back to indexJason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship | Lex Fridman Podcast #161
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The following is a conversation with Jason Calacanis,
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who's an entrepreneur, investor, author of Angel,
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How to Invest in Technology Startups,
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and as many people may know, he's a fun, brilliant,
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long time podcast host of This Week in Startups,
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and co host of the All In podcast
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with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, and David Friedberg,
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who all happen to be poker buddies
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and self proclaimed besties.
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The result is always a great listen
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due to both the love and the heated disagreements.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines,
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Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee,
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and Rev Speech Detect Service.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount
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and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that I've been learning a lot
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about real world finance in the past few months.
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To give you a bit of context on the side,
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I've studied trading from an algorithmic trading perspective
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as a machine learning and a game theory problem
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off and on for a few years in undergrad and grad school.
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I found the distributed complex system aspect of finance
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and economics in general fascinating,
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but now I find even more fascinating
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the human side of the whole thing,
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ideas of greed, power, freedom, and truth.
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Wall Street bets, Robin Hood, and the whole beautiful mess
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around this topic allows us to have great conversations
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about human nature and the systems that underlie
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the rise and fall of civilizations.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
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support on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter
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And now, here's my conversation with Jason Kolokanis.
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I have a million things to talk to you about,
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but we do happen to be living through
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what I would think of as a historic event
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in terms of its impact, in terms of almost philosophically
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thinking about the role of people
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and how they can fight power
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with this whole Wall Street bets and GameStop situation.
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I was wondering, you've covered in your amazing
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all in podcast, you guys have been having
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fascinating battles over this whole situation.
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I was wondering if you could tell maybe
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from your perspective, as it's unrolling
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the saga of Wall Street bets and GameStop,
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what are some interesting insights
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that you have about this whole set of events?
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In full disclosure, I was an angel investor
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in Robin Hood before they launched.
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And when I met the founder, Vlad, and his partner,
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you know, they pitched me at a bar,
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not too far from where we are right now in Palo Alto,
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called Antonio's Nut House.
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And my friend Adeo, it's a really good story,
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my friend Adeo had asked me to speak
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at his founder's institute, which is kind of like
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an accelerator for people who were thinking
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about starting a company.
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And so I gave a talk, and then he said,
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hey, let's go to Antonio's Nut House
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and we'll meet Elon for a drink.
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And so Elon met us for a drink there.
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And it's the divest of dive bars.
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Like you'll take a beer and it will...
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I love the image of all of this.
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You hang out with Elon at a crappy bar.
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Yeah, I mean, it is the worst bar in the peninsula.
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Like just garbage on the floor, and like cheap beer,
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and warm beer, and like you'll pick up your pint glass
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and be lipstick on it.
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Not your lipstick.
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You understand, somebody else's lipstick.
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And so we're sitting there and Vlad walks up
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with his partner and he says, you're Jason Calacanis.
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And I said, tell me about your startup.
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He said, how do you know I have a startup?
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I said, you recognize me.
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And I mean, that's the only way.
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And he goes, is that Elon Musk?
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And I said, yes, Elon, come say hi.
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And he came over and said, hi.
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I said, tell me what you do.
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He said, well, I'm a quant.
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I said, what's that?
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And he said, quantitative analysis.
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And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I know about that.
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That's like you guys make algorithms
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and then try to beat the market, right?
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I was like, so you're gonna pitch me on a startup
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and you're gonna sell your algorithm to other people.
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And if it was so good, why wouldn't you just use it yourself
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He's like, yeah, yeah, no, no, that's not our business.
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Our business is we're gonna create an app
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to get millennials to trade stocks.
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And he said, hmm, you do realize
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there's no retail investors anymore.
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Like the dot com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis
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eliminated any individual's belief
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in participating in the stock market.
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And he said, that's the opportunity.
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I said, okay, I like it.
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He said, well, we're gonna get these millennials to trade.
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I said, the same ones who live in their mom's basements
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and take Uber and Lyft and are on their parents,
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have no money, got screwed and went 250K into debt
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for school and now can't get a job.
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And he's like, yeah.
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I'm like, okay, they have no interest in their future,
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but they're gonna trade stocks.
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He said, yeah, that's the opportunity.
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I was like, how are you gonna make money?
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And he said, well, that's the best part.
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It's gonna be free.
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And I said, so your idea is to get a group of people
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who have no interest in saving for their future
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to trade and your business model is free.
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Because in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas
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that nobody believes in are the ones
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that have the greatest returns.
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I mean, Uber, I introduced to about 25 investors
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and three of us said yes.
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So a full 12% of the community who saw that deal
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So your sense about this idea being good
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had to do with the fact that this guy was just crazy
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and ambitious and bold thinking,
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or was it that there was something here
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in allowing a much larger magnitude of people
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to be able to be investors?
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Yeah, the way to do really well as an angel investor
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or just in technology or in life
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is to not say what could go wrong,
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but to say what could go right.
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And then to just imagine for a moment,
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if it does work, what would the world look like?
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And so when Elon was investing in Tesla
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and some other guys were running it
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and he was trying to save the company,
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it wasn't, is this gonna work?
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It was almost positively not gonna work.
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And he knew that, but if it does work,
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what does the world look like?
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And so that's really what you're looking for
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is not the chances of success,
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but if it does succeed, what would that look like?
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And that's what the world needs more people doing.
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And so when you looked at Robinhood, it was like,
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well, if he does succeed, what would the world look like?
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And now we've seen what it looks like.
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You have a generation who are so financially sophisticated
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that they know how to do puts and calls
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and shorts and research at a level
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that dominated the hedge fund industry.
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So let's pause for a second.
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These traders sitting there on a subreddit
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in a discord server are able to do analysis and research
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and then act in unison to say,
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we're going to beat in the Robinhood sense,
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this group of sophisticated insiders
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who have more access and more access to capital,
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but we will figure out how to solve this problem.
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And most things don't work.
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It's like the Wikipedia.
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There's no way the Wikipedia would ever work, except it did.
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You're like, how is this ever gonna work?
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You're not paying anybody,
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but it's both the largest corpus of an encyclopedia ever.
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So I think Robinhood actually succeeded.
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And then what we saw was this system
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and a lot of the systems in our society,
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whether it's the political system,
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the constitution of the United States,
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education, higher education, which you're involved in,
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and then even the financial system,
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we have not stress tested and stress tested it,
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and we don't actually know all the edge cases
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So Trump was able to just really put this crazy stress test.
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Is the democracy going to hold?
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Are we gonna break this two or three,
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200 someone year old experiment?
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And then we looked at the financial markets
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and it turns out there were more people shorting the stock
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than stocks and shares were available.
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I don't know how that's possible.
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And then I'm trying to uncover,
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where can I see a list of people who have shorted the stock?
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And it's like, you can't,
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but we can tell you sort of how many every two weeks
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or maybe twice a week, we can create a report.
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I was surprised that nobody knows
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the list of people who were shorted
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and you guys are trying to figure that out.
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Yeah, there's no transparency on a lot of these systems.
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And if you call to try to short a stock,
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it's almost like they'll tell you on the phone,
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let me see, I think I might know a guy
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who has shares to loan out.
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So it's like, am I calling to try to find
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like a 73 Mustang Grande in gold?
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You're gonna call around, it's like,
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shouldn't this be like on a ledger somewhere
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and be completely transparent?
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So now we're seeing those things.
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And I think the investigations will make it super clear.
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But of course, in a vacuum without information,
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there are so many investors in these startups
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that conflicts can start to appear.
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And then you know how it is with people
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in conspiracy theories, the mind starts to wander, right?
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And so in some cases, there is actually a conspiracy.
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And then in other cases, people's mind will fill in like,
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oh my God, there's some grand conspiracy here.
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I can tell you Robinhood's only goal
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is to get more people to trade stocks
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and to democratize it even more.
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And they apparently were on the brink of seizing as an entity
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if they didn't get more money to cover all these trades.
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I mean, they were on the brink
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and they raised $3.5 billion or something like that
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Yeah, so in some sense, Robinhood enabled this very,
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like the magic of this distributed system
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of WallStreetBets, right?
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You said Wikipedia, which is another,
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which is probably one of my favorite websites
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and one of my favorite examples of like a distributed system
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somehow coming together in a way,
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just like you said at that crappy bar,
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I would have guessed it would never work.
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But if it does work, it changes everything and it did.
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And Robinhood in that same way probably enabled
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or was one of the major enablers of WallStreetBets
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of giving power, like empowering young kids to learn
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about how this whole messy financial system works
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and take on the big elite centralized players.
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Yes, and it's very easy.
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When these companies get big,
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one thing that's changed is the footprint of these startups
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and the velocity at which they grow.
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So something like Airbnb is another perfect example
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of something that should really not work in practice,
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Like I'm gonna rent my couch or my extra room to somebody
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like a serial killer,
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or I'm gonna stay in somebody's house,
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like a serial killer's house.
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And it's like, it really sounds scary,
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but it actually works and it has not destroyed
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the hotel business.
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So the best startups induce a market to exist.
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If you look at Uber or Airbnb, people replace their cars
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and Uber was not competing ultimately with taxis.
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They were competing with car ownership,
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public transportation, walking, or just not going out.
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And then you look at Airbnb,
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a lot of people who stay in an Airbnb
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would not be taking a trip to Kyoto,
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if not for the fact that they could get a $75 beautiful room
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with great reviews in Kyoto for three weeks.
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It inspires people and it manifests the market
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because the product is so transcendent, right?
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And I think that's one of the things that Robinhood did.
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You can't learn how to do this options trading
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and puts and calls and all this sophistication stuff,
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unless you actually do it.
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It's just too hard to learn except in practice,
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If you wanna learn how to play poker or guitar
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or tennis or skiing, like you can talk about it.
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You can watch YouTube videos,
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but at a certain point, you gotta get on the mountain.
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At a certain point, you gotta put some chips in the pot
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and it's gonna be painful.
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Like poker is gonna be painful.
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You're gonna lose a lot of money
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and that's why you should play at the small tables first.
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And even in trading, like you look at people
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who are doing this crazy trading and GameStop,
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a company that's worth maybe a couple of billion dollars,
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but certainly not tens of billions of dollars.
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Of course, the people who are throwing their money in last
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are gonna lose it.
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I think everybody knew that.
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And so it was a momentum play
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and they're betting against the hedge funds.
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So I think it's good for people to learn
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and become financially literate
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and just always understand the concept of the risk of ruin.
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The good news is for a young person,
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the risk of ruin might be like they lose $5,000 or something
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and then they have to build their stack back up.
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But that's really the only thing I am concerned about
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is there are people who will play poker or blackjack
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or sports betting or whatever it is and lose control.
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Just like there might be people who try alcohol
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But we can't build a system based upon limiting
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the average person's behavior based upon somebody
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who can't control their ability to drink.
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Two glasses of wine instead of 20.
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How does this whole thing end?
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Probably in tears.
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Is everybody crying?
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Who's crying when?
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So I think there were some of the hedge funds
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that were crying initially.
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That maybe some of the Wall Street Bets people
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who bought last would be crying.
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And then eventually there's probably another set
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of hedge funds or even the Wall Street Bets mob
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and that army, some of them might've broke ranks
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and then shorted the stock.
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So everybody has to be aware of what's happening
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So if Wall Street Bets said, hey, let's squeeze
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these hedge funds because they have too much short interest.
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Let's all buy the stock.
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Then some of them might've said, okay,
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you know, it's at two or $300.
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Maybe I'll join the short movement now that they've covered.
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And they could have shorted their been like double agent.
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So people have to understand like this stuff is gnarly
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and it's a free for all.
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I mean, it is a literal free for all.
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There's a kind of morality,
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like a big statement that Wall Street Bets made
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in terms of like the elites can't just push us around.
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They can't bully around.
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But at the same time, you know,
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they're also interested in making money, right?
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What's your sense?
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You said that some of the people in the Wall Street Bets
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might've broken off and shorted the stock.
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Are they more interested?
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There was an emergent like morality that emerged
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and said like, we're not gonna put up
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with the centralized elites,
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but is that going to continue?
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Are they going to fight the power structures
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that are bad for society?
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Or are they going to now like,
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I mean, are they ultimately going to introduce more chaos
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that's going to damage the economy and damage the world?
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Or are they going to continue being the good guys
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and fighting the evils that manipulate the market?
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What's your sense?
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You know, it really feels like the Dark Knight series
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of films where like some people
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just want to see the world burn.
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I think there is a contingent of people
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who just literally want to see chaos.
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Like, you know that contingent on some of these forums
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who just want to create chaos, right?
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So there's certainly that chaos contingent,
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but I think overall what the arc will show
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is a group of people getting massively educated.
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You see it in crypto as well.
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There was like a three year period
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where all of these failed entrepreneurs who I knew
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who couldn't build companies were then coming back to me
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after their companies has failed or after they gave up
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or couldn't clear market raising money
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with the venture capital community
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and they were doing ICOs.
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And I was like, I met you before, right?
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And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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No, I'm doing an ICO now.
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I'm like, okay, where's your company at?
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And they're like, here's a white paper.
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And I was like, this white paper with spelling errors in it
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that says you're going to destroy Airbnb
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because everybody's apartment
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is gonna be on an immutable ledger.
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Like, wouldn't that be better in a regular database
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that was private and not public?
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Like, why does it need to be on an immutable ledger?
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I'm like, not changing the database is a feature?
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That does not seem like a good feature.
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And they couldn't explain it.
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They're like, well, just people are interested in ICOs.
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And there was that ICO mania.
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And what it showed was there's a global appetite for risk.
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People want to try new things.
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This is one of the great things about the human spirit
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is one of the great things about capitalism.
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And one of the things that concerns me most
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about where we're at in society
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is the sort of socialism, communism,
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entrepreneurship is bad, technology is bad,
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and polarization of wealth,
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and people getting rich is a bad thing.
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When I grew up, I'm 50 now,
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but when I was a Gen Xer growing up,
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we kind of maybe too much idolized Bill Gates
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and people who were doing interesting things in the world.
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And we thought capitalism was a force for good.
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I still believe capitalism is a force for good
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because when a group of people build a product or service
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that changes the world and it gets globally distributed,
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whether it's Tesla or SpaceX or Google or Airbnb
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or Uber or Robinhood,
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everybody gets to benefit from that product or service
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having to compete.
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And if you look at the places where there's no competition
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like public education or less established colleges
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and something like that,
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less competition for accreditation degrees,
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like things tend to get a little weird, don't they?
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And people tend to be protected and that's not good.
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You need competition.
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Doesn't mean that people shouldn't have global healthcare.
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It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a safety net,
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but we need to keep capitalism vibrant,
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especially because China has now coopted capitalism
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and created their own version of capitalism,
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which is communism with capitalism.
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It's like this weird operating system
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like we still want to keep communism
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so we can take any of your gains at any time,
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but we'd like you to be entrepreneurial.
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And then you have somebody like the founder of Alibaba,
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Jack Ma, who disappears for a couple of weeks.
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No, I'm just kidding.
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I was like, he kind of disappears for a couple of weeks
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and then he comes back and he's really sorry
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about the things he said and then he disappears again.
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And like, we have to be very careful.
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You know, we have to be very careful if China wins
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capitalism, this is going to be an existential threat
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The Chinese are no joke.
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I mean, they are seriously focused
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and they are picking the winners.
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It's a very weird system because it is in fact,
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I don't know what you call it.
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Like communism and capitalism is such a overloaded terms,
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but they do encourage entrepreneurship,
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but they, and they do a good job of it.
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But then they're like, they're like the surveillance thing
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and they're controlling things in a way.
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It's weird because it seems to work really well for them
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in the short term.
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Yes, it's definitely got short term benefits.
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So the question is like, how that gets distorted
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and it becomes worse and worse and worse,
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which it potentially might be.
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And I think on, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit,
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which you have a podcast all centered
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around the entrepreneurial spirit,
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is one of the magical things that makes this country great.
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I don't know if money is deeply tied into that.
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I do get bothered by people, you know,
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treating the word billionaires if it's a bad word.
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But in general, like all the hard things,
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all the difficult things we're going through in this country,
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it seems like the way out is going to be
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making the entrepreneur the hero of society
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of like letting that young kid with a big dream
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and the guts to take the big risks
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and build something totally new,
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giving them a chance and whatever that involves.
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I don't think it's about taxes.
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I don't think it's about like regulation, all that stuff.
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It's about us and just public discourse saying
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that kid, that guy, that girl, they're bad asses.
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Like encourage them to do it.
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We have to have people buy in
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to the fact that they have that opportunity.
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And I think one of the problems in society is
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there's a group of people who actually don't believe
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that they can succeed or they don't believe
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even more perniciously that other people can.
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And that's the group of people that I think are highly vocal
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but a small group of people,
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which are generally people of incredible privilege,
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rich parents, white city dwellers, liberals.
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They kind of look and say,
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poor people cannot change it a lot.
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And they're battling in their minds
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to protect poor people.
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But they have this very weird
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patriarchal kind of approach to it,
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which is they think that they're not capable
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of changing their lot in life.
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And they're like, it's not possible.
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And then once in a while, I'll tweet something where I say,
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it's really incredible that every piece of knowledge
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you could possibly want is now available for free on YouTube.
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And every course from MIT and Harvard and Stanford
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is available on edX or Coursera.
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And all that information is there freely available.
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And you can take the lectures.
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And then people will be like,
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yeah, but people don't have access to it.
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I'm like, they do.
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And they're like, yeah, but they don't have internet.
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And I'm like, here's the chart
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of internet penetration in America.
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And they're like, well, poor people don't have internet.
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And I'm like, really?
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Find me any downtrodden person without a smartphone
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with a high speed connection
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that capitalism provided for $12 a month or $15 a month.
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It's very hard to find that.
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And we have it so well in this country
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and there's so much opportunity,
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but people don't believe it.
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And that's actually one of the problems.
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See, the average American still watches
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four or five hours of television a day.
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And often I meet people and they're like,
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I need a technical co founder.
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But all I need is a million dollars.
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And I'm like, okay, well, what is your skill?
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And they don't have a skill.
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And I'm like, well, are you a designer?
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Are you a product manager?
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Are you a developer?
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Are you a sales executive?
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Do you have an idea?
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Well, as my friend, Sam Harris,
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I think your friend as well says like,
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everybody has like a million ideas an hour.
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Like you don't really get credit for those.
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Even when you're asleep, your idea is spewing ideas.
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Like zero credit for your ideas.
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It's all about execution.
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You have to believe that you yourself
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can be the core of that execution.
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You yourself can build the thing in every,
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no matter what your circumstances are.
link |
I mean, we could talk about like structural racism
link |
and all those kinds of things that push things down.
link |
But from the individual perspective,
link |
when you just like are coaching
link |
or giving advice to an individual,
link |
you can literally change the world.
link |
I mean, Wall Street Bets is an indication of that
link |
in the financial space that you yourself can have,
link |
can change the world.
link |
That's why this country is amazing.
link |
Still the best country in the world, right?
link |
I mean, it still is amazing the opportunity
link |
provided to people.
link |
All this educational experience is online.
link |
And the ability, what I tell young people
link |
who are looking for advice, I say,
link |
the skill you need to refine
link |
is the ability to learn new skills.
link |
Like if you become good at learning a new skill,
link |
and Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine has really pioneered this,
link |
he can get to 60 or 70% of like the knowledge
link |
in a skill in some incredibly short period of time.
link |
And I'm not saying he's gonna become a virtuoso drummer
link |
or a great basketball player,
link |
but Tim and I were on vacation together
link |
in like a group vacation in Italy
link |
and there was a basketball court.
link |
And I said, let's go shoot some hoops.
link |
I'd never shot before.
link |
And I was like, okay, come on, I'll teach you.
link |
And Tim is fabulously uncoordinated.
link |
People don't know this.
link |
Like he tried to dribble a basketball and do a layup
link |
and it looked like he had a blindfold on.
link |
I mean, you've never seen something less elegant
link |
than Tim Ferriss doing a layup in basketball.
link |
And then he watched me do it three or four times
link |
and I watched him study me.
link |
And listen, I've been playing basketball in Brooklyn
link |
since I was a kid.
link |
I got a couple of moves and he was just taking notes
link |
and taking notes and taking notes.
link |
And by the end of a couple of hours of doing this,
link |
I could just watch him checking his form
link |
and figuring it out.
link |
That's every skill in the world now.
link |
And what I tell people is like, I'm like,
link |
did you watch Game of Thrones?
link |
And they're like, yeah.
link |
Watch Breaking Bad?
link |
Like, yeah, I'm like, okay, that's about 400 hours.
link |
How about you don't watch the next two
link |
and you put that 400 hours into learning
link |
how to be a graphic designer, a UX person,
link |
a developer, whatever it is and learn how to add skills.
link |
That's what I did my whole life.
link |
I was a kid from Brooklyn, went to school at night,
link |
but I was very quick to get to maybe 50%
link |
of the knowledge base of graphic design
link |
or being a writer or being a sales executive,
link |
whatever it was, a developer even.
link |
And I was just good enough to not have people
link |
be able to bullshit me like when I hired them.
link |
And that was a big unlock.
link |
When you know enough that people can't snow you,
link |
that's a really good one.
link |
And look at yourself.
link |
You figured out how to set up an entire podcast,
link |
people don't know this,
link |
but you don't have a team around you.
link |
I have a team of like five, six people working on my podcast.
link |
With even knowing enough about to set this up,
link |
you would then be able to hire a team.
link |
And you'll be able to call them on their bullshit
link |
if they're not doing a good job.
link |
And that's really important.
link |
And I don't know that much about this whole thing,
link |
but I know enough to be able to then see
link |
who knows their stuff and not.
link |
You're absolutely right.
link |
And the process of learning how to learn
link |
is essential there because I did martial arts,
link |
jiu jitsu and so on.
link |
And it's so funny to watch.
link |
I did Taekwondo, yeah.
link |
Taekwondo is awesome.
link |
It's funny that there's some people
link |
that do an activity for years,
link |
because just sort of elaborate on something
link |
you were saying about hours.
link |
It's not always the amount of hours,
link |
it's the quality that you put in.
link |
Deliberate practice versus just doing some behavior.
link |
I mean, literally I've been playing chess
link |
and trying to get that going again
link |
after watching Queen's Gambit and I got chess.com.
link |
And I realized I was just playing
link |
and I'm not getting better.
link |
And then I was like, oh wait,
link |
there's a little analysis feature here in chess.com
link |
where it will show you your blunders and mistakes.
link |
And I'm like, oh, I'm spending no time
link |
reviewing my losses in chess
link |
and I just wanna play the next game.
link |
I should really review these losses
link |
and figure out what mistakes I made.
link |
And when I started doing that,
link |
I was like, oh, I'm getting better.
link |
So some deliberate practice really works.
link |
And if you wanna take it all the way,
link |
Magnus Carlsen, shout out to the guy,
link |
he has an app, but there's a few other coaching apps
link |
where you focus on the end game,
link |
you focus drilling a particular,
link |
you basically don't play the game at all.
link |
You just focus on drilling the different aspects.
link |
The openings, the end game, the end game, yeah.
link |
And there's different kinds of puzzles.
link |
So you can really make it into a deliberate practice.
link |
Not to make this episode sponsored by chess.com,
link |
but they literally have puzzles.
link |
So I was like, oh, and it's $100 a year for this product.
link |
And I just thought to myself, this is capitalism.
link |
They don't need to charge you $100 an hour for a lesson.
link |
They can charge you $100
link |
and they've created the ability for you to play chess
link |
24 hours a day against opponents
link |
who are perfectly matched against you based on your rating.
link |
And they analyze every game and they have puzzles
link |
and they have tutorials and they've got everything else.
link |
It's like, just think about how much value
link |
is being provided to society because of capitalism
link |
and because competition.
link |
If you want things to get better
link |
and you wanna step up your game,
link |
just make it slightly competitive.
link |
It is one of these things in human existence
link |
that is so powerful.
link |
I don't know, did you see the Michael Jordan documentary,
link |
Like half of it, I'm still working through it.
link |
He's so competitive and petty.
link |
It's so inspiring that all he cares about is just winning
link |
to the level of which he literally,
link |
there's like this running meme, I took that personally
link |
and I took that person.
link |
I don't know if you've seen the images of him
link |
sitting smoking a cigar,
link |
looking at like an iPad or a video clip
link |
and it's like, I took that personally.
link |
And you can make a super cut
link |
of every time he took something personally,
link |
he literally takes everything personally
link |
to give himself that competitive motivation to win.
link |
That's capitalism.
link |
And when people are competing,
link |
man, look at what Elon did to the space of cars.
link |
Like every, they were literally laughing at him
link |
in the first 10 years.
link |
Electric cars, ha ha, that company will go out of business.
link |
And now every single company is like,
link |
we're going fully electric by 2035.
link |
And he kicked their asses so brutally
link |
that they had no choice but then to step up their game.
link |
And that's what we want, right?
link |
And this virus and this pandemic,
link |
I think the great thing that will come out
link |
of this horrible experience that we've all had
link |
is psychologically death, learning,
link |
just so many bad things occurred,
link |
the economy, people losing their jobs.
link |
But we also got to see the human spirit
link |
with these mRNA vaccines and just how,
link |
if we took out some of the regulation
link |
and people were super motivated,
link |
we might actually be able to eliminate
link |
all pandemics from ever happening again.
link |
And before that, Bill Gates was banging his fist
link |
and Jeff Skoll was doing the movie Contagion.
link |
I mean, for two decades, people have been banging their fist.
link |
We have to be prepared for this.
link |
And everybody's like, yeah, whatever, YOLO.
link |
It's not gonna happen.
link |
And now it's happened and people are like,
link |
we need to be able to destroy every pandemic and virus
link |
before it happens.
link |
And listen, you know a lot more about science than I do,
link |
but these mRNA has been around for a while.
link |
We've just never gotten aggressive about doing it.
link |
And then you think about challenge trials.
link |
I don't know if you've been following this,
link |
but they're doing challenge trials now in the UK this month
link |
where they're introducing COVID into healthy young patients
link |
and then giving them the vaccine or, you know.
link |
And that is against all rules and regulations
link |
But then you think about it.
link |
We kind of celebrate people jumping out of planes
link |
and we got that one guy, Alex Honnold,
link |
who's climbing up mountains without a rope
link |
and they give him a North Star, you know,
link |
back page ad and an endorsement deal.
link |
And we celebrate that.
link |
We celebrate people surfing with sharks.
link |
We celebrate people doing deep welding.
link |
We pay them extra to go 200 feet underground
link |
And people do dangerous stuff all day long, astronauts.
link |
But we won't, soldiers, firefighters,
link |
but we won't let people get paid to do a challenge trial.
link |
Yeah, we're weirdly risk averse in certain areas
link |
that completely don't make any sense.
link |
And this is where the world needs it.
link |
We could have said these thousand people, young people,
link |
who we know are in all likelihood
link |
not going to have a bad outcome,
link |
but there's a possibility.
link |
There's a possibility.
link |
But it's very low.
link |
It's certainly lower than riding a motorcycle.
link |
It's lower than riding a motorcycle.
link |
People ride motorcycles everywhere.
link |
We have ads for motorcycles.
link |
We could have just said to those thousand people,
link |
we'll give you a million dollars each to do this.
link |
Okay, there's your billion dollars.
link |
We're printing trillions of dollars of money
link |
to deal with this.
link |
If we had just done a thousand people
link |
for a million dollars each to do a challenge trial
link |
in March, April, May, when they had the mRNA vaccines ready,
link |
we could have deployed the vaccines in the summer.
link |
We would have been done with this.
link |
We would have been over by now.
link |
So we get to challenge all of that thinking.
link |
I think that's what the great pause did.
link |
It's letting everybody challenge that thinking is,
link |
why do we have that rule?
link |
Okay, yeah, we don't want to have people,
link |
you know, like give up their organs for money.
link |
Like we obviously understand,
link |
but there's a reasonable discussion about,
link |
well, maybe there's a level of risk in a global pandemic.
link |
I mean, we fought the Nazis, right?
link |
We defeated the Nazis.
link |
That took a lot of deaths to do that,
link |
but we had to kill that evil.
link |
This is another evil, which we must fight.
link |
And it's going to result in,
link |
it's already resulting in thousands of people dying a day,
link |
but we could have actually stopped it earlier
link |
if we just had a reasonable discussion.
link |
This is why podcasting is our respect what you do.
link |
This is why intelligent people are so drawn to podcasts
link |
because you and I can expand on this
link |
and not cancel each other over this very suggestion.
link |
When I make this suggestion,
link |
are challenge trials reasonable or not?
link |
If I were to do that on Twitter, they'd be like,
link |
oh, Calacanis wants to give poor people coronavirus
link |
in order to save rich people.
link |
It's like, no, I didn't say that.
link |
But you and I could have a reasonable discussion
link |
about a challenge trial is something we should consider
link |
in a acute situation
link |
where millions of people are going to lose their lives.
link |
Right, so that's an example
link |
of capitalism competition working really well.
link |
There's one of the, to me, sad thing to see
link |
about coronavirus is that, for example,
link |
testing at scale should have, it seems obvious.
link |
I was a little clueless about it,
link |
but because I thought there's no way you can have
link |
like antigen tests at hundreds of millions,
link |
like order hundreds of millions of them and make them cheap.
link |
But actually I realized recently
link |
that there have been available since about like May.
link |
Yeah. You were able to.
link |
In Korea, in Finland, all over the place.
link |
You could have done mass manufacture.
link |
So there, there's a little bit of a failure
link |
of capitalism to step up.
link |
And I don't know if you agree with this,
link |
but it seems that the blame is to be placed
link |
at the regulators and the various institutions.
link |
Chrony capitalism in all likelihood
link |
is what stopped it here in America.
link |
I mean, I had friends who had imported them
link |
from other countries, the testing kits.
link |
And you've probably been to parties
link |
where people had these kinds of testing kits
link |
from other countries and we're sitting here
link |
and they're just approving them now.
link |
Really, in February, month 11 of the pandemic in America,
link |
we're gonna have testing online, really.
link |
I mean, even if these tests were 80% effective
link |
and they're 95% effective, mass producing them,
link |
we should have sent them in every postal,
link |
anybody with a post office box with a mailing address
link |
should have had 10 of them put in their mailing address
link |
just for free from the government.
link |
And then everybody would be testing
link |
and we would have contained it.
link |
We don't have test and trace here in the United States.
link |
Well, all the countries that are on the other side of COVID
link |
did it by having testing, tracing
link |
and closing their borders and masks.
link |
That's the combination that works.
link |
The problem with the coronavirus
link |
is while there's a lot of institutions
link |
did not behave their best,
link |
it's also the case that there's a lot of uncertainty.
link |
So I tend to give a little bit of a pass
link |
to everybody involved for the uncertainty.
link |
I give them that until June.
link |
I wonder how history will remember this whole period.
link |
I'd love to ask you,
link |
because you were an early investor in Robinhoods
link |
and you're in a very nice place
link |
of being a huge supporter of the sort of Wall Street bets
link |
kind of distributed power of the people.
link |
And at the same time, because of you being an investor,
link |
like intellectually giving a chance to Robinhood
link |
in this kind of chaotic time of conversations
link |
to think about like, well, what did they do right?
link |
What did they do wrong?
link |
So you have a kind of a balance view on the whole thing,
link |
which is really nice.
link |
We've talked about what Robinhood did right, I think.
link |
Can you sort of steel man at your mouth's argument
link |
of what Robinhood did wrong in the last few days?
link |
Yeah, I mean, communication is always
link |
the number one issue with these startups, right?
link |
And if you, you have to get ahead of any problem
link |
and you have to put all the bad news out immediately.
link |
And in the case of Robinhood, it seems based on
link |
what has been in the papers and what Robinhood said publicly
link |
is that they had this kind of liquidity crisis, right?
link |
Where they were being, because of these exchanges telling
link |
them you have to put up this amount of money in collateral
link |
and them being pinned at number one in the app store.
link |
There were so many people trying to buy five shares
link |
of this stock, five shares of this meme stock
link |
that it kind of broke their system.
link |
And then the people who clear the trades for them,
link |
they said, you gotta put up a billion dollars,
link |
two billion dollars, three billion dollars.
link |
We can't do that overnight.
link |
And I think that they were in an uncomfortable situation
link |
of like going on TV and saying, we have a liquidity crisis.
link |
Like that could be like a run on the bag.
link |
Everybody then logs in at the same time to Robinhood
link |
and tries to sell every share they own
link |
because they're afraid that the whole thing's
link |
gonna collapse, right?
link |
So I think there was this kind of like black swan event
link |
and they probably didn't communicate it all that well.
link |
At the center of that, this is really interesting.
link |
Maybe you can comment on the nature of communication.
link |
Vlad, the CEO, the guy you met at the bar,
link |
was I think at the center of the communication, right?
link |
So Elon is an example of a guy who also is
link |
at the center of the communication
link |
for his particular set of companies.
link |
And that on Twitter seems to be a really powerful way
link |
And there was something, this is me saying it,
link |
there was something about Vlad that sounded
link |
like he's hiding stuff.
link |
As opposed to Elon, it doesn't sound
link |
like he's hiding stuff.
link |
It could be the nature, the beat,
link |
the timing of the conversation.
link |
Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg.
link |
Mark Zuckerberg for some reason often sounds
link |
like he's hiding something.
link |
And then there's like Jack Dorsey is much less so.
link |
And I don't know what that is about the CEOs
link |
that makes you trust them and not.
link |
Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity.
link |
There might be nondisclosures in place
link |
that we're not aware of where they're not allowed
link |
to talk about certain relationships.
link |
And that results like in Vlad's case,
link |
and that results in you being like acting weird and nervous.
link |
Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous.
link |
So it's really hard to be building one of these companies
link |
and you're at scale and oh my Lord,
link |
the entire thing's coming apart
link |
and you're the most hated person for that day.
link |
You know how the rage cycle works
link |
and the media is just so crazy
link |
when they get their hooks into something.
link |
I saw it happen with Uber.
link |
We saw it happen with Facebook and even Tesla.
link |
There were times when people did stupid things
link |
with autopilot and it's like, okay,
link |
somebody is watching a movie and sleeping in their car
link |
or leaving the driver's seat
link |
against all the rules of autopilot
link |
and somehow Tesla's responsible for that.
link |
It's like we have people who stand on top
link |
of their motorcycles and drive down the road
link |
And we don't blame Yamaha or Harley Davidson
link |
for some idiot standing on the seat of their motorcycle
link |
on a highway going 60 miles an hour.
link |
We just say, that person's an idiot.
link |
But when new technology comes out,
link |
we blame the technology, not the person operating it.
link |
And if you are going to operate,
link |
we basically vilify it and demonize it.
link |
I think that is part of it.
link |
Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb,
link |
we always thought, what if somebody trashes your apartment?
link |
And then sure enough, a bunch of meth heads
link |
rented this poor woman's apartment.
link |
She left all of her stuff in it.
link |
And then a bunch of meth heads had a drug party,
link |
destroyed her apartment, ripped up all her photos
link |
And we knew that day would happen,
link |
but nobody remembers it now.
link |
But it was the number one story on every news channel
link |
because wow, that's an exciting story.
link |
And I just thought to myself,
link |
I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms
link |
where the hotel room is being trashed
link |
and people are doing drugs and crazy things.
link |
It's like, yes, that's basically every hotel
link |
in Los Angeles right now is being destroyed
link |
by some rock band that's throwing a TV out the window.
link |
Like we expected in a hotel,
link |
we just didn't expect it in somebody's house with Airbnb.
link |
And then Airbnb created rules around,
link |
you can't rent an Airbnb for a party and they learn.
link |
So I think there's a learning curve with these companies
link |
and they do get to scale at a level
link |
that is unprecedented.
link |
It used to take decades for a company
link |
to become an international phenomenon.
link |
Now it happens in two, three, four years.
link |
I mean, look at Clubhouse.
link |
This thing went from being a private beta six months ago
link |
to being the number one app in Germany
link |
and in Japan and here.
link |
Like just like that, boom.
link |
And it's because there's an ecosystem
link |
that has never existed, the app store.
link |
Then there's payments online.
link |
And then everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket.
link |
The thing people got wrong
link |
about entrepreneurship technology and business
link |
over the last couple of decades
link |
was just how big the market was
link |
and then how quickly you could achieve relevancy
link |
We thought the market was like the 60 million homes
link |
And originally it was like maybe 10 or 20.
link |
Then it became 60 million.
link |
Then it was like, okay,
link |
well, how many hours are you at your desktop computer?
link |
Well, like probably at our computers for five hours a day,
link |
10 hours a day at work, three hours a day on our own.
link |
And then it was like,
link |
yeah, nobody's on their desktop computer.
link |
Everybody's on their mobile phone.
link |
Oh, and by the way, they have it with them.
link |
So the people with mobile phones
link |
are now using this high speed device with an app store
link |
with their credit card in it.
link |
In the early days of the internet,
link |
people were scared to put their credit card on the internet.
link |
That was considered a really dumb thing to do.
link |
If you put your credit card on the internet,
link |
you're gonna lose all your money.
link |
They're gonna hack you or whatever.
link |
And now it's just amazing to me
link |
how quickly when a company hits,
link |
how quickly it can get to a million subscribers
link |
or 10 million or a billion users, right?
link |
And there's all these networks, like social networks
link |
that allow the spread of the viral spread
link |
of like a new startup, a new company, a new app
link |
An idea, a podcast, right?
link |
A single thing, a single meme could change the world.
link |
Speaking of Clubhouse, I just wanna,
link |
we're saying so many interesting things,
link |
but there was a magical moment with Vlad and Elon
link |
I don't know if you got that.
link |
Yes, is there, do you have thoughts about that interaction
link |
which felt like so many aspects of this whole situation
link |
feels like totally novel, surreal,
link |
like it's defining a new era.
link |
Like a billionaire, the richest human on earth
link |
is interviewing the person at the center
link |
of one of the most interesting mass scale
link |
like power battles in finance ever, perhaps.
link |
And by the way, seven movies have been sold two weeks.
link |
Just think about how fast things are moving, Lex.
link |
This thing happens.
link |
Like people had the idea to short the stock six months ago.
link |
They start doing their research.
link |
They build an army.
link |
They execute the trade.
link |
The system goes down.
link |
Robinhood raises $3.5 billion in four days.
link |
Elon is interviewing them on Clubhouse on Sunday
link |
after the Wednesday it happened.
link |
And now here we are, it's 10 days later.
link |
Doesn't it feel like it's been 10 months?
link |
It's been 10 days, Lex.
link |
It's been 10 days.
link |
Plus, there's like a new president,
link |
all these things, and everyone forgot.
link |
Oh, and there was an insurrection.
link |
By the way, we also almost had a revolution at the Capitol
link |
where a bunch of crazy people who have guns
link |
and body armor, and then a bunch of them
link |
who are just yoloing in cosplay, took over the Capitol.
link |
Well, so, and the other more dramatic thing to me is.
link |
That was one month ago.
link |
That was one month.
link |
And the president of the United States got banned
link |
from every major social network,
link |
and which I think I'm still deeply troubled by
link |
is Parler being removed from AWS.
link |
That changed the way, that changed a lot of things.
link |
As somebody who's an aspiring entrepreneur,
link |
that changed the way I see the world.
link |
That little, maybe I'm being over dramatic, but.
link |
I think you're paranoid for a reason.
link |
You're paranoid for a very good reason,
link |
which is as big as these companies can become,
link |
they are beholden to the mob.
link |
And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled,
link |
they're going to get canceled
link |
because you can't lose your entire audience.
link |
You could lose your whole customer base,
link |
and you could lose all your employees.
link |
I think what's interesting about your fear
link |
about Parler and AWS taking off
link |
is we went from being like a social network,
link |
which is the software layer.
link |
And then we went to like the infrastructure layer,
link |
and they'll even go after like Cloudflare,
link |
which is a CDN provider, right?
link |
They're just like a plumbing,
link |
it's like sort of like the telephone.
link |
So we're basically holding everybody responsible
link |
on the whole chain of events here.
link |
And what that's going to do is,
link |
I'm not a huge believer in crypto,
link |
but distributed computing,
link |
where nobody in decentralized
link |
and distributed computing platforms and open standards,
link |
podcasting is an open standard,
link |
the web is an open standard, FTP was an open standard,
link |
but Twitter and Facebook are closed.
link |
And what's going to happen is we will see
link |
a group of individuals create peer to peer networks
link |
for social media, where nobody can control it.
link |
And the same for cloud computing,
link |
where there's a crypto project where everybody will,
link |
and I invested in a company that tried to do this
link |
and got sold and it didn't work out,
link |
but take your hard drive on your computer at home,
link |
you give a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive
link |
over to the cloud,
link |
and then everybody else does their terabyte.
link |
And then all of a sudden you've got this virtual cloud
link |
and anybody can store stuff on it and it's all encrypted,
link |
and then nobody can stop it.
link |
And that could be tweets, it could be videos.
link |
And so this idea that YouTube will be able to tell people,
link |
to kick people off because they're skeptics of,
link |
I don't know, the pandemic or the vaccine,
link |
or they've, they'll make things
link |
that are more censorship resistant.
link |
I think that'll be the reaction to all of this.
link |
This is my question for you,
link |
going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you,
link |
is there, like with Clubhouse, do you see competitors,
link |
do you think it's possible that another,
link |
perhaps more decentralized or another kind
link |
of social media will emerge
link |
that will take on Twitter and Facebook
link |
and might be able to replace them?
link |
If you look at the whole landscape with Clubhouse
link |
and everything else,
link |
do you think some other company might emerge?
link |
There'll be 10 versions of Clubhouse.
link |
We looked at social networking.
link |
We thought Friendster was it.
link |
Like Friendster was so good,
link |
nobody would be able to compete with that.
link |
It was growing so quickly.
link |
And then MySpace was a juggernaut
link |
and they hit a hundred million in revenue
link |
and a hundred million users.
link |
And it was like, well, that's game over.
link |
And then Facebook and LinkedIn and Snapchat
link |
and FriendFeed and countless others.
link |
So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category
link |
and 80% of the category will be owned
link |
by the top two or three players.
link |
But will those players change, do you think?
link |
What's your sense of that?
link |
Oh yeah, for sure.
link |
I mean, if Facebook hadn't bought Instagram,
link |
it would be a company in decline right now.
link |
People would be shorting the stock, right?
link |
Facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down
link |
and Instagram saved them and WhatsApp saved them.
link |
So, you know, that's another kind of weird moment
link |
in history that they were able to accumulate
link |
that much power and consolidate that much power.
link |
Instagram should have never sold to them.
link |
That should have gone public.
link |
They had just raised money from Sequoia
link |
and they had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation
link |
and they didn't need to sell.
link |
And that was a big mistake to sell.
link |
They should have kept going
link |
and they should have took on Facebook.
link |
And if Instagram was a standalone company right now,
link |
it'd be worth 500 million, 500 billion, yeah.
link |
Do you think Facebook might buy Clubhouse has been?
link |
Oh, they'll probably copy it.
link |
I mean, Zuckerberg has no moral compass
link |
or ethics or anything.
link |
I mean, he's a marauder.
link |
I mean, he basically copied Snapchat seven times.
link |
Like he did poke and he just kept trying
link |
and trying and trying.
link |
Part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders
link |
and the Instagram founders left
link |
is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful
link |
in terms of his ability to copy.
link |
What do you think makes a great leader in that sense?
link |
Because, okay, so when I look at Zuckerberg.
link |
He's a great executor.
link |
Is he a great executor?
link |
I don't think he's a great leader.
link |
I was excited by Facebook in the very early days.
link |
I thought it was an exciting opportunity to connect people
link |
and stuff started going wrong in certain kinds of ways.
link |
And again, maybe it's our human nature,
link |
but I attribute a lot of that to the leadership.
link |
I mean, the guy started it because he was unable
link |
to ask girls if they were single and on a date.
link |
I mean, that was his explicit.
link |
That could be a good motivator.
link |
That could be a good motivator.
link |
Well, I mean, it does.
link |
I mean, listen, the motivation of 18, 19 year old men
link |
or his, yeah, pretty clear.
link |
He was just trying to, he had no game.
link |
He had no game and he needed to know who was single
link |
so he could at least have a shot at getting a date.
link |
It's a little creepy.
link |
A little creepy, yeah.
link |
He, I think, was so obsessed with engagement and winning.
link |
And he's kind of like one of those friends you have
link |
who's just really good at playing a video game,
link |
but maybe doesn't see the bigger picture in life.
link |
And I mean, there's a reason why everybody who worked
link |
for him hates him and doesn't talk to him anymore
link |
and then actively derides him.
link |
Like so many, the people who sold WhatsApp to him
link |
then backed other projects like Telegram
link |
and said horrible things about him on the way out.
link |
These are the people he made billionaires.
link |
And they really don't like him.
link |
So I think there is something that he does
link |
that does not breed loyalty,
link |
but he's very successful in his focus,
link |
which is growth is all that matters.
link |
He's a marauder and taking friction out of products
link |
and processes is the playbook of Silicon Valley
link |
for the last decade or two.
link |
So whatever the friction is.
link |
It's like poetry what you're saying right now.
link |
It's like you're speaking so fast
link |
that I almost forget that you're dropping bombs.
link |
But so removing the, removing friction.
link |
And you're saying Facebook is exceptionally good
link |
at removing friction. He was the best at it.
link |
I mean, at Uber, they were like,
link |
we're gonna take out tipping.
link |
We're gonna take out the need for you
link |
to take out your credit card and do payment.
link |
It's just gonna be in your wallet.
link |
You got picked up, you leave, that's it.
link |
And I was like, we should have tipping.
link |
And they're like, it adds a step.
link |
And we're trying to have no steps.
link |
You put your address in, you click the button
link |
and you do nothing else.
link |
And so we've been obsessed here in Silicon Valley
link |
is how many clicks can we take out of the process?
link |
I guess Amazon is incredible at that as well.
link |
Absolutely, one click was the start of it.
link |
And then you look at Clubhouse as an example,
link |
you open Clubhouse and you see rooms,
link |
you click on it, you're listening.
link |
So in one click, you're listening.
link |
And then in one click, if you raise your hand
link |
or you get invited and you say, yes, you're speaking.
link |
So it's two clicks to speak, one click to listen.
link |
I mean, the only way they could make that app work
link |
even faster is if you opened it up
link |
and your microphone was turned on,
link |
which is kind of scary, but that is the next evolution.
link |
And what happens when you go that fast
link |
is you get unintended consequences.
link |
And so this is why Facebook has had more fines
link |
than any company in the history of Silicon Valley,
link |
just giant fines for doing stuff like this.
link |
And one of them was, I don't know if you remember
link |
when they created groups
link |
or if you have a group for your podcast,
link |
but you can just add people to a group
link |
without their permission.
link |
And there was this famous case
link |
when they first came out with it.
link |
Somebody created a Nambla fake group,
link |
National Man Love Boy Association or whatever,
link |
like pedophilia association.
link |
And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself,
link |
and like 20 other famous people in Silicon Valley.
link |
And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it
link |
and they're like, you're in Nambla?
link |
Facebook, and then Zuckerberg's response was,
link |
well, if your friends put you in that Nambla group,
link |
you should get new friends.
link |
And it was like, you got put in there too.
link |
And then the sad part about it was
link |
there were a group of young men who were gay
link |
and who were in college
link |
and there was a gay choir in their college
link |
and the person who was coordinating their Facebook group
link |
So Zuckerberg, it wasn't enough for Zuckerberg
link |
to make it so anybody could add anybody to any group
link |
because it will grow faster,
link |
let alone you have to confirm
link |
you wanna be added to the group.
link |
What it also did was posted it on their walls
link |
to increase engagement.
link |
And what they inadvertently did was
link |
they outed a bunch of 18, 19 year olds in college
link |
because they joined the gay men's choir at some college.
link |
And this is the kind of way,
link |
this is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself
link |
and to do better is you have to really think,
link |
well, there is my incentive to grow faster
link |
and then there's what's right for society
link |
and for the individual.
link |
You gotta think it through, think it through.
link |
It's sometimes very difficult.
link |
This is where vision is required
link |
to anticipate the unintended consequences.
link |
And it seems like Mark Zuckerberg is not very good at that.
link |
You've talked to so many great leaders in this world,
link |
privately and publicly.
link |
What do you think makes a great leader
link |
of these tech companies?
link |
Do you have an example?
link |
Is Elon to you a great leader?
link |
He's also a controversial one, right?
link |
There's a love and hate, a controversial sense
link |
that there is, and I know a lot of people work with him,
link |
for him, that there's also a love, hate relationship.
link |
The hate comes from the fact
link |
that they get pushed extremely hard.
link |
It's a very competitive environment,
link |
but it's a positive one
link |
because there's a vision that's underlying.
link |
It's similar to the Steve Jobs thing.
link |
And it has to do with the,
link |
back to our Michael Jordan discussion as well,
link |
that there seems to be the demons involved in tension
link |
and just anxiety, all those kinds of things.
link |
If you wanna do great things,
link |
there will be some suffering
link |
and there'll be some pain,
link |
and it's not easy if you wanna change the world.
link |
And then some people have this expectation
link |
that it's going to be easy.
link |
And what you'll typically find for any great leader
link |
who's trying to do something super ambitious,
link |
like if you wanna be like,
link |
if you're a rich guy and you start a restaurant
link |
and you don't care about making money
link |
and people have made restaurants before,
link |
you could be high fives
link |
and everybody could love you or whatever.
link |
But if you wanna change the world,
link |
you wanna do something hard driving,
link |
there's gonna be sacrifice involved.
link |
And so the problem is people are looking at something
link |
that is an Olympic caliber sport
link |
or a Navy SEALs like effort.
link |
In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice.
link |
We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal,
link |
like Michael Phelps and say,
link |
oh my God, he had to get up at 4 a.m. every day
link |
and he had to swim and he had to do an ice bath.
link |
Oh my God, that poor guy, he suffered, he was tortured.
link |
People were super mean to him,
link |
they put him in an ice bath.
link |
It was like, no, he wanted to be
link |
the greatest swimmer of all time
link |
and he knew what the sacrifice entailed.
link |
And that what happens in work, in business,
link |
is that people conflate like,
link |
oh, well, I went to work to make a living to pay my bills
link |
versus Michael Phelps approach to getting gold medals
link |
or Michael Jordan or pick the person,
link |
Elon or Jeff Bezos.
link |
And when you look at the reviews of like a place like Amazon,
link |
there was this incredible story in the New York Times
link |
where people were, I don't know if you remember it,
link |
this is the worst place you could ever work, Amazon.
link |
And we talked to 200 people and they all told us,
link |
they all described for us in the New York Times,
link |
a culture of cutthroatness and brutality
link |
that has never before been seen.
link |
And then you see all these people who work for Bezos
link |
for 24 years from when they graduated
link |
with their MBAs until today.
link |
And they've never left the company
link |
and they are ride or die forever.
link |
And what you're seeing there is,
link |
there's a mismatch of people going to work
link |
in an extreme sport or an extreme endeavor
link |
who should not do that.
link |
There are people who should go out into the rice fields
link |
And then there's another group of people who are samurai
link |
and who wield a sword and who take on missions
link |
that are dangerous.
link |
But if you're a rice picker and that's what you do
link |
and you feel safe, just getting a couple grains of rice,
link |
put them in a basket, cleaning it and then whatever,
link |
that's valid work, no big deal.
link |
I'm not deriding it, I'm sort of,
link |
but that is one group.
link |
And then there's people who are samurai
link |
and you cannot conflate the two,
link |
you cannot compare the two.
link |
And that's what is happening right now in business.
link |
Whenever you see these stories about,
link |
this person at this company is like a tyrant
link |
and they're so horrible and they yelled at somebody.
link |
Like if you're in the field
link |
and you're taking the beach at Normandy and it's D day
link |
or you gotta take the hill
link |
or you gotta whack Osama bin Laden
link |
and you're the Navy SEALs and like a rudder,
link |
a rotor gets knocked off the back of the Black Hawk,
link |
like this is serious shit.
link |
Like don't do it if you're not serious.
link |
And if you're not serious about changing the world,
link |
why would you go work for Bezos?
link |
Why would you go work for Elon Musk?
link |
Don't do it, don't go work there.
link |
This is, let me just sit back
link |
and enjoy the beauty of all of that.
link |
That's music to my ears,
link |
but I'm not sure what to do with it
link |
because it's conflicting to a lot of the things I hear
link |
from the way you're supposed to kind of act.
link |
And I think in order to do great things,
link |
you have to, I always admired people
link |
that lose their shit a little bit
link |
because they're so passionate.
link |
And I apologize and all those kinds of things,
link |
but like there's a tension,
link |
there's a drama to the creative process
link |
when especially in the early startup,
link |
this is not like the work life balance idea
link |
doesn't even apply.
link |
Work life balance, it's ridiculous.
link |
It's a ridiculous concept.
link |
Like the idea that there's like work life balance
link |
in a startup is ridiculous.
link |
If you're looking for work life balance,
link |
do not go to a startup or any kind of ambitious company.
link |
There is a series of places you can work in the world
link |
where you do not need to do anything more
link |
than what's put in front of you.
link |
And you just put the round peg in the round hole
link |
and the square peg in the square hole and you go home.
link |
And you get your little bits and grains of rice
link |
and you go heat them up and eat them, that's it.
link |
And then there's this other thing,
link |
which is the extreme pursuit of changing the world
link |
And we have a generation of people,
link |
multi generations of people who are soft.
link |
They're just soft.
link |
I mean, what is the big struggle we've had to deal with
link |
in America in our lifetimes?
link |
Like 9 11 and we didn't have the Vietnam War
link |
and then we had this like weird Iraq Wars
link |
and Middle East Wars that were kind of like a small number
link |
of people went and we sent drones.
link |
Like we have not had to sacrifice.
link |
Gen Xers, maybe the tail end of boomers
link |
experienced the Vietnam War regrettably.
link |
But we've had a couple of generations now, three I guess,
link |
that just haven't had to suffer.
link |
And so we're soft as Americans, we're soft.
link |
And then you look at people in China and we're like,
link |
oh my God, these poor Chinese people are living
link |
in these tiny cramped apartments.
link |
Like they were living in like essentially lean twos
link |
in Northern China with no running water
link |
or like one spigot of ice cold water for the entire village.
link |
Like they're thrilled to be joining the middle class.
link |
Even if it's the bottom of the middle class, right?
link |
They've taken hundreds of millions of people in China
link |
and moved them into the middle class.
link |
And we're like, oh my God, these people are suffering.
link |
It's like, they're up to $4 an hour,
link |
three or $4 an hour in the factories there.
link |
And they were just two decades ago at,
link |
I don't know, it was probably 50 cents an hour,
link |
something crazy like that.
link |
And now they've improved the quality of life there so much,
link |
just like America did 200 years ago or 100 years ago.
link |
They've improved it so much in China
link |
that now they're getting outpriced for factories
link |
from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India,
link |
and people are moving and people in China
link |
are moving the factories out of China into other countries.
link |
Because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam
link |
and other countries.
link |
So this is the way of the world.
link |
People move up and they get a better lot in life
link |
for their families.
link |
And just in America, we've gotten soft.
link |
And there's a generation.
link |
How do people die in America now?
link |
Suicide, obesity, heart attacks, anxiety.
link |
I mean, we're suffering from things
link |
that if you told people 100 years ago
link |
that the number, the top ways Americans would die
link |
would be overeating and suicide,
link |
they'd be like, what?
link |
You're literally killing yourself
link |
or eating yourself to death?
link |
That's what's happening in America?
link |
And when everybody, not everybody en masse,
link |
there's a large number of people
link |
who have become softer and softer.
link |
Capitalism creates an environment
link |
where there is people that still step up amidst that
link |
with a big dream and challenge the conventions.
link |
And that human spirit just arise above that.
link |
Elon's example of that, Jeff Bezos's example of that.
link |
Countless, countless examples.
link |
And they push the limits of those,
link |
of human beings that are willing to step up.
link |
And I think about sort of how to create a company
link |
that amidst all of this softness
link |
still creates a revolution.
link |
It's not, it doesn't seem trivial.
link |
It seems like how do you build a culture
link |
that's once healthy, but also unhealthy
link |
in the way that an Olympic pursuit is.
link |
It's all top down.
link |
Everybody just, you asked earlier what leadership was
link |
and I never answered the question.
link |
I think what leaders do is they set the example,
link |
And if you look at someone like Elon,
link |
we're personal friends for 20 years
link |
and he is indefatigable.
link |
Like, I mean, the guy has a stamina that is just phenomenal.
link |
Like he does not get tired.
link |
He works relentlessly
link |
and he sets that standard for the rest of the team.
link |
And I think Bezos is very sharp
link |
and likes to debate stuff and is very,
link |
and Jobs was just incredible at design
link |
and figuring out how to bridge that gap.
link |
So they just, leaders set the standard.
link |
They set the standard.
link |
And you know that your time is over as a leader
link |
when you can't set the standard.
link |
And that's when you have to pass the baton, right?
link |
And Bezos did that.
link |
And Bezos now is saying, you know what?
link |
I'm 57, I'm the richest guy on the planet,
link |
depending on the week.
link |
And I would like to do some other challenges,
link |
but I don't wanna grind it out at Amazon
link |
for another 25 years.
link |
I wanna do other things.
link |
And so he passed the baton.
link |
And that's the healthy thing to do in that regard.
link |
I do think there is a time period
link |
in which you can run that hot.
link |
And then at a certain point you have to then change.
link |
Just like an athlete might go to be a coach, right?
link |
And so being an entrepreneur is brutal.
link |
It's seven days a week, 12 hours a day.
link |
Anybody who says anything differently
link |
is kidding themselves.
link |
You're gonna have to sacrifice.
link |
And this competition, and America has to fight.
link |
If America does not win capitalism, and China does,
link |
it is literally the end of the human species.
link |
It's over for humanity.
link |
Right now, everything has been going really well
link |
in terms of the number of people living in poverty
link |
Lifespans have been rising.
link |
Science is booming.
link |
The economy is booming.
link |
All these things are incredible.
link |
The one thing that's kind of stagnant right now
link |
is the number of people living in democracy
link |
versus under authoritarian rule.
link |
So when you look at all Steve Pinker's charts,
link |
and he's really excited,
link |
there's one you're gonna see that's flat.
link |
And I think we peaked with 53 or 54% of people
link |
on the planet Earth being in a democracy,
link |
and now it's going below 50.
link |
And it's because some of the democratic Western countries
link |
don't have the population growth
link |
of some of the communist and socialist countries
link |
and authoritarian countries.
link |
And we have to make sure that we win capitalism.
link |
We must win economically.
link |
That is the battlefield.
link |
The battlefield is science, technology, and money,
link |
and economy, finance.
link |
That's the battlefield.
link |
China wins, authoritarians win.
link |
And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room
link |
and say, it's time for you to be reeducated.
link |
Or they can put three or four million people,
link |
Uighurs, into prison camps and say, you know what?
link |
This religious thing,
link |
that's counter to what is productive for us.
link |
Therefore, we're gonna shave your heads
link |
and we're going to have you
link |
literally pick cotton in the fields.
link |
They have Uighurs with no sense of any kind of
link |
arc of history in the fields picking cottons
link |
as slaves in what can only be described
link |
by every humanitarian organization as a concentration camp.
link |
And every Jewish person I know takes great offense
link |
when somebody uses the Holocaust as a metaphor,
link |
except in the case of the Uighurs right now.
link |
And every Jewish person I've talked to has said to me,
link |
that is a Holocaust.
link |
That is millions of people going to genocide
link |
because of their religious beliefs.
link |
And I'm an atheist,
link |
but if people wanna believe a certain religion, fine.
link |
But China's approach is we need to win capitalism so bad,
link |
we need to win on the global stage so bad,
link |
we can't have any of this religious stuff going on here.
link |
That is a distraction from winning and beating America.
link |
And then in America,
link |
the people who are gonna make us win are the entrepreneurs
link |
and the scientists and the technology
link |
and our education system and finance.
link |
And we're vilifying those things.
link |
It's dark, but I still believe that the vilification
link |
is just in the space of Twitter and the space of ideas.
link |
I think that's probably a good.
link |
And entrepreneurs win out in the end.
link |
They don't listen to that.
link |
I believe we'll win.
link |
And they'll build, we'll get the rocks up.
link |
Some of them do actually in their darkest moments,
link |
I can tell you that they turn off their Twitter accounts
link |
and they, I've had to sit down
link |
with a number of entrepreneurs and say, turn off Twitter.
link |
This is not healthy for you.
link |
This is not a healthy pursuit because,
link |
don't read the comments.
link |
If you do, it's like a full contact sport.
link |
You should just take it as like professional wrestling
link |
or something, but stay focused on building companies
link |
and advancing the human species
link |
through science and technology.
link |
As you're describing, you've hosted this week in startups
link |
for how many episodes?
link |
11 years, almost 1200 now.
link |
So you've talked to some of the great leaders
link |
in business in general.
link |
Is there a common thing that you see or?
link |
Really, I'm in a relationship with their parents.
link |
Like just find me a great entrepreneur.
link |
I will, show me the trauma.
link |
Their dad was like, you're not good enough.
link |
In the teenage years, is that truly, is there something?
link |
There is definitely something.
link |
Hardship at some point in their life kind of thing?
link |
I mean, and there's definitely something
link |
with immigrant parents that is a bit of a stereotype
link |
out here, but I've heard from many investors,
link |
like that's like their, oh, were your parents immigrants?
link |
And did they beat into you that you have to succeed
link |
and you feel the need to succeed
link |
because they suffered to get you to this country?
link |
Like there is an archetype there that I hear.
link |
When I started investing, I heard from a lot of people.
link |
It's like, yeah, you wanna find those immigrant founders
link |
who are coming out of Stanford
link |
because they had to fight to get there
link |
and their parents had to fight, right?
link |
So it was like two huge fights and there's so much at stake
link |
as opposed to somebody who's fifth generation
link |
and like had everything handed to them
link |
and they were legacy and got into schools for free.
link |
But I think in general, the ability to get people
link |
to join you on that journey is so critical.
link |
So you have to be charismatic
link |
and it doesn't mean like you're an extrovert.
link |
There are introverts who are super charismatic
link |
and there are soft spoken people.
link |
They don't have to be like super vivacious
link |
or rambunctious people.
link |
They could be just quiet assassins,
link |
but you need to be able to get people
link |
to come on the journey with you.
link |
You have to be that storyteller
link |
and you have to have that passion
link |
and then you have to transfer that enthusiasm to investors,
link |
the press, to customers, to all the stakeholders.
link |
And if you're enthusiastic about it and you're engaged,
link |
then it's easier for people to come on that journey.
link |
And that's why people really start to think about,
link |
well, what is the purpose of what I'm doing?
link |
And it sounds corny and when I first heard that,
link |
I was like, it's kind of corny.
link |
But then I read this book by,
link |
I've got his name, Rick something.
link |
He wrote the purpose driven church
link |
and he had spoken at a TED or something
link |
and everybody went crazy about it.
link |
And he's like, a church should have one purpose,
link |
one single thing they do.
link |
And like his church,
link |
which was like one of these mega churches in San Diego,
link |
just wanted to do education for this specific country.
link |
And that's all they did.
link |
And they just, they benchmarked.
link |
I think it's very important to have a purpose and a mission,
link |
not everything, but a specific purpose of some kind of joy
link |
that you wanna put into the world.
link |
You wanna solve some kind of big, hard problem.
link |
And then everybody knows
link |
why you're coming to work every day.
link |
And then for the founder,
link |
when you dread going to work that day
link |
and you don't feel like solving that problem anymore,
link |
And a lot of times I meet young founders,
link |
I'm like, why are you doing this?
link |
And they're like, well, I was looking for an idea
link |
and this is the one I came up with
link |
because I think I'll make a lot of money.
link |
And it's like, you're gonna quit.
link |
You're gonna get to month nine or 10 of this
link |
and you're gonna run out of money
link |
or like your CTO is gonna quit,
link |
then your CFO is gonna quit
link |
and you're gonna lose your biggest customer
link |
and you're just gonna say, this is not worth it.
link |
And if using Bezos or Elon as examples,
link |
they just needed to see the world change
link |
in very specific ways.
link |
And Steve Jobs, they needed to see a change
link |
and it doesn't matter if they made money
link |
or they were losing or winning,
link |
they just went to work every day and they had to change it.
link |
It's almost like they didn't have a choice.
link |
Elon makes it sound like his torture, his whole journey,
link |
but he can't help it.
link |
Having been a witness to it, just as friends for that long,
link |
I have never seen an entrepreneur suffer more than him.
link |
And he's been public about that, like you do not wanna be me.
link |
He has suffered for those companies.
link |
He has suffered to get them where they are.
link |
It has not been easy.
link |
Can you second analyze Elon in that aspect?
link |
Like, is it just he can't help it?
link |
He must see the change that he hopes for in the world.
link |
He's just incredibly hardworking
link |
and he's very talented as well.
link |
I don't think people understand that.
link |
He actually is a really brilliant man.
link |
He actually is a really brilliant engineer.
link |
At the end of the day, he actually knows what he's doing
link |
and he asked the right questions.
link |
I mean, people were kind of aghast
link |
that he was asking Vlad such good questions.
link |
And they're like, oh my God,
link |
Elon's the best journalist on the planet.
link |
And it was like, anybody who knows Elon knows
link |
he has great questions.
link |
I mean, I used to have dinner in LA
link |
and my book agent also was Sam Harris's agent.
link |
And Sam and I met through John Brockman
link |
and we became friends because we lived near each other
link |
and I was friends with Elon.
link |
And then I used to invite them to both dinner in Brentwood
link |
because one lived in Bel Air,
link |
one lived in Santa Monica and I lived in Brentwood.
link |
And we would go to this place,
link |
Popone, this Italian restaurant.
link |
And every Tuesday for years, we would just,
link |
the three of us, every other Tuesday or so,
link |
we'd have dinner and I'd sit there
link |
and Sam wanted to know about AI
link |
and Elon's talking about artificial intelligence
link |
because he's on the board of DeepMind.
link |
Elon wanted to know about atheism and meditation
link |
and all this other stuff that Sam was an expert on.
link |
I got to sit there and just listen to these two guys talk.
link |
And they have both piercing intelligences,
link |
but Elon, he goes straight to the gut,
link |
like the questions that no engineer wants to hear
link |
is just the basic stuff that,
link |
it's like, why the hell are you doing it this way
link |
when the obvious solution is much easier or this or that?
link |
Why haven't you tried this?
link |
He can figure things out.
link |
I mean, he's a problem solver.
link |
I mean, and that's another thing,
link |
like I think the great entrepreneurs
link |
can look at a problem with very fresh eyes,
link |
like almost consistently.
link |
And Bezos described that as day one thinking, right?
link |
Like just pretend this is day one every day.
link |
And then other people use the term first principles,
link |
but it basically means like when you see a problem,
link |
pause for a second and really think through
link |
what is the best possible solution here?
link |
What are some alternative solutions and get from everybody,
link |
like how do we solve this problem?
link |
What people do sometimes they get in a rut.
link |
They just come to work and they just go through their email.
link |
They do whatever they did the day before.
link |
They don't think, why are we doing this?
link |
And is there a better way to do it?
link |
Now you can get so obsessive about that
link |
that you can over engineer stuff
link |
and you can never actually ship a product.
link |
So there have to be some pragmatism and some goals
link |
and some dates associated with that.
link |
But it is a very cool thing to really think like,
link |
I wonder if we actually made the batteries ourselves,
link |
what that would look like.
link |
Or I wonder if we could get to two day shipping,
link |
or what if we do same day shipping?
link |
Like you need to have somebody who's willing to say,
link |
you know what, fuck it.
link |
Let's set a crazy audacious goal.
link |
Two day shipping of any product
link |
anywhere in the United States.
link |
And once you throw the gauntlet down like that,
link |
now everybody knows they're rolling in the right direction.
link |
Two day shipping, Amazon Prime.
link |
And that's what people didn't realize about Amazon.
link |
The business wasn't shipping all those products.
link |
It was getting you to sign up for Amazon Prime.
link |
They have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime
link |
for 10 bucks a month.
link |
I think globally it's probably cheaper.
link |
But that was the driver of that business
link |
was all of those people.
link |
Cause they would, you're an Amazon Prime subscriber?
link |
Do you know how much you pay?
link |
It started at $50.
link |
And I think they even had like 40, 50, $60
link |
was like the testing in the early days.
link |
And now it's, I think $149, 12, $13 a month.
link |
If you pay for the year,
link |
I think it goes down to 10 bucks a month, 120.
link |
And you're like, wow.
link |
And it's like, yeah, you're paying $13 a month
link |
for the privilege of shopping at Amazon.
link |
But you say it's the greatest thing in the world
link |
because anything I need,
link |
if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad
link |
or a camera goes bad, you get it here within a day or less.
link |
It's pretty amazing.
link |
You've already been dropping bombs,
link |
incredible advice on startups in general.
link |
But let me maybe go straight in and ask,
link |
is there advice for somebody that wants to go big
link |
to build the big startup to help them succeed?
link |
Yeah, it's very similar to the advice I give to investors
link |
because now I teach angel investing
link |
because there's so many people who want to invest.
link |
And so I wrote a book on that angel
link |
and then I do a course called Angel University
link |
that I teach six times a year.
link |
And then I have a syndicate called thesyndicate.com
link |
where I invest in companies.
link |
There's 6,500 people who are members of that.
link |
It's the largest syndicate in the world.
link |
In fact, the first deal we ever did was calm.com,
link |
the meditation app.
link |
We put $378,000 into it
link |
when it was a $5 million product.
link |
A $5 million company.
link |
So we bought six or 7% of the company.
link |
It's now worth 2 billion.
link |
So you can do the math on that.
link |
What year was that?
link |
So probably seven, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014.
link |
And nobody else would invest in calm.
link |
But Sam Harris was the reason I did because I asked Sam,
link |
tell me about meditation.
link |
And he's explaining it to me.
link |
And I said, what about this?
link |
You have to have like a mantra.
link |
How does it work exactly?
link |
He was like, well, you know, you should just go to UCLA
link |
and talk to Diana Winston.
link |
And like, there's this whole project there.
link |
And I'm like, UCLA does meditation?
link |
He's like, yeah, there's a mindful institute.
link |
They're like teaching people to be Tahitian meditation.
link |
And they're doing PTSD and I'm doing brain scans.
link |
And I was like, oh.
link |
And then I talked to the UCLA people and they're like,
link |
it's real, yeah, like we taught Phil Jackson
link |
and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O Neal did,
link |
you know, that's how they won their championships.
link |
And I was like, hmm, if UCLA is doing it,
link |
Sam says it's cool.
link |
Well, fuck it, I'll put money into that.
link |
And that's the second biggest investment
link |
in my career after Uber.
link |
And it will in all likelihood become the biggest.
link |
I mean, it's between Uber, Robinhood and Calm.
link |
And long story short,
link |
when I'm teaching people to angel invest,
link |
there's really two things that you cannot fake.
link |
One is a product that is built really well.
link |
So if you look at Calm, Robinhood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon,
link |
these products are transcendent.
link |
They're well constructed.
link |
There's craftsmanship to them.
link |
They're great products.
link |
So you're saying not fundamentally like the idea,
link |
but the execution of the actual craftsmanship
link |
of the construction.
link |
The actual product is amazing.
link |
Then there's customers.
link |
And that every business has ultimately a customer.
link |
And that customer, if they are in fact delighted
link |
by that product, that's the magic.
link |
Because you need a team to build the product.
link |
And then you need customers to use the product.
link |
And really those three vectors are undeniable.
link |
Now, you can have great teams that build a bad product,
link |
doesn't happen too often.
link |
Or you can have customers who don't like the product,
link |
but generally speaking,
link |
a great team will build a great product
link |
or a good product that iterate,
link |
and then eventually delight customers.
link |
And so most people say the team is the most important,
link |
but there's a lot of smart people out there.
link |
And let's assume that you can raise money for your idea,
link |
or you have money,
link |
or you can just convince people to do it for free.
link |
If you make a great product and it connects with users,
link |
You look at Clubhouse,
link |
it's actually a really well designed product.
link |
And that product is connecting with customers.
link |
And if you were to talk to the customers
link |
or look at the product,
link |
you would see a well constructed product
link |
and a delighted customer.
link |
And you can tell the delighted customer
link |
by just the amount of time they use it.
link |
That's called engagement.
link |
It's the fancy word for how much they use it.
link |
And Snapchat, when that was going around
link |
and they were trying to raise money,
link |
they had a fraction of the number of users,
link |
but the top maybe third were opening the app every hour.
link |
And nobody had ever seen that before.
link |
People were using Facebook a couple of times a day,
link |
but nobody had ever seen people using it every day
link |
for a hundred days in a row, every hour.
link |
And I was like, what's going on here?
link |
It's like, oh, the ephemeral messaging,
link |
and then the streaks.
link |
They had created these streaks between people
link |
where every day and then people would be like on vacation,
link |
like, I just have to open my streak
link |
and keep my streak with Lex
link |
that we chatted every day going.
link |
And so they had this like addictive nature to it.
link |
And that's why Clubhouse was able
link |
to garner so much investment
link |
is the number of hours people were using it every month
link |
was just unbelievably off the charts.
link |
Some of that is execution,
link |
but some of it is the weird magic of the...
link |
Product market fit.
link |
Yeah, so there's something, I mean, Clubhouse,
link |
there's a, it's still a mystery to me
link |
because I also use Discord voice.
link |
There's an intimacy to voice.
link |
Well, you have people's, yeah, tent.
link |
It's, well, but like the video gets in the way actually,
link |
There's a privacy when you just use voice.
link |
People are not taking showers now, Lex.
link |
I mean, we're in a pandemic and people just roll out of bed.
link |
And the hair thing, nobody's getting haircuts.
link |
Nobody's hair is good, nobody's getting haircuts.
link |
People are wearing gym clothes.
link |
I mean, Zoom is just horrific to be on Zoom
link |
for five hours a day.
link |
Well, it does make me wonder what,
link |
once we emerge from the pandemic,
link |
whether a product market fit,
link |
how that evolves with Clubhouse
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
Yeah, I know Clubhouse is a beneficiary
link |
of the pandemic for sure.
link |
When do you think the pandemic,
link |
when do you think deaths will be under,
link |
let's say 200 a day and we'll have 200 million people
link |
on the other side of this?
link |
Because that's kind of what it takes, right?
link |
You gotta get to 150, 200 million people
link |
on the other side in America?
link |
I haven't, you know,
link |
I personally stopped deeply thinking about this
link |
because I've been frustrated for so long that.
link |
I almost checked out
link |
because it psychologically allows me to carry on
link |
because I thought for many months now
link |
that testing needs to be done at scale.
link |
And it still hasn't gotten done.
link |
It's so ridiculous.
link |
We gave up basically on testing.
link |
Because we're, and we're all sitting there
link |
waiting for vaccine to come along.
link |
And the distribution of the vaccine is not, you know,
link |
it's struggling from the same kind of things
link |
It's gonna take quite a bit of time.
link |
So it does, if everything goes great,
link |
meaning there's not a second strand of the virus
link |
that's going to create a second major wave
link |
that I am cynical enough to think
link |
that it won't be until mid summer
link |
that we start opening back up.
link |
Yeah, I think it's gonna be May, June.
link |
I'm a little bit earlier than you.
link |
I've been tracking it.
link |
There are 1.5 million shots in arms a day.
link |
I think this vaccine's been undersold.
link |
I mean, it's a miracle.
link |
Not one person who was in the trials died, who took it,
link |
and only one went to the hospital
link |
and they weren't even put on a ventilator.
link |
So, and the hospitalizations are plummeting
link |
and we're at 10% now in the United States.
link |
At the pace, we're going at 1.5 a day.
link |
I think when the Johnson & Johnson one comes out next month,
link |
it'll be 3 million a day maybe, two and a half.
link |
And we already have 100 million people
link |
who've likely had it.
link |
So I've been doing the math.
link |
I think we're like 60 days away, February, March.
link |
Yeah, sometime in April, I think.
link |
Anybody's gonna be able to get a shot
link |
and the number of deaths is gonna go below 200 a day.
link |
And once that happens,
link |
I think people have had enough of this.
link |
They're just gonna go YOLO.
link |
But see, the crucial piece for me
link |
that I've been focusing on is the social media aspect
link |
of how the, it's not just about the reality of deaths.
link |
It's about the state of the collective intelligence
link |
of the human species,
link |
which is determined by our communication on social media.
link |
So yeah, we can be collectively afraid,
link |
the fear can spread, or it could be YOLO can spread,
link |
or it could be like all different kinds of misinformation.
link |
And of course, during the election year,
link |
the politics influences our perception of what is true
link |
and not, but having real rigorous nuanced conversation
link |
about this kind of stuff is the way out of this.
link |
And that's where social media really comes in
link |
because social media drives division,
link |
where people form tribes and so on.
link |
And it feels like it's honestly a technology problem.
link |
People say it's a human problem,
link |
but it just feels like, I believe humans are good.
link |
Technology can enable them to be thoughtful.
link |
We talked earlier about the magic of Silicon Valley
link |
and then maybe going too far
link |
with the Facebook groups example,
link |
where you take out all that friction.
link |
What happened was we used to have something called Rchron,
link |
reverse chronological order.
link |
That's how you consume to feed.
link |
So any kind of social feed,
link |
like Twitter was in reverse chronological order.
link |
The newest thing was up top
link |
and you would just work your way backwards.
link |
And so it gave this like really fresh feeling.
link |
And then a guy named Dave Moran
link |
and the team over at Facebook realized,
link |
you know, there are some things
link |
that got a lot of attention two hours ago.
link |
And the stuff since then has not been as important.
link |
But if you miss that, there was a really good tweet
link |
where there was a really good update.
link |
Like somebody had a baby.
link |
Can we get the baby one at the top?
link |
And it was like, well, how would we do that?
link |
How would we know that that's the important one?
link |
It's like, well, let's put a like button on it
link |
and let's see how many comments there are.
link |
So if it gets a lot of likes or comments or retweets,
link |
let's show those first
link |
and then we'll kind of mix in the most recent stuff.
link |
And so when you're on Twitter,
link |
and then when Facebook did that,
link |
Facebook became so addicting
link |
because Facebook was on,
link |
what has got the most engagement?
link |
So every time you opened up Facebook,
link |
you get the dopamine hit.
link |
And then what happens when you see the Bar Mitzvah photo
link |
or, you know, the enraging story
link |
about some injustice in the world?
link |
You retweet it, you write a comment,
link |
you share it on your wall.
link |
And thus this addiction to the outrageous,
link |
the outlandish, the inspiring occurred.
link |
And it used to be like inspiring stuff,
link |
puppies or some heartwarming story.
link |
And then it got dark.
link |
And then people started to realize,
link |
if I wanna show up on the top of my friend's feeds,
link |
if I say something controversial or I'm outraged,
link |
And then that's when outrage culture came in.
link |
And then that's when cancel culture came in.
link |
Everybody started to realize,
link |
if I try to cancel that person for being a racist
link |
or a sexist or a horrible human being
link |
or whatever they did that's wrong,
link |
I get to the top of the feed.
link |
And we all collectively started playing
link |
a very weird video game,
link |
which is how outraged can we all be?
link |
And to get to the top of the list.
link |
And then of course, with Trump, he realized it.
link |
And he's like, okay, yeah,
link |
I'm just gonna make fun of a celebrity
link |
and I get more retweets.
link |
Okay, I'm gonna make fun of Rosie O'Donnell
link |
for being overweight or something.
link |
And he just starts attacking people.
link |
And people are like, oh my God, what did he say?
link |
And he copied that from Howard Stern.
link |
Cause he was in New York and he used to be on Howard Stern.
link |
Howard Stern took over all the dialogue
link |
in the eighties and nineties because he was outrageous.
link |
And then Trump did that.
link |
And then social media incorporated that
link |
into the operating system.
link |
It became the actual device of social media
link |
was the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
link |
We've got something incredible for you.
link |
Everybody salivates like Pavlov's dog.
link |
Oh my God, I can be outraged.
link |
That's what's gotta be undone.
link |
And the only way for that to be undone
link |
is these things can't be billions of people
link |
where the most outrageous thing
link |
that happened in the world today
link |
in the last five minutes is now in front of you.
link |
And that's why people have anxiety.
link |
They don't sleep and they doom scroll all night.
link |
It's because the human mind was not meant to process
link |
this much suffering, pain, anger.
link |
And that's why we have all this mental health issues.
link |
Also, young girls or even adults watching other people
link |
post their private jets and their vacations
link |
and YOLO adventures on their Instagram
link |
to the point at which young people are now faking
link |
being on private jets to put on their Instagram
link |
and creating this crazy FOMO around their Instagrams.
link |
We wonder why people are unhappy.
link |
If you think everybody's on a private jet
link |
going to some Michelin star restaurant
link |
or whatever the coolest thing in the world is today,
link |
going to the Grammys, going to whatever,
link |
Coachella, Burning Man.
link |
You're like, ah, but I'm home.
link |
I'm in my house and I'm not at Burning Man.
link |
Getting inadequate.
link |
So this whole system is creating
link |
the wrong set of incentives.
link |
I tend to believe it's possible
link |
to still have extremely high engagement
link |
and create a successful profitable business
link |
while encouraging personal growth,
link |
like encouraging people to be the best version of themselves.
link |
I just think we haven't,
link |
we got the first generation of social networks.
link |
I think a new generation needs to be built.
link |
Is that your plan for a business?
link |
Well, I have a longer term plan in terms of ambition,
link |
which is I believe in being able to have deep connection
link |
between human and AI systems, like partners, friends.
link |
There is a connection to there with social media.
link |
I do think AI has a strong role to play in representing us,
link |
in guiding us in how we consume social media.
link |
So this algorithm that controls the feed for Facebook
link |
is a somewhat centralized algorithm,
link |
but instead to give more power to the people,
link |
individuals to where each one of us have our own algorithm.
link |
Bring your own algorithm.
link |
Bring your own algorithm.
link |
Instead of bringing your own alcohol,
link |
bring your own algorithm.
link |
Well, I mean, if you thought about it,
link |
if we came and said, when I look at my Twitter feed,
link |
I would like to see the people with,
link |
who are the most helpful in the world,
link |
generous, kind, intelligent, considered,
link |
commenting on things that I don't already know about
link |
because I want to open my worldview.
link |
That could be a beautiful thing for society.
link |
And actually Jack was talking about potentially on Twitter,
link |
letting people bring their own algorithms
link |
and sort their feeds themselves.
link |
This would be a wonderful thing.
link |
I think it's one of the reasons Clubhouse has resonated
link |
is it's such a diverse group of people
link |
that I've been able to drop in on conversations
link |
with people who are nothing like me
link |
and listen in and hear conversations
link |
that I wouldn't normally be privy to.
link |
And everybody's like, oh, come join as a speaker.
link |
I want to do a room with you.
link |
I get asked every day, can we do a room?
link |
Ask an angel investor, talk about startups.
link |
And I'm like, my usage of Clubhouse
link |
is going on my Peloton treadmill,
link |
putting Clubhouse on, picking a room and just listening.
link |
It's so delightful for me as a podcaster
link |
where my job is to talk, to sit back
link |
and just put in a couple of miles and play chess
link |
and listen to a Clubhouse discussion
link |
that is about relationships or some fashion or hip hop
link |
or whatever it is that I'm not part of.
link |
I just sit there and I listen and you learn.
link |
It's like such a delightful thing.
link |
I always think about these kids who go to college
link |
and I've always been so jealous of these Ivy League kids.
link |
They go and they're like, oh, I got to go to class.
link |
And I'm like, I would just love to sit there
link |
and listen to Professor Lex talk.
link |
What a privilege to sit there
link |
and let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn.
link |
Yeah, that's the beauty of podcasting.
link |
But of course, Clubhouse creates a whole nother experience
link |
where it's conversations, it's different.
link |
I think it's going to be the in between.
link |
I like it as a, you release your podcast.
link |
Like you and I are going to release this podcast, right?
link |
And then at some point I'll have you on my pod
link |
when you want your startup.
link |
And then at some point somebody is going to be like,
link |
you and I will run into, and I ran into you.
link |
I saw you were on Clubhouse the other night
link |
and I was busy, but I was almost going to click on you
link |
and say, let's start a room together.
link |
But you and I will start a room together
link |
with Eric Weinstein or somebody
link |
or Sam Harris will jump in or Elon
link |
and we'll have a different experience,
link |
which would just shoot the shit.
link |
And it'll act as like a fabric
link |
and a little filler between the tent pole podcasts, right?
link |
Like you and Eric, you've done three, I think, with Eric.
link |
Yeah, it was your four, I haven't released the fourth yet.
link |
Oh, okay, so I watched all three
link |
because I really thought your you way
link |
and him like giving you advice
link |
is very interesting dynamic.
link |
I thought it was very interesting dynamic.
link |
And I find him like a fascinating cat.
link |
We know everybody in common, except we've never met.
link |
It's very weird because you think about the social graph
link |
in the real world.
link |
This is why I think augmented reality
link |
is going to be such an amazing product.
link |
I just have one killer feature I want
link |
for augmented reality, we wear our glasses.
link |
And when I look at you above your head,
link |
I see the relationships we have
link |
and the things we've done together, right?
link |
So I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris
link |
or you had Elon on the podcast on this date
link |
or you and I were both at Burning Man in 2016.
link |
So it's the most meaningful element
link |
of our connection in the network, yeah.
link |
And then, cause we would discover that through small talk,
link |
but imagine you're like at a party and you look
link |
and it just, people glow and you just see a glow
link |
around a person and like green means
link |
you have some financial relationship.
link |
Blue means you have some friendship one
link |
or yellow means you have friendship one.
link |
Blue means you know nothing about each other.
link |
You have no connections.
link |
You're like, wow, these blue people have no connection to.
link |
These people, that one's glowing red.
link |
We know seven or more people in common.
link |
And those are the seven people.
link |
Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other.
link |
That could, and that sort of happened with Facebook member
link |
or MySpace where you were like, oh, you know that person,
link |
friend of a friend.
link |
But that's what is going to be AR is like,
link |
this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat
link |
and they just have those glasses, you know,
link |
forget about VR, it's just nauseating and whatever,
link |
but AR where you put the glasses on,
link |
you see the real world, but you augment it.
link |
You make a, just like you were saying,
link |
you make a frictionless, a very low friction
link |
to make a deep human connection
link |
because you have all the basic elements there already.
link |
Now think about the unintended consequences
link |
of what I just described.
link |
It could get creepy and weird.
link |
The privacy thing.
link |
I mean, people will, here's the thing,
link |
people, your privacy is an illusion.
link |
Like all this information is there.
link |
And then people are more than willing to give up privacy
link |
in exchange for some value, you know, it's a value trade.
link |
And giving, if my Tesla,
link |
when I'm driving in the direction of my house,
link |
just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks
link |
and that friction's gone,
link |
I'm willing to give Tesla my location
link |
and my home address, right?
link |
I'm not willing to give Zuckerberg anything
link |
because I don't trust him, but you get the idea.
link |
I mean, it will be that way with like DNA and other things
link |
at some point we'll just be like, yeah, just take my DNA.
link |
Like I don't, yeah, sure.
link |
People can look and see that I'm a mental midget
link |
and my IQ is like lower than,
link |
I don't want to bring the bell curve up or whatever,
link |
but you could figure out,
link |
like if we all put our DNA in a sequence online
link |
and be like, oh yeah, you know, Lex has got 10 more IQ points
link |
than Jcal and, you know, Sam's got 10 more than Lex.
link |
And all of a sudden people are like all bed out of shape
link |
about it, but what if they, we did that?
link |
And they were like, and by the way, you also,
link |
all three of you are going to get Parkinson's
link |
unless you do X, Y, and Z,
link |
unless you eat more blueberries or whatever we figure out.
link |
They're going to accept it pretty quickly.
link |
Yeah, that's brave new world.
link |
I have to ask you, you're, just like you were saying,
link |
you're one of the world experts in investing
link |
and in startups, yeah, VC and so on.
link |
From the perspective of the startup,
link |
I was always kind of skeptical of raising money.
link |
It feels like people do it too quickly, too easily,
link |
but I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
link |
When is the, when should a startup raise money?
link |
And from the perspective of the investor,
link |
when should the investor invest in a startup?
link |
Like, is there a timing thing here?
link |
Is there a, what, yeah, what?
link |
It's a very important question
link |
because the venture capital community
link |
is only going to fund, you know, sub 1% of enterprises
link |
started in the United States every year,
link |
like maybe 10 basis points of them, like one in a thousand.
link |
And the reason is it's jet fuel.
link |
You only want to take that money
link |
if you really want to build something big
link |
and you want to build it fast.
link |
And when you put jet fuel behind a startup,
link |
as we've seen with other rockets,
link |
things can blow up and people can die.
link |
You know, it's not people literally dying,
link |
but the business can go up in smoke, right?
link |
Like rockets get blown up all the time at SpaceX
link |
as part of their ambitious plans.
link |
And startups, seven out of 10 startups we invest in,
link |
Now, if you were to start the business
link |
and only build it off customer revenue
link |
and use your own money and go nice and slow
link |
and grow 10% a year,
link |
the chances of you blowing up the rocket are very low
link |
because you're riding a bicycle.
link |
You can go a little faster,
link |
but the bicycle can only go so fast.
link |
And once you start taking that money,
link |
the way venture capital is constructed
link |
as in the mix of like MIT or Harvard's endowments is,
link |
you know, we're going to put some money into safe things
link |
and then we're going to have
link |
these really binary things over here.
link |
And they probably put 5% in venture capital traditionally.
link |
It's grown to 20% just as a function
link |
of how successful it's been.
link |
So, you know, the Harvards of the world and MIT
link |
is probably want five or 10% in venture,
link |
but it's grown to 25% because, you know,
link |
companies like Airbnb and Uber have grown so big and Tesla.
link |
But the goal is in these venture funds,
link |
we're going to invest in 30 names
link |
and one or two of them are going to return three times
link |
the capital we've deployed.
link |
So it's a $300 million fund and there's 30 names
link |
and they each got 10 million.
link |
That means one of the 10 million
link |
is going to return the fund plus.
link |
So that means it has to grow 30X and then 60X
link |
to double the fund.
link |
And you're really supposed to be doing
link |
three times cash on cash.
link |
So that $300 million funds,
link |
the expectation is in 10 years to return 900 million,
link |
triple the person's money as opposed to the stock market,
link |
which doubles your money in the same period.
link |
So you're supposed to do 25% annualized returns
link |
in order to triple the money.
link |
And maybe I have an outlying chance
link |
of four or five times the money,
link |
which does happen sometimes when you have an outlier
link |
in your portfolio like Uber or Facebook was.
link |
And what that means is the venture capitalist behavior
link |
in the game they're playing is different
link |
than you as the founder.
link |
You as the founder, you may really care about this
link |
and it dying really matters to you.
link |
And then you got a venture capitalist who's like,
link |
we're betting on 30 names,
link |
we need two of them to hit it out of the park, maybe three,
link |
and nothing else is meaningful.
link |
So now you start thinking about the game theory there.
link |
You're dealing with money that is coming in
link |
that only cares about you going 100X.
link |
It's a whole different ball game.
link |
Whereas if you build off revenue, you don't have to do that.
link |
And if you look at a company like com.com,
link |
we invested at 5 million, the next round they did was 250.
link |
They were so capital efficient
link |
that they grew from $10,000 a month in revenue
link |
to millions of dollars a month in revenue
link |
over those four years since we invested
link |
and they didn't raise money in between.
link |
It was unbelievable.
link |
And I've only seen this happen three or four times.
link |
So it doesn't happen all this capital efficient meaning
link |
based on customer revenue alone
link |
plus some small amount of fundraising, you're able to go.
link |
Like how hard is it to do that?
link |
It takes extreme product market fit.
link |
You have to have a great price for your product
link |
that has a great margin.
link |
Yeah, and if you're doing something in hardware,
link |
it's probably impossible
link |
because it's super capital intensive.
link |
So it's probably gotta be a software business.
link |
Hardware businesses take a lot more.
link |
Do venture capitals get in the way at all of the business
link |
or is it possible to get out of the way?
link |
Yeah, if you get young venture capitalists
link |
who are starting their career,
link |
they're very nervous and scared
link |
because they're putting all these bets.
link |
And then there's a very weird thing that happens.
link |
The bad news comes first.
link |
So companies that don't work out
link |
go out of business immediately.
link |
So if it's not gonna be Com or Robinhood or Uber,
link |
you know you have one of those great successes
link |
somewhere in your five, six, seven, eight as an investor.
link |
What is the first five years like?
link |
First five years, you feel like an idiot.
link |
Let's say you make these 10 bets.
link |
In year two, two or three of them come back
link |
and they don't have product market fit
link |
and they're out of money.
link |
And they say, can we have more money?
link |
You say, no, we have to go get it from somebody else
link |
because you have to prove
link |
that there's still a market for it.
link |
We may keep our pro rata.
link |
We may put a little bit in
link |
to maintain our percentage ownership,
link |
but we're not going to give you another big chunk of money.
link |
And that company dies.
link |
So now you've got 10 million, poof, up in smoke.
link |
Boom, 10 million up in smoke.
link |
So this is called the J curve
link |
where your performance goes down.
link |
And then it's only in years four or five and six
link |
it starts going up.
link |
And what you're seeing right now is the people
link |
who started like I did in 2000,
link |
you know, just 11, 12 years ago.
link |
In 2009, I started investing.
link |
We all look like geniuses.
link |
We're at the end of the cycle.
link |
We invested after when the stock market was on the floor
link |
after the financial crisis.
link |
And it's gone straight up since.
link |
So everybody looked,
link |
there's a couple of little blips in there,
link |
but generally speaking,
link |
there hasn't been like a major crash
link |
with the exception of the pandemic crash,
link |
but that bounced right back.
link |
And so, you know, it takes a decade to figure out
link |
if you're good at it.
link |
And then if the market crashes again,
link |
everybody feels like an idiot again,
link |
the cycle starts again.
link |
So you are now as a founder,
link |
you are now inserting yourself into that casino.
link |
And now you've got all these other forces
link |
pushing and pulling.
link |
And you're growing,
link |
let's say your company was growing 50%.
link |
You feel like, wow, I'm successful.
link |
I made a million dollars last year.
link |
Now I'm doing a million and a half.
link |
And the first thing a VC is gonna say to you is,
link |
We're growing too slow.
link |
See, but that's, like you said,
link |
that beautifully is a rocket fuel.
link |
It's, in a sense, it's a kind of motivation.
link |
I mean, it's a positive.
link |
So if you want that.
link |
Yes, if you want that.
link |
if you want to go to Navy SEAL school,
link |
you're gonna be in pain
link |
and they're gonna put that hose in your face
link |
while you're underwater
link |
with your hands tied behind your back in the pool
link |
and you're gonna be choking.
link |
And they may have to do CPR on you.
link |
And like every couple of years, tragically,
link |
somebody dies in Navy SEAL school.
link |
Does it mean we're getting rid of the Navy SEALs?
link |
Brock, if he dies, he dies.
link |
I don't know if you know David Goggins
link |
I mean, I don't know him personally,
link |
So I'm running 48 miles together with him in person
link |
What, you're doing an ultra marathon?
link |
With him and probably other stuff
link |
because he enjoys just breaking people,
link |
Oh my God, I'm so jelly.
link |
So no, well, I offered,
link |
we agreed a while ago to do a podcast
link |
and he's like, oh yeah, come, we'll do it this day.
link |
Is he in the Bay Area?
link |
I don't know where the hell he is,
link |
but we're doing it.
link |
And I don't think I'm supposed to say where it is,
link |
but it's not anywhere close to anywhere of this.
link |
It's in the middle of nowhere.
link |
But he seems to be in a bunch of different locations.
link |
Like he's in Oregon or something like that.
link |
What does he do for outside of writing books
link |
and being inspirational?
link |
Does he actually train people or like?
link |
No, he's just, he's a full time insane.
link |
Like he fights forest fires like for a few months a year
link |
as a farmer, like unpaid labor.
link |
Like he, you know, there's a bunch of people
link |
who are like him, like Navy Seals and so on
link |
that kind of make a career,
link |
automotivational speak and all that kind of stuff.
link |
He's not interested in any of that.
link |
He's literally interested in just doing hard shit
link |
Breaking himself personally.
link |
He seems like he wants to break himself.
link |
And that book is amazing.
link |
And the audio book's amazing
link |
when he's talking about how fat he was
link |
and how he just had to go and keep running
link |
and his like legs are broken and he's just super pain
link |
and he just goes through it.
link |
It's really inspiring.
link |
Inspiring thing also.
link |
You could have videotaped yourself doing this.
link |
I can't wait to see you get destroyed.
link |
This is gonna be so entertaining for the lax audience.
link |
But the other inspiring thing is he's happily married
link |
and there's a partnership there that's, you know,
link |
everybody finds this attention as a push and pull
link |
that's beautiful, I think.
link |
But in speaking of a beautiful push and pull,
link |
how about that transition?
link |
You and Chamath on, he's a friend of yours.
link |
Besties. Besties, yeah.
link |
Yeah, good friend.
link |
I mean, there's very few people in my life,
link |
him, Elon, David Sachs, John Brockmans.
link |
Very few people have supported me as much as those folks.
link |
I mean, I'm a huge debt.
link |
So he's also cohost on the All In podcast.
link |
We taped episode 21 today.
link |
Yeah, every Friday now.
link |
They wanna do every Friday.
link |
They're addicted like me and you are to podcasts.
link |
So you're going to release it when?
link |
It's probably released as we're sitting here.
link |
Special guest on it.
link |
We had Draymond Green from the Warriors phone in.
link |
So we had our first guest.
link |
Yeah, so it's really funny
link |
because he plays poker with us and we're all besties, so.
link |
So you guys went pretty heated against each other
link |
versus on Robin Hood.
link |
There's just two things I wanna ask.
link |
First, on the actual Robin Hood discussion
link |
and the Wall Street Best discussion,
link |
can you steel man his argument?
link |
What was the nature of the disagreement?
link |
Where, yeah, what is the little,
link |
because I don't think it's as big as spaces
link |
it came off as sounding.
link |
What is the nature of the disagreement?
link |
He felt that Robin Hood turned off trading
link |
because the hedge funds told them to
link |
and that they were bowing down
link |
to the pressure of the hedge funds.
link |
That's not true, but in a vacuum of information,
link |
you know what happens to people's minds,
link |
conspiracy theories abound.
link |
And sometimes there is a conspiracy theory
link |
and sometimes there's just the appearance of impropriety
link |
or a bunch of related things.
link |
Like when you look at the Trump situation with Russia,
link |
like was Trump trying to coordinate with Russia
link |
or the Russians just screwing with a bunch of like neophyte
link |
idiotic dipshits like Donald Trump Jr.
link |
who don't know any better.
link |
And they don't know that you shouldn't meet with the Russians
link |
and if you do meet with the Russians,
link |
you are probably a useful idiot.
link |
You probably should tell the FBI.
link |
Like they're just a bunch of idiots in all likelihood,
link |
And there's a vacuum of information.
link |
And there's a vacuum of information, we don't know.
link |
And the Russians are trying to compromise everybody.
link |
So would you call it a conspiracy
link |
or would you call it an attempted conspiracy?
link |
There was no conspiracy here.
link |
What it was was Robin Hood needed to raise billions
link |
of dollars to say solvent in all likelihood.
link |
And they weren't allowed to talk about it.
link |
So they were forced into not talking about it
link |
in all likelihood and had to come up with that money
link |
And then what got me upset with Chamath
link |
and we had a talk afterwards that people don't know about,
link |
I'll talk about it here for the first time.
link |
On Sunday, we had to have a little, we had to air it out.
link |
Yeah, in the episode after you guys sound like
link |
you've had a private, you've made up.
link |
We had a private discussion, just one on one.
link |
And we said, listen, we love each other, we're besties.
link |
We've always been there for each other.
link |
What happened here?
link |
And what happened there is I'm fiercely loyal to my folks,
link |
whether it's Chamath or Travis from Uber or Saks or whoever.
link |
I'm just a loyal guy.
link |
And I'm always ride or die with my founders.
link |
If I invest in them, even if they make a mistake
link |
and Uber made plenty of mistakes,
link |
I always went on CNBC, on my podcast and said,
link |
hey, we're gonna fix these things.
link |
I'm in touch with the team.
link |
Mistakes were made, we're gonna solve them.
link |
This is a group of people with great intent
link |
who want to make the world a better place.
link |
And you know what?
link |
I was hated for a period of time with Uber.
link |
I was hated for it last week with Robinhood.
link |
I got a lot of blowback.
link |
But I think in both of those cases, eventually I was right.
link |
Uber is doing great stuff in the world.
link |
Robinhood is doing great stuff in the world.
link |
And I like to be loyal to my investments
link |
and my partners to just,
link |
I feel like if you invest and you're on the team,
link |
you have really three choices.
link |
You either fight for your team, you can go silent,
link |
or you can throw your team under the bus.
link |
And I've watched investors throw the team
link |
that they invested in that made them a bunch of money
link |
under the bus, not acceptable to me.
link |
And being quiet's not acceptable to me.
link |
So I always ask the founder, do you want me to,
link |
is it okay if I go out and defend you publicly?
link |
If they say yes, I do it.
link |
That's beautiful, by the way,
link |
because what else do we have in this world
link |
if not friendship?
link |
Loyalty means everything to me.
link |
I grew up in Brooklyn where if you were not loyal
link |
and you were not loyal to your crew,
link |
then you were a Ronin.
link |
You were out there on your own flailing in the,
link |
trust me, you do not want to be on your own
link |
in 1970s, 80s, Brooklyn, Manhattan.
link |
You need to have a crew with you.
link |
I've gotten into, you don't want to get into a fight
link |
with 10 guys and be alone or just be with,
link |
you need a crew to survive.
link |
So I just learned early on, my dad owned a bar,
link |
just drilled into me being loyal.
link |
And so for whatever reason,
link |
I'm a bulldog when it comes to loyalty.
link |
And Shemov came out and said,
link |
these guys need to go to jail and they're scumbags.
link |
And I'm trying to defend them.
link |
And I'm in a position where I can't defend them
link |
because I don't have complete information.
link |
There is no complete information.
link |
It's in the heat of the moment.
link |
And then it becomes the number one story.
link |
And it's my number three investment.
link |
And Shemov has a competing company, SoFi.
link |
And he's killing my guys.
link |
And then I started killing his guys.
link |
And then all of a sudden we're like,
link |
wait a second, we're best friends.
link |
And we're swinging our swords at each other.
link |
And we're a group of the seven samurai who fight together.
link |
When did we turn on each other?
link |
And then everybody else who's on the pod,
link |
the two Davids, you know, both on the spectrum a bit,
link |
they got a little Asperger's or whatever.
link |
I'm not saying, you know,
link |
but there is, you're into AI and you might be somewhere.
link |
It's not a coincidence, yeah.
link |
Might not be a coincidence.
link |
Anyway, we upgraded the two Davids firmware.
link |
We're gonna upgrade your firmware after this.
link |
I'll give you, yeah, you're on the 1.5.
link |
You have the three emotions now.
link |
Or should we add a fourth?
link |
Do you wanna go with joy?
link |
I'm on the 2.0 already.
link |
You're on the 2.0, you got the joy.
link |
How's it working out for you, the joy chip?
link |
It's painful. It's difficult.
link |
Just let it happen, Lex.
link |
Just let the joy happen.
link |
So anyway, we just talked about it offline
link |
and we decided like, listen,
link |
we didn't pregame that episode.
link |
And I happened to be skiing with my family.
link |
I had taken the first like vacation
link |
since this goddamn pandemic started.
link |
And I was having a wonderful time.
link |
And then this whole thing blows up.
link |
I'm coming off the mountain,
link |
just having a great time with my daughter skiing.
link |
And you know, and then I'm mixing it up with him.
link |
And you know, he had a short fuse about it
link |
because he was triggered, he told me,
link |
because he really feels like he's fighting
link |
to defend, you know, the every man.
link |
And I was like, that's what my team's doing.
link |
That's why they named the company Robinhood.
link |
We're on the same side here.
link |
And then over time,
link |
we've started to see the explanation come out.
link |
And you know, people who are friends
link |
are gonna have disagreements.
link |
In the podcast, it happened to happen very publicly.
link |
And we didn't know it was gonna become
link |
the number one story in the world.
link |
If Trump still had his Twitter handle,
link |
this would not have been a story.
link |
Trump would have said something about GameStop
link |
and he would have coopted the entire conversation.
link |
So in a way, going back to our censorship discussion,
link |
I might actually be in favor of Trump being censored
link |
only because how delightful has it been since January 20th
link |
that we can all focus on something other than him.
link |
He was exhausting.
link |
I mean, the amount of cycles he took on our processors.
link |
He monetized the conversation.
link |
And now this is a little bit more of a distributed,
link |
like this bunch of.
link |
Yeah, everybody gets a chance
link |
to be the number one news story.
link |
Everybody gets a chance to discuss it.
link |
So on a scale of one to 10, how much do you love Chamath?
link |
I mean, I love Chamath.
link |
I mean, we played cards last night.
link |
And you know, I would literally jump
link |
in front of a bullet for him.
link |
I mean, what's the lesson in that discussion?
link |
Because it was super, I wouldn't.
link |
I think the love was felt and the respect was felt
link |
throughout even when you guys
link |
are going pretty vicious on each other.
link |
Is there a lesson to be learned?
link |
Do you regret any of that conversation?
link |
No, I mean, I think he told me
link |
that he regretted some of the things he said.
link |
He said publicly on the podcast,
link |
like, listen, I was a little hot.
link |
I may have said things in the heat of the moment.
link |
But I don't live with too much regret
link |
because I always think about intent.
link |
As one of the nuance and intent have been totally lost.
link |
The idea that we could have any kind of a nuanced discussion
link |
about things seems to have been forgotten.
link |
And the fact that people don't look at people's intent.
link |
If you hurt somebody's feelings or you disrespect somebody
link |
or you do something mean or whatever,
link |
I always look at the intent, you know?
link |
And I've had people attack me and I look at the intent
link |
and I'm like, that person feels bad about themselves.
link |
Or maybe I said something and I insulted them
link |
and that's why their blowback's there.
link |
So I always try to think what's the intent of the person.
link |
And then almost universally,
link |
you talk to somebody and you find out,
link |
you ascribe some crazy intent that's not there.
link |
And they're like, oh yeah, you know what happened?
link |
I got in a fight with my spouse
link |
and I didn't sleep last night
link |
and I've had a lot of anxiety about my business.
link |
And I just snapped and said something about you.
link |
And it's like, oh, okay.
link |
Like I literally had somebody on Twitter this past summer.
link |
I had said something.
link |
I was complaining about a New York Times journalist
link |
and something I thought was wrong.
link |
And this person was a fan of that journalist.
link |
And they went, I kid you not, onto my social media account,
link |
found a picture I'd taken about how blue the sky was one day.
link |
They reverse image search the tree line,
link |
found the tree line on Google image search somehow
link |
with a reverse image search,
link |
found an old listing that some broker had listed
link |
on their website of my house,
link |
and then posted my home address, the value of my home,
link |
and doxxed me on Twitter.
link |
And I'm like, what is going on here?
link |
So I call the person and I look them up
link |
and they work in private equity in Boston.
link |
And I look and I'm like, this person works in Boston.
link |
This is July 4th week.
link |
So, and when I look at the person's LinkedIn,
link |
we have seven people in common.
link |
So going back to the AR conversation real quick,
link |
I'm like, okay, this person literally just doxxed me.
link |
I asked them to take it down.
link |
They told me they won't take it down.
link |
And then I look at it.
link |
So then I DM him back on Instagram, on Twitter.
link |
And I said, by the way, your boss, Susan,
link |
and I know seven people in common.
link |
And these are the seven people.
link |
Here's a screenshot.
link |
What is she going to think when I call her on Monday
link |
and you've doxxed me?
link |
Here's my phone number if you'd like to talk.
link |
I said, what's going on?
link |
Why would you do this?
link |
He's like, well, I really pissed off
link |
about what you said about this person.
link |
I was like, you understand I've had like two
link |
or three stalkers and anybody who's a high profile
link |
like I am or medium profile,
link |
you're going to have weird things happen.
link |
You literally put my home address.
link |
You put my family at risk.
link |
What if I put your home address on my,
link |
I have 400,000 followers or 300,000 followers.
link |
You have like 300.
link |
What if I post your address?
link |
He said, well, I wish you wouldn't do that.
link |
I was like, well, I asked you kindly
link |
to take my address down.
link |
And I said, are you married?
link |
I said, how old are you?
link |
Are you like 25 or something?
link |
He's like, no, I'm 42.
link |
I was like, you're 42 years old.
link |
I was like, are you married?
link |
He's like, yeah, I just had a baby like six months ago.
link |
I'm like, you're home with your wife.
link |
It's July 4th weekend.
link |
You're doxxing Jason Calagans because you're upset at me
link |
because I said something about a New York Times writer.
link |
He's like, yeah, this is the biggest mistake of my life.
link |
I said, I tell you what, let's forget it ever happened.
link |
And he wrote me back and he said,
link |
I just wanted to thank you for how you handled it.
link |
My wife said I'm a complete fucking moron.
link |
And he literally sent me an email.
link |
My wife says I'm a complete fucking moron.
link |
And I'm really sorry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
And I wrote her back.
link |
I said, I wrote her back and I said,
link |
my wife says the same thing to me all the time.
link |
I said, welcome to the club.
link |
It's totally fine.
link |
But intent, nuance, it matters, right?
link |
And the person could be having a bad day
link |
and they do something stupid they regret.
link |
And what am I gonna do, cancel the guy?
link |
Or if I had called his boss,
link |
he would have been fired immediately.
link |
And then I got to live with this guy got fired
link |
and he's got a kid.
link |
And what is this personal destruction?
link |
Why are we doing this to each other?
link |
Life's hard enough.
link |
Life's hard, right?
link |
Like just getting through the day is hard.
link |
Yeah, and that little bit of empathy,
link |
thinking about the intent of the person
link |
allows you to then sort of deescalate
link |
this kind of conversation
link |
that social media wants to escalate.
link |
Yes, back to what we were saying.
link |
If this, in my younger years,
link |
I would have retweeted the guy's home address
link |
and my address and would have called his boss
link |
and tried to get him fired or whatever.
link |
And it's like, now I'm just like,
link |
why are we attacking each other?
link |
I mean, this is what the pandemic,
link |
I think we should make everybody realize is like,
link |
look at how hard it is.
link |
And then just think about all the people suffering right now
link |
who are at home, the single mom or dad
link |
with two or three kids at home in public school.
link |
Maybe they've been laid off
link |
and their kids aren't learning
link |
and they're in a tiny apartment.
link |
I mean, this has been brutal for a lot of people.
link |
Not to mention people losing loved ones
link |
or maybe some people got Corona
link |
and now their lungs are still not right.
link |
Can I ask you about love?
link |
I'm feeling it, you know,
link |
like we're an hour or two here, Lex.
link |
Yeah, you're feeling it.
link |
Feeling like we could become besties.
link |
I feel like we got a bromance going here, Lex.
link |
I don't know if it's Eric Weinstein level,
link |
but I feel like it's close.
link |
Yeah, I'm feeling the love.
link |
But we talked about those music to my ears,
link |
your whole rant on the Olympic nature of a startup.
link |
like what role does love, family, friendship
link |
play in that brutal pursuit of excellence
link |
that is building a startup, building a company
link |
or creating anything new in this world?
link |
Such a great question and totally unprepared for it.
link |
Because nobody would ever ask me about that.
link |
So I think it's why you've got quite a following
link |
on your podcast is that you're able to ask these questions.
link |
And I can tell one story because, you know,
link |
I don't talk about,
link |
I try not to talk about relationship with Elon that often
link |
because, you know, he's so famous now.
link |
I mean, when we met, I used to go out to parties with him
link |
and people were like, oh my God, you're Jason Calacas.
link |
And like, who's your friend?
link |
I'm like, that's my friend, Elon.
link |
And they'd be like, what, he's doing rocket ships?
link |
But he's told this story publicly.
link |
and I would never talk about anything
link |
that he hasn't already talked about publicly,
link |
especially since he's so high profile,
link |
but it was pretty funny moment.
link |
There was a moment in time
link |
when Tesla almost went out of business
link |
and you've probably heard the story many times,
link |
but it was during the financial crisis
link |
and they were running out of money.
link |
And they said, you know, let's go get a steak.
link |
And we're in LA and we drove to BOA
link |
and I had my orange Tesla Roadster
link |
and he had his P1 or P2, like the red one
link |
that I think is in space now.
link |
And we drove to the valet and we had a steak together
link |
and we're sitting there.
link |
And I said, you know, I read the story
link |
and Gawker or whatever, you know,
link |
and New York Times here,
link |
you only got like five weeks of money left in Tesla.
link |
He goes, it's not true.
link |
I was like, oh, thank God.
link |
He goes, we have two weeks.
link |
I was like, oh God.
link |
I was like, well, what's going on
link |
with the rocket ship company?
link |
You know, like, you know, I know you did the one last month
link |
and don't you have one coming up?
link |
He's like, yeah, we've got the third one coming up.
link |
I was like, well, how's that going?
link |
I said, well, we blow that one up.
link |
There's no more SpaceX.
link |
I was like, so two weeks of money left in Tesla
link |
and SpaceX, you blew up the first two rockets,
link |
you blow up the third SpaceX, it's over.
link |
I was like, I can loan you a couple million dollars.
link |
I don't have like a ton.
link |
He's like, it's okay.
link |
Our friend, beep, has loaned me some money.
link |
And Elon's been super public about this.
link |
I would never tell the story unless he hadn't been,
link |
but he was talking, he never said who it was,
link |
but somebody had loaned him money to keep him afloat.
link |
He was functionally bankrupt.
link |
I mean, he had the equity in the companies,
link |
but the equity was quickly becoming worth zero
link |
and the financial crisis.
link |
And he's figuring out if he's going to go on vacation
link |
for Christmas or not.
link |
And he's on the phone trying to, you know,
link |
save both companies.
link |
And I said, certainly there must be some good news.
link |
And he takes out his Blackberry to date this conversation.
link |
I don't know iPhones.
link |
Takes out his Blackberry and he starts swiping.
link |
And he says, don't tell anybody.
link |
This is what I'm building.
link |
And he shows me the Model S.
link |
And nobody knew that he was working on the Model S.
link |
We knew he was doing the roadster
link |
and he was trying to save the company.
link |
And I looked at it and I was like, that's gorgeous.
link |
It was the clay models.
link |
So it was a full size clay model.
link |
So there's human beings standing around a clay version
link |
of this tiny little Blackberry picture.
link |
I'm scrolling through on the,
link |
remember that little pad or the ball on the Blackberry.
link |
I'm scrolling through it.
link |
I'm like, this is fucking great.
link |
And I just said to him, it's like,
link |
what's the range going to be?
link |
He says, well, I think we get 250 miles.
link |
I was like, 250 miles?
link |
He's like, yeah, I think it'd be the safest car ever.
link |
I said, what is it going to cost?
link |
He says, I think this could cost eventually 50, $60,000.
link |
I said, Elon, if you make that car,
link |
you'll change the goddamn world.
link |
You have to, this company must survive
link |
because the roadsters for like 2000 people in United States,
link |
this car is for every person in the United States.
link |
Every single person in the United States
link |
will want this car if it's $50,000.
link |
And maybe some of the people who have 20 or 30,000 dollars
link |
won't be able to afford it, but they'll all want it.
link |
And he said, you really think so?
link |
So I got home and I talked to my wife, Jade,
link |
and I said, do you have the checkbook?
link |
She does all the finances and stuff like that,
link |
pays the bills and whatever.
link |
And I said, don't tell anybody,
link |
Elon's making this great car.
link |
And I wrote two checks for $50,000.
link |
And I just took out this paper and I wrote,
link |
E, comma, love the new car, I'll take two.
link |
I kissed the two $50,000 checks, put them in the envelope,
link |
and I FedExed it to him for Monday delivery.
link |
And I said to Jade, that $100,000 is going to be gone
link |
in 48 hours because it will pay for one or two days
link |
of payroll on Tesla.
link |
So we just added like, instead of two weeks of runway,
link |
And the checks don't cash, but then I read a story
link |
that he's closed the money, saved the company
link |
in like the next week or two.
link |
And a couple of months later, the checks get cashed.
link |
And I'm like, okay.
link |
Three years later, I get an email,
link |
your reservation number, it's from Tesla,
link |
your reservation number is 0000001.
link |
And then five seconds later,
link |
your reservation number is 000073.
link |
And I forwarded the number one to Elon,
link |
I said, you know, I can't take number one,
link |
a signature number one, I can't take that, that's yours.
link |
And he's like, oh, I got five of them.
link |
And besides, you're the first person who ordered it.
link |
And I was the first person who had seen it.
link |
You're gonna get me to be teary eyed.
link |
I mean, that's beautiful.
link |
No, it was a very...
link |
That's a beautiful moment.
link |
It was an incredible moment for both of us.
link |
And we talk about it sometimes, you know,
link |
those moments in time.
link |
And to your point about love, Elon...
link |
That's like the darkest moment,
link |
one of the darkest moments in his life probably.
link |
I think it was, I can tell you,
link |
it was the darkest period of his life for sure.
link |
And he's been very public about how dark that was.
link |
And I think, you know, this is why I have great sympathy
link |
for the entrepreneurs of the world,
link |
like the suffering and the pain.
link |
And when he talks about the suffering and the pain
link |
that all of these founders have felt,
link |
and then we were throwing rocks at them
link |
or criticizing them as they try to change the world
link |
and save humanity, and in Tesla's case,
link |
I mean, they weren't, you know,
link |
they weren't like delivering pizza.
link |
I mean, they were trying to get us off of fossil fuels.
link |
Like this was a big, heady mission
link |
to literally save the environment, the planet, humanity.
link |
And the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him,
link |
it was always perplexing to me why any human being
link |
who is standing on God's green earth
link |
would want to throw rocks at the guy
link |
who is trying to stem the dam of global warming
link |
that is about to engulf all of us.
link |
How dare they throw rocks at that guy?
link |
There's so many people you could throw rocks at.
link |
There's somebody who's making the Juul vaporizer,
link |
throw rocks at that scumbag, no offense.
link |
But like whoever's making the Juul things
link |
and is, you know, selling pina colada flavor
link |
to 12 year olds, like throw rocks at them.
link |
Somebody is doing something, you know, abhorrent,
link |
but not E, I mean, and yeah.
link |
Anyway, that car is, you know, up the road here,
link |
sitting under a cover with 20,000 miles on it in my garage.
link |
And then the Roadster number 16 is in the garage next to it.
link |
And every day I walk by the two of them
link |
and I get a warm feeling in my heart
link |
because I know he did it.
link |
Against all odds, against all odds, he pulled it off.
link |
And it was that moment, that month in that 2000,
link |
I think it was probably December, January,
link |
December of 2008, I think.
link |
You know, it's just 12 years ago
link |
when you think about 13 years ago, it was dark.
link |
I mean, it was dark.
link |
And they almost had the same thing happen,
link |
you know, in the Model 3 production
link |
in June of two years, three years ago.
link |
And I remember him just trying to get the Model 3
link |
out the door and the company almost crashed then.
link |
Most of these companies have, you know,
link |
these kinds of moments.
link |
And I think friendship is you get what you give,
link |
you get what you give.
link |
And if you are there for people,
link |
you're gonna feel so good about having done that.
link |
And then the reciprocation effect,
link |
which you'd probably know very well,
link |
is so great in the world that anytime you're kind to people,
link |
you build this incredible bond.
link |
And then what are we at the end of the day, Lex,
link |
besides a series of memories with the people we love?
link |
It's just a series of memories and moments.
link |
It's just moments.
link |
You ever see Blade Runner?
link |
Do you remember what Rucker Harris says at the end,
link |
all of these memories gone, like tears in the rain?
link |
I mean, that's our existence.
link |
It just all goes away at some point.
link |
It's just these drops of rain.
link |
Each of those memories,
link |
just like one snowflake or one drop of rain,
link |
and they're all lost at some point, but they're here now.
link |
And that's why we have to be there for each other.
link |
That's why I feel like what I do
link |
is so important in this world.
link |
And I get such great meaning out of it.
link |
Just being a friend, just having these conversations.
link |
What you're doing on your podcast,
link |
just talking to intelligent people
link |
and spreading the word and the gospel
link |
of what they're saying and amplifying it,
link |
you're inspiring so many people.
link |
Every podcast, you get 500,000 people,
link |
a million people watch these videos.
link |
And there's some kid in Sri Lanka
link |
or some little girl in Afghanistan
link |
who's gonna stumble upon this on YouTube,
link |
and they're gonna change the world in the next century.
link |
Because it's not just about America.
link |
Our story's almost over, right?
link |
We were the story of the last two or 300 years.
link |
I hope it keeps going.
link |
But there's all these other places in the world,
link |
Sao Paulo and Africa,
link |
where people now have access to these videos.
link |
And somebody will hear this video and go,
link |
Oh, and that guy Jason was his friend.
link |
And, oh, and Lex does those interviews with him.
link |
Oh yeah, I could do it too.
link |
Your little magical moment of love
link |
amidst the suffering with Elon
link |
because you've talked about it,
link |
it'll have these ripple effects.
link |
It's fascinating to think about in decades to come.
link |
And new entrepreneurs being born,
link |
new, more love being put out there,
link |
and more support through these rough times
link |
when people are trying to create new things.
link |
I mean, that's a beautiful thing, that's a beautiful,
link |
I'm glad you think of friendship in this way.
link |
I'm deeply grateful that you're loyal.
link |
Every time you invest.
link |
In the way you are.
link |
it costs you nothing to make this investment either.
link |
The amount of time it takes to be bitter or angry,
link |
sitting at home, to be disappointed,
link |
you could just channel that same amount of energy
link |
into being loyal, loving, kind, and there for people.
link |
It just only takes the intention, right?
link |
The water is gonna, those emotions are gonna flow, right?
link |
Like Sam would always tell me
link |
when I was struggling in my life and I talked to him,
link |
he'd say, you know, Jason,
link |
your brain is spewing all these ideas.
link |
Imagine you're standing, sitting by a river,
link |
and the river is all your ideas.
link |
You are not a slave to any one of these ideas.
link |
They're just whipping by
link |
like each of those little waves in the river.
link |
You can pick one of those ideas out
link |
and look at it and examine it,
link |
and either keep it,
link |
or throw it back in the river and let it go.
link |
And I was like, wow, Sam, that was like,
link |
of my entire friendship with Sam Harris,
link |
that was like the one moment where I was just like,
link |
oh my God, all my life,
link |
I've wondered about all these thoughts in my head,
link |
insecurities, you know, imposter syndrome.
link |
Like I didn't go to MIT, you know,
link |
I'm not the smartest guy,
link |
but somehow I made a career writing little 50K checks
link |
and now, you know, $3 million checks,
link |
but whatever, you know, little checks
link |
and being a journalist and doing this little podcast,
link |
and it's ended up to something.
link |
And I kind of, I'm proud of it.
link |
I'm 50 and I'm kind of proud of what I did.
link |
And I wake up every morning after I retired,
link |
I say, I kind of like what I do.
link |
I kind of like having the conversation
link |
and writing the check and then being on somebody's team.
link |
And I got offered to be in these giant mega funds
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and they said, Jason, you're in it,
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you invest in 60 companies a year,
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you know, 500K at a time,
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you put $30 million a year to work, come work with us,
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write one $50 million check
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and then you can go to Aspen and Cabo and Coachella
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But why are you doing all this work?
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It's like, well, the $50 million check
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is like, it's like a formality.
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It's just like being an ATM,
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like the companies are already huge by that time.
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I really want to meet the two people with the idea.
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I want to meet them in year one.
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I want to meet them on day zero.
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I want to be the guy who wrote the first,
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second or third check.
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I want a guy who wrote the 3000th check, the last check.
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It's fucking boring.
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And make that basic human connection
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and also be with them through the rough times,
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be with them with that first,
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I mean, the first early successes,
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I mean, that's a beautiful.
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When a founder and that team get product market fit
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and you just know it's going to work,
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oh man, Lex, it's,
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when Comm would email me and they'd say,
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we added, you know, the company's been growing
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and we're not going to go out of business,
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but we added some sleep stuff
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and then we added this other function
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and we have a streak now and we grew 10X
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in the last, you know, three months.
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You know, I was like, ah, that's nice.
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It's like, it's a nice feeling when you,
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well, because so many of them die.
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We talked about that J curve early.
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Imagine it's like,
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it's like all these baby turtles going out to the ocean
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and the seagulls are ripping them to shreds
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and then the sharks are eating them.
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But then like a couple of the turtles make it
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and they become wise old 100 year old turtles, you know?
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And you're like, yep, I remember when you catched
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and like all of your brothers and sisters
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were ripped to shreds by the seagulls
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and you made it into the water.
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And then you made it out to the deep water.
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Pretty great feeling.
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I think there's no better way to end it.
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The talk of the cruelty of life,
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that suffering that is life
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and the love amidst the suffering.
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Jason, I've been a fan of yours for a long time.
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You're one of the most special people in Silicon Valley.
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And maybe you'll also call me in one of the rough times.
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I'm sure there'll be many.
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There will be, yeah.
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There's one expression, nobody gets there alone.
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Nobody gets there alone.
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And anybody who thinks that they got there alone
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is delusional and kidding themselves.
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And they will at some point wake up and realize,
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oh shit, there were a lot of people helped me get here.
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I need to write a couple of gratitude letters.
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I got a gratitude letter the other day
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from a friend of mine who I helped.
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And I was one of the,
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you know about these gratitude letters people are writing?
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It turns out Martin Seligman in, was it Authentic Happiness?
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Anyway, the guy who really studied happiness and joy,
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turns out one of the greatest amplifiers of joy in your life
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is to thank somebody for doing something for you.
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And somebody who I had helped just wrote me a letter
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and I got in Christmas
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and I had the stack of Christmas cards
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and I hadn't opened them.
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And it's the second week of January
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and I was just getting to like the last stack
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and I open it up and I almost missed it.
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It's incredibly heartwarming letter
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about how meaningful like certain things I had done
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to help along the way
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and how he'd always appreciated my counsel.
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And I was just like, well, this happened 25 years ago
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and you wrote this letter now.
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And it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
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I was just like, wow, you know, if you're hearing this,
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there's probably 10 people
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who are really instrumental in your lives, in your lives.
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Go ahead and call them on the phone,
link |
write them an email or even better,
link |
just write a letter and send it to them
link |
and just tell them you're thankful.
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And let me tell you something,
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the amplification of joy in your life will go a hundred X,
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a hundred X when you tell somebody you love them
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and that you really appreciate them
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and that what they did for you was magical.
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So just, and you can look it up, gratitude.
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Gratitude is like one of these incredible forces.
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I'm grateful for being on the pod.
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I'm grateful you wasted all this time with me.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.