and intent
have been totally lost
the idea that we could have any of kind
of a nuanced discussion about things
seems to have been
forgotten and the fact that people don't
look at people's intent
if you hurt somebody's feelings or you
disrespect somebody
or you you do something mean or whatever
i always look at the intent you know and
i've had people
attack me and i look at the intent and
i'm like
that person feels bad about themselves
or maybe i said something and i insulted
them and that's why their blowbacks
there so i was trying to think what's
the intent of the person and then
almost universally you talk to somebody
and you find out
you ascribe some crazy intent that's not
there
and they're like oh yeah you know what
happened i got in a fight with my spouse
and i
didn't sleep last night and i've had a
lot of anxiety about
my business and i i just snapped and
said something
about you and it's like oh okay like i
literally had somebody on twitter
um this past summer i had said something
um i was complaining about a new york
times journalist uh
and something i thought was wrong and
this person was a fan of that journalist
and they went i kid you not onto my
social media account
found a picture i'd taken about the how
blue the sky was one day
they reverse image search the tree line
found
the tree line on google image or somehow
the reverse image search
found a an old listing that some broker
had listed on their like
website of my house and then posted my
home address the value of my home
and uh doxxed me
on twitter and i'm like
what is going on here so i call the
person yeah and i
look them up and they work in private
equity in boston
and i look and i'm like this person
works in my july fourth week
so and i when i look at the person's
linkedin we have
seven people in common so going back to
the ar conversation we'll go yeah i'm
like okay this person literally just
docks me
i asked him to take it down they told me
they won't take it down
and then i look and i so then i dm back
on instagram
on twitter and i said by the way your
boss susan
and i know seven people in common yeah
and these are the seven people here's a
screenshot
what is she going to think when i call
her on monday and you've doxed me
here's my phone number if you'd like to
talk he calls me i said what's going on
why would you do this he's like well i'm
really pissed off about what you said
about this person i was like
you understand i've had like two or
three stalkers like anybody who's a high
profile like i am like or medium profile
you're gonna have weird things happen
you literally put my home address you
put my family at risk
what if i put your home address yeah on
my i have four 400 000 followers or 300
you have like 300. what if i post your
address
he said well i wish you wouldn't do that
i was like well i asked you kindly to
take my address down
and uh i said are you married do you i
said i said how old do you like 25 or
something he's like no i'm 42.
it's like you're 42 years old i said are
you married you have kids who's like
yeah i just had a baby like
six months ago i'm like you're home with
your wife it's july 4th weekend
you're doxing jason calaganism because
you're upset at me because i said
something about a new york times writer
he said yeah this is the biggest mistake
of my life i said i tell you what
let's forget it ever happened and he
wrote me back
and he said i just wanted to thank you
for how you handled it um
my wife said i'm a complete fucking
moron and uh
he literally said to me my wife has a
complete fucking moron
and i'm really sorry blah blah blah blah
and i wrote her back i said
i wrote him back and i said my wife says
the same thing to me all the time
welcome to the club it's totally fine
this this this
the intent nuance it matters right and
the person could be having a bad day and
they do something stupid they regret and
what am i gonna do cancel the guy
or if i had called his boss he would
have been fired immediately
yeah and then i got to live with this
guy got fired and he's a
got a kid and what is this personal
destruction why are we doing this to
each other
life's hard enough yeah life's hard
right like just getting through the days
hard
yeah and and that little bit of empathy
uh thinking about the intent of the
person
allows you to then sort of de-escalate
this kind of conversation that
social media wants to escalate yes so
social media
what we were saying yeah if if this in
in
my younger years i would have retweeted
the guy's homepage
and my address and would have called his
boss and tried to get him fired or
whatever
and it's like now i'm just like what why
are we attacking each other life is so
hard i mean this is what the pandemic i
think should make everybody realize is
like
look at that how hard it is life is hard
and then just think about all the people
suffering right now who are at home the
single mom or dad
with two or three kids at home in public
school
maybe they've been laid off and their
kids aren't learning
and they're in a tiny apartment i mean
this has been brutal for a lot of people
and
not to mention people losing loved ones
or maybe some people got corona and now
their lungs are still not right
i can ask you about love oh sure
uh i'm feeling it you know like we're an
hour or two here
lex yeah you feel you're good we can
become besties we're good
we're good like we got a bromance going
here alexa i feel it too
if it's eric weinstein level but i feel
like it's close
yeah i'm feeling the love but you we
talked about the
there's music to my ears your whole rant
on the
the olympic nature of a startup
is there a role like what role does love
family friendship play in that
brutal pursuit of excellence that is
building a startup building a company or
building any creating anything new in
this world
such a great question um and and totally
unprepared for it
uh because i no one would ever ask me
about that so i think it's why you've
you've got quite a following uh on your
podcast is that you're able to ask these
questions and
um i could tell one story because uh you
know i don't talk about
i try not to talk about relationship
with elon that often because
you know he's so famous now yeah i mean
when we met i used to go out to parties
with him
and people like oh my god you're jason
calacas yeah and like who's your friend
i'm like how's my friend elon he's
and they'd be like what he's doing
rocket ships but he's told this story
publicly
so i can tell it and it would never talk
about anything that he hasn't already
talked about publicly especially since
he saw a high profile but it was a
pretty funny moment
um he there there was a moment in time
when tesla almost went out of business
and you've probably heard the story uh
many times but it was during the
financial crisis and
uh they were running out of money and i
said uh
uh you know let's go get a steak and
we're in la and we drove to boa
and i had my orange tesla roadster and
he had his p1 or p2 like the red one
that i think is in space now
um and we drove to the valet and we had
a stake together and we're sitting there
and i said you know i read the story and
gawker or whatever
you know and new york times here you
only got like
five weeks of money left in tesla
because it's not true i was like oh
thank god and he goes we have two weeks
i'm like oh god
i was like well what's going on with the
rocket ship company
yeah you know like you know i know you
did the one
last month and don't you have one coming
up he's like yeah we got the third one
coming up i was like well
how's that going as well would blow that
one up there's no more spacex
i was like so two weeks of money left in
tesla and spacex you blew up the first
two rockets you blow up the third spacex
is over he's like yeah
i was like i can load you a couple
million dollars i don't have like a ton
um he's like it's okay our friend beep
has loaned me some money
and elon's been super public about this
i would never tell the story unless
he hadn't been but he was talking he
never said who it was
but somebody had loaned him money to
keep him afloat he was he was
functionally bankrupt i mean he had the
equity in the companies but the equity
was quickly becoming worth zero and the
financial crisis and he's
figuring out if he's going to go on
vacation for christmas or not and he's
on the phone trying to
you know um you know save the save both
companies
and i said certainly there must be some
good news and he takes that as
blackberry
to date this conversation there are no
iphones he does blackberry and he starts
swiping
and he says don't tell anybody this is
what i'm building
and he shows me the model s
and nobody knew that he was working on
the model s we knew he was
doing the the roadster and was trying to
save the company
and i looked at it and i was like that's
gorgeous um
it was the clay models so it's a
full-size clay model so there's human
beings standing around
a clay version of this tiny little
blackberry picture i'm scrolling through
on the
remember that little uh pad or the ball
on the background scrolling through it
i'm like this is fucking great
and i just said to him it's like uh
what's the range going to be as well i
think we get 250 miles
like 250 miles like yeah i think it'll
be the safest car ever
i said what is it going to cost he says
i think this could cost eventually 50
60 000 i said elon if you make that car
you'll change the god damn world
you have to this company must survive
because
the roadsters for like 2 000 people in
the united states
this car is for every person in the
united states
every single person in the united states
needs will want this car if it's fifty
thousand dollars
and maybe some of the people who you
have twenty or thirty thousand dollars
won't be able to afford it but they'll
all want
it it's gorgeous and he said you really
think so i said yeah
so i got home and i talked to my wife
jade and i said you have the checkbook
she does all the finances and stuff like
that pays over the bills and whatever
and i said um yeah don't tell anybody
elon's making this great car
and i wrote two checks for fifty
thousand dollars and i just took a piece
of paper and i wrote
e comma uh love
love the new car i'll take two
and i signed it i kissed the two 50 000
checks put them in the envelope
and i fedexed it to them for monday
delivery and i said to jade
that hundred thousand dollars is going
to be gone
in 48 hours because we'll pay for one or
two days of payroll on tesla so we just
added like instead of two weeks of
roadways got
12 days yeah and uh
the checks don't cash but then i read a
story that he's closed the money saved
the company in like
the next week or two and a couple of
months later
uh the checks get cached and i'm like
okay three years later i get an email
your reservation number it's from tesla
your reservation number is zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero one and then
five seconds later your reservation
number is zero zero zero zero seventy
three
and i forward the number one to elon i
said uh you know
i can't take number one a signature
number one i can't take that
that's yours yeah it's like well i got
five of them and besides you're the
first person to ordered it
and i was the first person who had seen
you gonna give me the deterioration and
then i
know it was a very beautiful moment it
was an incredible moment for both of us
and we talk about it sometimes
uh you know those moments in time and
when you to your point about love
the darkest moment but one of the
darkest moments in his life probably
that i think it was i could tell you it
was the darkest period of his life for
sure
and he's been very public about how dark
that was and i think you know
this is why i have great sympathy for
the entrepreneurs of the world like the
suffering and the pain
and when he talks about the suffering
and the pain that all of these founders
have felt and then we we're throwing
rocks at them we're criticizing them as
they try to change the world and save
humanity
and in tesla's case i mean they weren't
you know
they weren't like delivering pizza i
mean they were trying to get us off of
fossil fuels like this was a big
heady mission to literally save the
environment the planet humanity
and the way they shorted that stock and
they attacked him
it was always perplexing to me why
any human being who is standing on god's
green earth
would want to throw rocks at the guy who
is trying to stem
the dam of global warming that is about
to engulf
all of us how dare they throw rocks at
that guy
yeah there's so many people you throw
rocks at there's somebody who's making
the jewel
vaporizer throw rocks at that scumbag no
offense
but like whoever's making the jewel
things and you know selling pina colada
flavor to 12 year olds
like throw rocks at them somebody's
doing something you know abhorrent but
not e
i mean and uh yeah anyway
that car is you know up the road here
sitting under a cover yeah with 20 000
miles on it in my garage
and then the roadster number 16 is in
the garage next to it and every day i
walk by the two of them
and i get a warm feeling in my heart
because i know he did it yeah
against all odds against all odds he
pulled it off uh and it was
that moment that month in that 2000 it
was ja
it was probably december january
december of 2008 i think
you know it's just 12 years ago when you
think about 13 years ago it was dark
i mean it was dark and they they almost
had the same thing happen
uh you know in the model 3 production in
june of two years three years ago
and i remember him just trying to get
the model 3 out the door and the company
almost crashed then
most of these companies have you know
these kind of moments um
and i think friendship is you get what
you give
you get what you give and if you are
there for people
you're going to feel so good about
having done that
and then the the
the reciprocation effect which you
probably know very well
is so great in the world that anytime
you're kind to people
you build this incredible bond and then
what what are we at the end of the day
lex besides a series of memories with
the people we love
that's all it is it's just a series of
memories
and moments it's just moments you ever
see blade runner
yes of course do you remember what
rucker harrah says at the end
all of these memories gone like tears in
the rain yeah i mean that's our
existence
it just all goes away at some point it's
just these
drops of rain each each of those
memories just like one snowflake or one
drop of rain
and they're all lost at some point but
they're here now
and that's why we have to be there for
each other that's why
i feel like what i do is so important in
this world
and i get such great meaning out of it
just being a friend just having these
conversations
what you're doing on your podcast just
talking to intelligent people
and spreading the word and the disciple
the gospel of what they're saying
and amplifying it you're inspiring so
many people every podcast you get 500
000 people a million people watch these
videos
and there's some kid in sri lanka or
some little girl in afghanistan who's
going to stumble upon this on youtube
and they're going to change the world in
the next century
because it's not just about america
our story is almost over right like we
we were the story of the last two or
three hundred years i hope it keeps
going
but there's all these other places in
the world sao paulo and and africa
where people now have access to these
videos
and somebody will have this video and go
elon did it oh and that guy jason was
his friend and
oh and then lex does those interviews
with the oh yeah i could do it too
your little magical moment of love
amidst the suffering with elon
because you've talked about it you'll
have these ripple effects it's
fascinating to think about it
so weird to come in new entrepreneurs
being born
new yeah more love being put out there
in uh
more support through these rough times
when you're
people are trying to create new things i
mean that's a that's a beautiful thing
that's a beautiful i i'm
glad you think of friendship in this way
i'm
deeply uh grateful that you're loyal
every time you invest
you are here's the thing it costs you
nothing to make this investment either
the the amount of time it takes to be
bitter or angry
uh sitting at home uh to be disappointed
you could just channel that same amount
of energy into being loyal
loving kind and there for people it just
only takes the intention right the water
is gonna those emotions are gonna flow
right like sam would always tell me when
i was struggling in my life
and i talked to him he'd say you know
jason your brain is spewing all these
ideas
imagine you're standing sitting by a
river and the river is all your ideas
you are not a slave to any one of these
ideas they're just whipping by like each
of those little waves in the river
you can pick one of those ideas out and
look at it and examine it
and either keep it or throw it back in
the river and let it go
and i was like wow sam that was like of
my entire friendship with sam harris
that was like the one moment where i was
just like oh my god
all my life i've wondered about all
these thoughts in my head
insecurities you know imposter syndrome
like i didn't go to mit you know i'm not
the smartest guy
but somehow i made a career writing
little 50k
checks and now you know three million
dollar checks but whatever you know
little checks and
being a journalist and doing this little
podcast and it said it's added up to
something
and i kind of i'm proud of it i'm 50 and
i'm kind of proud of what i did
and i and i wake up every morning i
could retire and i say
i kind of like what i do i kind of like
having the conversation and writing the
check
and then being on somebody's team and i
got offered to be in these giant
mega funds and they said jason you're an
idiot you're investing 60 companies a
year
you know 500k at a time you put 30
million dollars a year to work
come work with us write 150 million
dollar check
and then you can go to aspen and cabo
and coachella and not work but why are
you doing all this work
it's like well the 50 million dollar
check is
like it's like a formality it's just
like being an atm like the companies are
already huge by that time
i really want to meet the two people
with the idea i want to meet them in
year one
yes i want to meet them on day zero yeah
i want to be the guy who wrote the first
second or third check
i want a guy with the 3 000th check the
last check
that's fucking boring and make that
basic human connection
and also either be with me into the
rough times
be with them with that first i mean the
first early successes i mean that's a
beautiful
so great when they when when when a
founder and that team
get product market fit and you just know
it's going to work
oh man lex it's when when
com would email me and they'd say we
added
you know the company's been growing and
we're not going to go out of business
but we added some sleep stuff and then
we added this other
function and uh we have a streak now and
uh we grew 10x in the last you know
three months
and uh we're good you know i was like ah
that's nice
it's real nice it's like it's a nice
feeling when you well because so many of
them die we talked about that j
curve early imagine it's like um
it's like all these baby turtles going
out to the ocean and the seagulls are
ripping them to shreds and then their
sharks are eating them but then like a
couple of the turtles make it
and they become wise old 100 year old
turtles yeah
you know and you're like yep i remember
when you catched
and like all of your brothers and
sisters were ripped to shreds by the
seagulls and you made it into the water
and then you made it out into the deep
water it's a pretty great feeling
i think there's no better way to end it
there it is
the talk of the cruelty of life that's
suffering that is life
and the love amidst the suffering jason
absolutely i've been a fan of yours for
a long time you're
one of the most special people in
silicon valley
thanks lex and maybe you'll also call me
in one of the rough times
oh yeah i'm sure there'll be many there
will be yeah you know
there's one expression nobody gets there
alone
nobody gets there alone and anybody who
thinks that they got there alone
is delusional and kidding themselves and
they will at some point wake up and
realize oh shit
there were a lot of people help me get
here i need to write a couple of
gratitude letters i got a gratitude
letter the other day from a friend of
mine who i helped
and it was one of the you know about
these gratitude letters people are
writing
it turns out martin seligman in um uh
was it authentic happiness anyway the
guy who really studied happiness and joy
turns out one of the greatest amplifiers
of joy in your life
is to thank somebody for doing something
for you and
somebody who had helped just wrote me a
letter
and i got on christmas and i had the
stack of christmas cards and i hadn't
opened them
and it's the second week of january and
i was just getting to like the last
stack
and i opened it up and i almost missed
it this incredibly heartwarming letter
about how
meaningful like certain things i had
done to help along the way
and how he'd always always appreciated
my counsel and
i was just like well this happened 25
years ago
and you wrote this letter now and it
just hit me like a ton of bricks i was
just like wow you know
if you're hearing this there's probably
10 people who are really instrumental in
your lives in your lives
go ahead and call them on the phone
write them an email or even better
just write a letter and send it to them
and just tell them you're thankful and
let me tell you something
the amplification of joy in your life
will go 100x
100x when you tell somebody you love
them
and that you really appreciate them and
that what they did for you was magical
so just
then you can look it up gratitude
gratitude is like one of these
incredible forces
amen i'm grateful for being on the pod
i'm grateful
you've wasted all this time with me i
love it
thanks for listening to this
conversation with jason kolokanis and
thank you
to our sponsors brave browser linode
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discount to support this podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
from the man himself
jason kilikanis the number one reason a
startup shuts down
is not running out of money the number
one reason
a startup fails is that the founder
gives
up thank you for listening and hope to
see you
next time