#161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship

Jason Calacanis is an angel investor, entrepreneur, and co-host of All-In Podcast and This Week in Startups. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Brave: https://brave.com/lex – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – Four Sigmatic: https://foursigmatic.com/lex and use code LexPod to get up to 60% off – Rev: https://rev.ai/lex to get 7-day free trial EPISODE LINKS: Jason’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jason Jason’s Website: https://calacanis.com/ Jason’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThisWeekIn Jason’s Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/calacanis All-In Podcast: https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast This Week in Startups Podcast: https://thisweekinstartups.com/about/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:52) – WallStreetBets and Robinhood (17:58) – How does the WallStreetBets saga end? (21:09) – Capitalism (26:30) – Ideas vs Execution (27:38) – Learning to learn (33:06) – Risk-aversion (39:07) – Robinhood (47:33) – Parler and AWS (49:59) – Social networks (56:33) – Leadership (1:01:21) – Work-life balance (1:09:44) – Great leaders lead by example (1:17:30) – Advice for startup founders (1:21:57) – Clubhouse (1:22:42) – When will we fully re-open the economy (1:33:20) – Augmented reality (1:36:48) – When should a startup raise money? (1:43:44) – David Goggins (1:45:40) – Disagreement with Chamath Palihapitiya (1:58:52) – Story about Elon Musk’s darkest moments (2:07:08) – Friendship

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Jason Kallikanas, who's an entrepreneur, investor, author of Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups. And as many people may know, he's a fun, brilliant, longtime podcast host of This Week in Startups and co-host of the All In Podcast with Chamath Balakapatiya, David Sacks, and David Friedman, who all happen to be poker buddies and self-proclaimed besties. The result is always a great listen due to both the love and the heated disagreements. Quick mention of our sponsors: Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines,

• 0:42Lex Fridman?

  Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and Rev Speech to Text Service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I've been learning a lot about real-world finance in the past few months. To give you a bit of context, on the side, I've studied trading from an algorithmic trading perspective as a machine learning and a game theory problem off and on for a few years in undergrad and grad school. I found the distributed, complex system aspect of finance and economics in general fascinating. But now I find even more fascinating the human side of the whole thing, ideas of greed, power, freedom, and truth. Wall Street Bets, Robinhood, and the whole beautiful mess around this topic

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  allows us to have great conversations about human nature and the systems that underlie the rise and fall of civilizations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Brave, a fast, privacy-preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome but without ads or the various kinds of tracking that ads can do.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  You should listen to my conversation with Brett and Ike where we talk about Brave quite a bit. Anyway, I love using Brave more than any other browser, including Chrome. If you like, you can import bookmarks and extensions from Chrome as I did. The Brave browser is free, available on all platforms. It's actively used by over 20 million people. Speedwise, it just feels more responsive and snappier than other browsers. So I can tell there's a lot of great engineering behind it. It has a lot of privacy-related features that Chrome doesn't have, like it includes options such as Private Window with Tor for those seeking advanced privacy and safety. Get it at brave.com/lex and

• 2:51Lex Fridman?

  it might become your favorite browser, too. That's brave.com/lex. This episode is sponsored by Linode, Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale the applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge systems. I personally recommend you read their "Why Choose Linode Over AWS" article to see why you might want to go with them. At least for me, it was a clarifying set of comparisons. Lower cost is a big reason, but more important to me is just the simplicity. And also, a part of the great experience

• 3:32Lex Fridman?

  is just the high quality of customer service with real humans 24/7, 365 days a year. And just a breath of fresh air for me. Linode has data standards around the world with the same simple and consistent pricing regardless of location. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. I like that line. Visit linode.com/lex and click on Create Free Account button to get started with $100 in free credit. That's linode.com/lex. These guys are awesome. Try them out. This show is also sponsored by Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and

• 4:13Lex Fridman?

  plant-based protein. I enjoy both. The coffee has lion's mane mushroom for productivity and chaga mushroom for immune system support. The plant-based protein has immune support as well and tastes delicious. By the way, the coffee doesn't taste like mushroom. It's actually really flavorful. I don't know what's a better word to use. I'm terrible with adjectives that describe coffee, wine, beer, and whiskey. I'm definitely not a coffee snob. I just know it tastes good and coffee is pretty much deeply ingrained in my psyche. At this point, there is no escape, ladies and gentlemen. Of all the addictions you can have, coffee is one of the good ones.

• 4:57Lex Fridman?

  They give you up to 50% off and money-back guarantee. And now, on top of that, we've worked out an exclusive additional 10% off all sale products. If you go to foursigmatic.com/lex. This, I think, is a Valentine's Day/week sale, I guess, as it ends on February 23rd. So hurry up. Go to foursigmatic.com/lex. This show is also sponsored by Rev and Rev.ai, which is, by many metrics, the best speech-to-text AI engine in the world. Rev, in general, is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI.

• 5:42Lex Fridman?

  I've been using their service for a couple of years and am planning to use Rev to add more captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast. I'm sorry I've been really lazy on that. There's more transcripts. There's a lot more transcripts coming. I apologize for the delays. Okay. They've processed over 16 billion minutes of audio and video to date. Rev.ai is the API part of Rev that allows you to use speech-to-text programmatically as a service. You can check out how well Rev's AI performs in a seven-day free trial at rev.ai/lex. That's an awesome URL.

• 6:22Lex Fridman?

  That's rev.ai/lex to tap into the world's most accurate speech AI. And now, here's my conversation with Jason Kolekanis.

• 6:52Lex Fridman?

  I have a million things to talk to you about, but we do happen to be living through what I would think of as a historic event in terms of its impact, in terms of like almost philosophically thinking about the role of people and how they can fight power with this whole Wall Street Bets and GameStop situation. I was wondering, you've covered in your amazing All In podcast, you guys have been having fascinating battles over this whole situation. I was wondering if you could tell maybe from your perspective, as it's unrolling the saga of Wall Street Bets and GameStop, what are some interesting insights that you have about this whole set of events?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  In full disclosure, I was an angel investor in Robinhood before they launched. And when I met the founder Vlad and his partner, you know, they pitched me at a bar not too far from where we are right now in Palo Alto called Antonio's Nut House. And my friend Adeo, it's a really good story. My friend Adeo had asked me to speak at his Founders Institute, which is kind of like an accelerator for people who are thinking about starting a company. And so I gave a talk and then he said, hey, let's go to Antonio's Nut House and we'll meet Elon for a drink. And so Elon met us for a drink there. And it's the divest of dive bars. Like you'll take a beer.

• 8:14Lex Fridman?

  I love the image of all of this. You hang out with Elon at a crappy bar.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it is the worst bar in the peninsula. Like just garbage on the floor and like cheap beer and warm beer. And like you'll pick up your pint glass and be lipstick on it. It's brutal.

• 8:32Lex Fridman?

  Classy.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Not your lipstick. You understand, somebody else's lipstick.

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And so we're sitting there and Vlad walks up with his partner and he says, you're Jason Calacanis. And I said, tell me about your startup. He said, how do you know I have a startup? I said, you recognize me. And I mean, that's the only way. And he goes, is that Elon Musk? And I said, yes, Elon, come say hi. And he came over and said, hi. I said, tell me what you do. He said, well, I'm a quant. And I said, what's that? And he said, Quantitative analysis. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know about that. That's like you guys make algorithms and then try to beat the market. Right. He's like, yeah, I was like, so you're going to pitch me on a startup and you're going to sell your algorithm to other people. And if it was so good, why wouldn't you just use it yourself and print money? He's like, yeah, no, no, that's not our business. Our business is we're going to create an app to get millennials to trade stocks.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  And he said, hmm, you do realize there's no retail investors anymore. Like the dot com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis eliminated any individual's belief in participating in the stock market. And he said, that's the opportunity. I said, okay, I like it. Tell me more. He said, well, we're going to get these millennials to trade. I said, the same ones who live in their mom's basements and take Uber and Lyft and are on their parents have no money, got screwed and, you know, went 250 K into debt for school and now can't get a job. Those people? And he's like, yeah, I'm like, okay, they have no interest in their future, but they're going to trade stocks. He said, yeah, that's the opportunity. I was like, how do you, how are you going to make money? And he said, well, that's the best part. It's going to be free. And I said, so your idea is to get a group of people who have no interest in saving

• 10:05Speaker 01

  for their future to trade and your business model is free. And he said, yes, I said, I'm in.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Because in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas that nobody believes in are the ones that have the greatest returns. I mean, Uber, I introduced to about 25 investors and three of us said yes. So, you know, a full 12% of the community who saw that deal decided to do it.

• 10:28Lex Fridman?

  So your sense about this idea being good had to do with the fact that this guy was just crazy and ambitious and bold thinking? Or was it that there's something here in allowing a much larger magnitude of people to be able to be investors?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way to do really well as an angel investor or just in technology or in life is to not say what could go wrong, but to say what could go right. And then to just imagine for a moment, if it does work, what would the world look like? And so when Elon was investing in Tesla and some other guys were running it and he was trying to save the company. You know, it wasn't, is this going to work? It was almost positively not going to work. It was, and he knew that. But if it does work, what does the world look like? And so that's really what you're looking for is not the chances of success, but if it does succeed, does succeed, what would that look like? And

• 11:27Speaker 01

  You, that's what the world needs more people doing. And so when you looked at Robin Hood, it was like, well, if he does succeed, what would the world look like? And now we've seen what it looks like. You have a generation who are so financially sophisticated that they know how to do puts and calls and shorts and research at a level that dominated the hedge fund industry. So let's pause for a second. These traders sitting there on a subreddit in a Discord server are able to do analysis and research and then act in unison to say, we're going to beat, in the Robin Hood sense, you know, this group of sophisticated insiders who have more access and more access to capital, but we will figure out how to solve this problem.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, things, most things don't work. It's like the Wikipedia, like, there's no way, no way the Wikipedia would ever work. Right. Except it did. Yeah. Right? Like, you're, you're like, how is this ever going to work? You're not paying anybody, but it's both the largest corpus of an encyclopedia ever. So I think Robin Hood actually succeeded. And then what we saw was this system and a lot of the systems in our society, whether it's the political system, the Constitution of the United States, education, higher education, which you're involved in, and then even the financial system, we have not stress tested and stress tested it. And we don't actually know all the edge cases

• 12:50Speaker 01

  and how it works. So Trump was able to just really put this crazy stress test, like, is the democracy going to hold? Are we going to break this two or three, you know, 200-some-one year old experiment? And then we looked at the financial markets and it turns out there were more people shorting the stock than stocks were, than shares were available. I don't know how that's possible. And then I'm trying to uncover, where can I see a list of people who've shorted the stock? And it's like, you can't. But we can tell you sort of how many every two weeks or maybe twice a week, we can create a report. Maybe we know.

• 13:23Lex Fridman?

  I was surprised that nobody knows the list of people who were shorted and you guys were trying to figure that out.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no transparency on a lot of these systems. And if you call to try to short a stock, like, it's almost like they'll tell you on the phone, like, let me see, I think I might know a guy who has shares to loan out. So it's like, am I calling to like, try to find like a 73 Mustang Grande in, you know, gold? You know, and you're gonna call around? It's like, shouldn't this be like, on a ledger somewhere and be completely transparent? So now we're seeing those things. And I think the investigations will make it super clear. But of course, in a vacuum, without information, there are so many investors in these startups that conflicts can start to appear. And then you know how it is with people in conspiracy theories, the mind starts to wander, right? And so in some cases, there is actually a conspiracy. And then in other cases, people's mind will fill in like, oh my God,

• 14:12Speaker 01

  there's some grand conspiracy here. I can tell you, Robin Hood's only goal is to get more people to trade stocks and to democratize it even more. And they apparently were on the brink of, you know, seizing as an entity if they didn't get more money to cover all these trades. I mean, they were on the brink and they raised $3.5 billion or something like that in a week.

• 14:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So in some sense, Robin Hood enabled this very like the magic of this distributed system of Wall Street Bets, right? You said Wikipedia, which is another, which is probably one of my favorite websites and one of my favorite examples of like a distributed system somehow coming together in a way, just like you said at that crappy bar, you, I would have guessed it would never work. But if it does work, it changes everything and it did. And Robin Hood in that same way, probably enabled, or was one of the major enablers of Wall Street Bets of giving power, like empowering young kids to learn about how this whole messy financial system works and take on the big elite centralized players.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, it's very easy. When these companies get big.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  One thing that's changed is the footprint of these startups and the velocity at which they grow. So something like Airbnb is another perfect example of something that should really not work in practice, but it does. Like, I'm gonna rent my couch or my extra room to somebody, like a serial killer, or I'm gonna stay in somebody's house, like a serial killer's house. And, you know, it's like, it really sounds scary, but it actually works. And it has not destroyed the hotel business. It has added. So the best startups induce a market to exist. If you look at, you know, Uber or Airbnb, people replaced their cars, and Uber was not competing ultimately with taxis. They were

• 16:06Speaker 01

  competing with car ownership, public transportation, walking, or just not going out. And then you look at Airbnb, a lot of people who stay in an Airbnb would not be taking a trip to Kyoto, if not for the fact that they could get a $75 beautiful room with great reviews in Kyoto for three weeks. It inspires people, and it manifests a market, because the product is so transcendent, right? And I think that's one of the things that Robinhood did. You can't learn how to do this options trading, and puts, and calls, and all this sophistication stuff, unless you actually do it. It's just too hard to learn, except in practice, just like poker. If you want to learn how to play poker, or guitar, or tennis, or skiing, like, you can talk about it, you can watch YouTube videos, but at a certain point, you gotta

• 16:50Speaker 01

  get on the mountain. At a certain point, you gotta put some chips in the pot. And it's gonna be painful. Like poker's gonna be painful. You're gonna lose a lot of money. That's why you should play at the small tables first. And, you know, even in trading, like, you look at people who are doing this crazy trading in GameStop, a company that's worth, you know, maybe a couple billion dollars, but certainly tens of billions of dollars. Of course, the people who are throwing their money in last are gonna lose it. I think everybody knew that. And so it was a momentum play, and, you know, they're betting against the hedge funds. So I think it's good for people to learn, and become financially literate, and just always understand the concept of the risk of ruin. The good news is, for a young person, the risk of ruin might be like they lose $5,000 or something, and then they have

• 17:32Speaker 01

  to build their stack back up. But that's really the, the only thing I am concerned about is, there are people who will play poker, or blackjack, or sports betting, or whatever it is, and lose control. Just like there might be people who try alcohol and lose control. But we can't build a system based upon limiting You know, the average person's behavior based upon somebody who can't control, you know, their ability to drink, you know, two glasses of wine instead of 20.

• 17:58Lex Fridman?

  How does this whole thing end?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Probably in tears.

• 18:02Lex Fridman?

  For who?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:03Lex Fridman?

  Who's crying? Is everybody crying?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Who's crying when? So I think there were some of the hedge funds that were crying initially. Then maybe some of the Wall Street Bets people who bought last would be crying. And then eventually there's probably another set of hedge funds or even the Wall Street Bets mob and that, you know, that army, some of them might've broke ranks and then shorted the stock.

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So nobody knows. So everybody has to be aware of what's happening in the game. So if Wall Street Bets said, hey, let's squeeze these hedge funds because they have too much short interest. Let's all buy the stock. Then some of them might've said, okay, you know, it's at two or $300. Maybe I'll join the short movement now that they've covered and they could have shorted their, been like double agents. So people have to understand like this stuff is gnarly and it's a, it's a free for all. I mean, it is a literal free for all.

• 18:50Lex Fridman?

  There's a kind of morality, like a big statement that Wall Street Bets made in terms of like the elites can't just push us around. They can't bully around. But at the same time, you know, they're also interested in making money, right?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:04Lex Fridman?

  Is, uh, what's your sense? You said that some of the people in the Wall Street Bets might've broken off and, and shorted the stock.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 19:11Lex Fridman?

  Are they more interested? There was an emergent like morality that emerged and, and said like, we're not going to put up with the centralized elites, but is that going to continue? Are they going to fight the power structures that are bad for society? Are they going to now like, I mean, are they ultimately going to introduce more chaos that's going to damage the economy and damage the world? Or are they going to continue being the good guys and fighting the, uh, the, the evils that manipulate the market? What's your sense?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  You know, it, it really feels like the Dark Knight series of films where like some people just want to see the world burn.

• 19:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I think there is a contingent of people who just literally want to see chaos.

• 19:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Like you know, that contingent on some of these, you know, forums who just want to create chaos, right? So there, there's certainly that chaos contingent, but I think overall what the arc will show is a group of people getting massively educated. You see it in crypto as well. There was like a three year period where. All of these failed entrepreneurs who I knew, who couldn't build companies, were then coming back to me after their companies has failed, or after they gave up, or couldn't clear market raising money with the venture capital community, and they were doing ICOs. And I was like, I met you before, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm doing an ICO now. I'm like, okay, where's your company at? And they're like, here's a white paper. And I was like, this white paper with spelling errors in it that says,

• 20:38Speaker 01

  you're going to destroy Airbnb because everybody's apartment's going to be on immutable ledger?

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Like, wouldn't that be better in a regular database that was private and not public? Like, why does it need to be on immutable ledgers? It can't change. I'm like, not changing the database is a feature? That's, that does not seem like a good feature. And they couldn't explain it. They're like, well, just people are interested in ICOs. And there was that ICO mania. And what it showed was there's a global appetite for risk. People want to try new things. This is one of the great things about the human spirit. It is one of the great things about capitalism. And one of the things that concerns me most about where we're at in society is the sort of socialism, communism, you know, entrepreneurship is bad, technology is bad, and polarization of wealth, and, you know, people getting rich is a bad thing. When I grew up, I'm 50 now, but when I was a Gen Xer growing up,

• 21:27Speaker 01

  we kind of maybe too much idolized Bill Gates and people who are doing interesting things in the world, and we thought capitalism was a force for good. I still believe capitalism is a force for good because when a group of people builds a product or service that changes the world and it, and it gets globally distributed, whether it's Tesla, or SpaceX, or Google, or Airbnb, or Uber, or Robinhood, you know, everybody gets to benefit from that product or service having to compete. And if you look at the places where there's no competition, like public education, or less, you know, you know, established, you know, colleges and stuff like that, less competition for accreditation degrees, like, things tend to get a little weird, don't they?

• 22:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  And people tend to be protected, and that's not good. You need, you need competition. Does it mean that? You know, people shouldn't have global healthcare. It doesn't mean that, you know, we shouldn't have a safety net, but we need to keep capitalism vibrant, especially because China has now co-opted capitalism and created their own version of capitalism, which is communism with capitalism. It's like this weird operating system. Like, we still want to keep communism so we can take any of your gains at any time.

• 22:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  But we'd like you to be entrepreneurial.

• 22:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  And then you have somebody like, you know, um, you know, the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, who disappears for a couple of weeks.

• 22:45Lex Fridman?

  Who's that?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. Who's Jack Ma? It's like, he kind of disappears for a couple of weeks, and then he comes back and he's really sorry about the things he said, and then he disappears again. And like, you know, we have to be very careful. If China wins capitalism.

• 23:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  This is going to be an existential threat for humanity.

• 23:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  The Chinese are no joke. I mean, they are seriously focused, and they are picking the winners.

• 23:12Lex Fridman?

  It's a very weird system because it is, in fact, I don't know what you call it, like communism and capitalism is such overloaded terms, but they do encourage entrepreneurship, but they, and they do a good job of it.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 23:26Lex Fridman?

  But, but then they're like, they're like the surveillance thing, and they're controlling things in a way.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:31Lex Fridman?

  It's weird because it seems to work really well for them in the short term.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yes, it's definitely got short-term benefits.

• 23:38Lex Fridman?

  So the question is like, what, what, uh, how that gets distorted and then becomes worse and worse and worse, which you potentially might be. And I, I think on, you know, the, the entrepreneurial spirit, which you have a podcast all centered around the entrepreneurial spirit, is, uh, is one of the magical things that makes this country great. I don't know if money is deeply tied into that. I do get bothered by people, you know, treating the word billionaire as if it's a bad word.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Lex Fridman?

  But in general, like, all the hard things, all the difficult things we're going through in this country, it seems like the way out is going to be, uh,

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  Making the entrepreneur the hero of society of like letting that young kid with a big dream and the guts to take the big risks and build something totally new. Make giving them a chance and whatever that involves. I don't think it's about taxes. I don't think it's about like regulation, all that stuff. It's about us and just public discourse saying that that kid, that guy, that girl, they're badasses. Like encourage them to do it.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  We have to have people buy in to the fact that they have that opportunity. And I think one of the problems in society is there's a group of people who actually don't believe that they can succeed, or they don't believe even more perniciously that other people can. And that's the group of people that I think are highly vocal, but a small group of people, which are generally people of incredible privilege, rich parents, white, city dwellers, liberals. They kind of look and say, poor people cannot change a lot. And they're they're battling in their minds to protect poor people. And but they have this very weird patriarchal kind of approach to it, which is they think that they're not capable of changing their lot in life. And they're like, it's not possible. And then

• 25:32Speaker 01

  once in a while, I'll tweet something where I say, you know, it's really incredible that every piece of knowledge you could possibly want is now available for free on YouTube. And every course from MIT and Harvard and Stanford is available on EdX or Coursera. And all that information is there freely available. And you can take the lectures. This is amazing. And then people will be like, yeah, but people don't have access to it. I'm like, they do. It's free. Here's the link. And they're like, yeah, but they don't have internet. And I'm like, here's the chart of internet penetration in America. Like, and they're like, well, poor people don't have internet. And I'm like, really? Find me any downtrodden person without a smartphone with a high speed connection that capitalism

• 26:14Speaker 01

  provided for $12 a month or $15 a month. Like, it's very hard to find that. And we have it so well in this country. And there's so much opportunity. But people don't believe it. And that's actually one of the problems. See, the average American still watches four or five hours of television a day. And often I meet people and they're like, I need a technical co-founder. And I, you know, but all I need is a million dollars. And I'm like, okay, well, what is your skill? And they don't have a skill. And I'm like, well, are you a designer? No. Are you a product manager? No. Are you a developer? No. Are you a sales executive? No. Okay, what are you? It's like, well, I have an idea. Well, as my friend Sam Harris, I think your friend as well, says like, everybody has like a million ideas an hour. Like, you don't really get credit for those.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Even when you're asleep, your idea is spewing ideas, like zero credit for your ideas. It's all about execution.

• 27:03Lex Fridman?

  You have to believe that you yourself can be the core of that execution. You yourself can build the thing and every, no matter what your circumstances are. I mean, we could talk about like structural racism and all those kinds of things that push things down. But from the individual perspective, when you just like are coaching or giving advice to an individual, you can literally change the world. I mean, Wall Street Bets is an indication of that in the financial space that you yourself can have, can change the world. That's why this country is amazing.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Still the best country in the world, right? I mean, it still is amazing, the opportunity provided to people. All this educational experience is online and the ability, what I tell young people who are looking for advice, I say, you know, you're, the skill you need to refine is the ability to learn new skills. Like if you become good at learning a new skill, and Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine, has really pioneered this, like, he can get to 60 or 70% of like the knowledge in a skill in some incredibly short period of time. Now, I'm not saying he's going to become a virtuoso drummer or a great basketball player, but Tim and I were on vacation together in like a group vacation in Italy and there was a basketball court. And I said, let's go, let's go shoot some hoops. I'd never shoot, shot before. And I was like, okay, come on, I'll, I'll teach you.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And Tim is fabulously uncoordinated. People don't know this.

• 28:19Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Like, he tried to dribble a basketball and do a layup. And it looked like he had a blindfold on. I mean, you've never seen something less elegant than Tim Ferriss doing a layup in basketball. And then he watched me do it three or four times. And I watched him study me. And listen, I've been playing basketball in Brooklyn since I was a kid. I got a couple of moves and he was just taking notes and taking notes and taking notes. And by the end of a couple of hours of doing this, I could just watch him checking his form and figuring it out. That's every skill in the world now. And what I tell people is like, I'm like, have you, did you watch Game of Thrones? And they're like, yeah. Watch Breaking Bad? Like, yeah, I'm like, okay, that's about 400 hours.

• 29:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  How about you don't watch the next two and you put that 400 hours into learning how to be a graphic designer, a UX person, a developer, whatever it is, and learn how to add skills. And that's what I did my whole life. I was a kid from Brooklyn, went to school at night, but I was very quick to get to maybe 50% of the knowledge base of graphic design, or being a writer, or being a sales executive, whatever it was, a developer even. And I was just good enough to not have people be able to bullshit me like when I hired them. And that was a big unlock. When you know enough that people can't snow you, that's a really good one. And look at yourself, like, you figured out how to set up an entire podcast, people don't know this, but you don't have a team around you. I have a team of like five, six people working on my podcast.

• 29:46Lex Fridman?

  But see, even knowing enough about to set this up, you would then be able to hire a team.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 29:51Lex Fridman?

  And you'll be able to call them on their bullshit if they're not doing a good job. And that's really important. And I don't know that much about this whole thing, but I know enough to be able to then see who knows their stuff or not. You're absolutely right. And then the process of learning how to learn is essential there because like I've, I did martial arts, jiu jitsu and so on. And it's so funny to watch.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I did Taekwondo, yeah.

• 30:12Lex Fridman?

  Taekwondo is awesome. It's funny that there's some people that do an activity for years, because I just sort of elaborated on something you were saying about hours. It's not always the amount of hours, it's the quality that you put in.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yes, deliberate practice versus just doing some behavior. I mean, literally, I've been playing chess and trying to get that going again after watching Queen's Gambit and I got chess.com. And I realized I was just playing and I'm not getting better. And then I was like, oh, wait, there's a little analysis feature here in chess.com where it will show you your blunders and mistakes. And I'm like, oh, I'm spending no time reviewing my losses in chess, and I just want to play the next game. I should really review these losses and figure out what mistakes I made. And when I started doing that, I was like, oh, I'm getting better. Right? So some deliberate practice really works.

• 30:57Lex Fridman?

  And if you want to take it all the way, Magnus Carlsen, shout out to the guy, has an app, but there's a few other coaching apps where you like focus on the end game, you focus drilling a particular, it's, you basically don't play the game at all. You just focus on drilling the different aspects.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  The openings, the end game, yeah.

• 31:14Lex Fridman?

  And there's different kinds of puzzles. So you can really make it into a deliberate practice.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Not to make this episode sponsored by chess.com, but they literally have puzzles.

• 31:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  So I was like, oh, and it's a hundred dollars a year for this product. And I just thought to myself, this is capitalism. They don't need to charge you a hundred dollars an hour for a lesson. They can charge you $100 and they've created the ability for you to play chess 24 hours a day against opponents who are perfectly matched against you based on your rating. And they analyze every game and they have puzzles and they have tutorials and they've got everything else. It's like, just think about how much value is being provided to society because of capitalism and because competition. If you want things to get better and you want to step up your game, just make it slightly competitive. It is one of these things in human existence that is so powerful. I don't know. Did you see the Michael Jordan

• 32:07Speaker 01

  documentary, The Last Dance? Like, half of it. Okay. I'm still working through it. I mean, he's so competitive. Yeah. And petty. Yeah. It's so inspiring that all he cares about is just winning to the level of which he literally, there's like this running meme, "I took that personally." And I took that personally. I don't know if you've seen the images of him sitting, smoking a cigar, looking at like an iPad or a video clip. And it's like, "I took that personally." And you can make a supercut of every time he took something personally. He literally takes everything personally to give himself that competitive motivation. Yeah. To win. That's capitalism. And when people are competing, man, look at what Elon did to the, the, the space of cars. Like every, they were literally laughing at him

• 32:50Speaker 01

  in the first 10 years. Electric cars, ha ha, that company will go out of business. And now every single company is like, "We're going fully electric by 2035." And he kicked their asses so brutally that they had no choice but then to step up their game. And that's what we want, right? And this virus and this pandemic, I think the, the, the great thing that will come out of this horrible experience that we've all had is psychologically, death, learning, just so many bad things occurred. The economy, people losing their jobs. But we also got to see the human spirit with these mRNA vaccines and just how if we took out some of the regulation and people were super motivated, we might actually be able to eliminate all.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Pandemics from ever happening again. And before that, Bill Gates was banging his fist and Jeff Skoll was doing the movie Contagion. I mean, for two decades, people have been banging their fist. We have to be prepared for this.

• 33:48Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And everybody's like, yeah, whatever. YOLO, it's not gonna happen. And now it's happened and people are like, we need to be able to destroy every, you know, pandemic and virus before it happens. And you're, listen, you know a lot more about science than I do, but these mRNA has been around for a while. We've just never gotten aggressive about doing it. And then you think about challenge trials. I don't know if you've been following this, but they're doing challenge trials now in the UK this month where they're introducing COVID into healthy young patients and then giving them the vaccine or, you know. And that is against all

• 34:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  rules and regulations about, you know, do no harm. But then you think about it, we kind of celebrate people jumping out of planes and we got that one guy, Alex Honnold, who's climbing up mountains without a rope and they give him a North Star, you know, back page ad and a, and a, you know, an endorsement deal.

• 34:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And we celebrate that. We celebrate people surfing with sharks. We celebrate people doing deep welding. We pay them extra to go 200 feet underground and weld stuff. And people do dangerous stuff all day long. Astronauts.

• 34:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  But we won't, soldiers, firefighters, but we won't let people get paid to be, do a challenge trial.

• 35:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we're rarely risk averse in certain areas that are completely don't make any sense.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  It doesn't, and this is where the world needs to be. We could have said, these thousand people, young people, who we know are in all likelihood not going to have a bad outcome, but there's a possibility.

• 35:18Lex Fridman?

  There's a possibility.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  But it's very low and it's certainly lower than riding a motorcycle.

• 35:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  It's lower than riding motorcycles. People riding motorcycles everywhere. We have ads for motorcycles. We could have just said to those thousand people, we'll give you a million dollars each to do this. Okay, there's your billion dollars. We, we're printing trillions of dollars of money to deal with this. If we had just done a thousand people for a million dollars each to do a challenge trial in March, April, May, when they had the mRNA vaccines ready. We could have deployed the vaccines in the summer. We would have been done with this. It would have been over by now. So we get to challenge all of that thinking. I think that's what the great pause did. It's letting everybody challenge that thinking is, why do we have that rule? Okay, yeah, we don't want to have people, you know, like, give up their organs for money. Like, we obviously understand, but there's a reasonable discussion about,

• 36:08Speaker 01

  well, maybe there's a level of risk in a global pandemic. I mean, we fought the Nazis. Right? We defeated the Nazis. That took a lot of deaths to do that, but we had to kill that evil. This is another evil which we must fight. And it's going to result in, it's already resulting in thousands of people dying a day, but we could have actually stopped it earlier if we just had a reasonable discussion. This is why podcasting is our respect what you do. This is why intelligent people are so drawn to podcasts, because you and I can expand on this and not cancel each other over this very suggestion. When I make this suggestion that are challenge trials reasonable or not? If I were to do that on Twitter, they'd be like, oh, Calacanis wants to give poor people coronavirus in order to save rich people. It's like, no, I didn't say that.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  But you and I could have a reasonable discussion about are challenge trials something we should consider in a acute situation where millions of people are going to lose their lives?

• 37:03Lex Fridman?

  Right. So, you know, that's an example of capitalism competition working really well. There's one of the, to me, sad thing to see about coronavirus is that, for example, testing at scale should have, it seems obvious. I was a little clueless about it, but because I thought there's no way you can have like antigen tests at hundreds of millions, like order hundreds of millions of them and make them cheap. But actually, I realized recently that there have been available since about like May.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:32Lex Fridman?

  You were able to.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  In Korea, in Finland, all over the place.

• 37:35Lex Fridman?

  And you could have done mass manufacture. So there, there's a little bit of a failure of capitalism to step up.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Lex Fridman?

  And I don't know if you agree with this, but it seems that the blame is to be placed at the regulators.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  And the various institutions.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Crony capitalism in all likelihood is what stopped it here in America. I mean,

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I had friends who had imported them from other countries, the testing kits. And you've probably been to parties where people had these kind of testing kits from other countries. And we're sitting here and they're just approving them now? Really? In February, month 11 of the pandemic in America, we're going to have testing online? Really? I mean, even if these tests were 80% effective, and they're 95% effective, mass producing them, we should have sent them in every postal, anybody with a post office box should have, with a mailing address, should have had 10 of them put in their mailing address, just for free from the government. And then everybody would be testing and we would have contained it. We don't have test and trace here in the United States. All the countries that are on the other side of COVID did it by having testing, tracing,

• 38:43Speaker 01

  and closing their borders and masks. That's the combination that works.

• 38:46Lex Fridman?

  The problem with the coronavirus is while there's a lot of institutions did not behave their best, it's also the case that there's a lot of uncertainty. So I tend to give a little bit of a pass to everybody involved for the uncertainty. We were all.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  I give them that until June.

• 39:04Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how history will remember this whole period. I'd love to ask you, because you were an early investor in Robinhood, and you're in a very nice place of being a huge supporter of the sort of Wall Street Bets kind of distributed power of the people. And at the same time, because of you being an investor, intellectually giving a chance to Robinhood in this kind of chaotic time of conversations to think about like, well, what did they do right? What did they do wrong?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:39Lex Fridman?

  So you have a kind of a balanced view on the whole thing, which is really nice. Is there, we've talked about what Robinhood did right, I think. Can you sort of steel man Chiarot's argument?

• 39:52Lex Fridman?

  Of what Robin Hood did wrong in the last few days.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, their communication is always the number one issue with these startups, right? And if you you have to get ahead of any problem and you have to put all the bad news out immediately. And in the case of Robin Hood, it seems, based on what, you know, has been in the papers and what Robin Hood said publicly, is that they had this kind of liquidity crisis, right? Where they were being, because of these exchanges telling them, you have to put up this amount of money in collateral, and them being pinned at number one in the App Store. There were so many people trying to buy five shares of this stock, five shares of this meme stock, that it kind of broke their system. And then the people who clear the trades for them, they said, you got to put up a billion dollars, two billion dollars, three billion dollars. Well, you can't do that overnight. And I

• 40:37Speaker 01

  think that they were in uncomfortable situation of like going on TV and saying, we have a liquidity crisis? Like, that could be like a run on the bank. Everybody then logs in at the same time to Robin Hood and tries to sell every share they own because they're afraid that the whole thing's going to collapse, right? So I think there was this kind of like, black swan event. And they probably didn't communicate it all that well.

• 40:58Lex Fridman?

  At the center of that, this is really interesting. Maybe you can comment on the nature of communication. Vlad, the CEO, the guy you met at the bar, was at the, I think, at the center of the communication, right? So Elon is an example of a guy who also is at the center of the communication for his particular set of companies. And that, you know, on Twitter, seems to be a really powerful way to communicate. And there was something, this is me saying it, there was something about Vlad that sounded like he's hiding stuff. As opposed to Elon, it doesn't sound like he's hiding stuff. It could be the nature, the beat, the timing of the conversation. Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg,

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  for some reason, often sounds like he's hiding something. And then there's like Jack Dorsey, is much less so. And I don't know what that is about the CEOs that makes you trust them and not.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity. You know, there might be non disclosures in place that we're not aware of, where they're not allowed to talk about certain relationships.

• 42:05Lex Fridman?

  I see. And that results, like in Vlad's case, and that results in you being like, acting weird and nervous.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Or nervous. Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous, you know? So it's really hard to be building one of these companies and you're at scale and, you know, Oh my Lord, the entire thing's coming apart and you're the most hated person for that day. You know how the rage cycle works and the media is just so crazy when they get their hooks into something. I saw it happen with Uber. We saw it happen with Facebook and even Tesla. You know, there were times when people did stupid things with autopilot and it's like, okay, somebody's watching a movie and sleeping in their car or leaving the driver's seat against all the rules of autopilot and somehow Tesla's responsible for that. It's like, we have people who stand on top of their motorcycles and drive down the road on a motorcycle and we don't blame Yamaha or Harley-Davidson for some idiot standing

• 42:58Speaker 01

  on the seat of their motorcycle on a highway going 60 miles an hour. We just say, that person's an idiot. But when new technology comes out, we blame the technology, not the person operating it. And if you are going to operate, we basically vilify it and demonize. And I think that is part of it. Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb, we always thought, what if somebody trashes your apartment? And then sure enough, a bunch of meth heads rented this poor woman's apartment. She left all of her stuff in it. And then a bunch of meth heads had a drug party, destroyed her apartment, ripped up all her photos and went crazy. And we knew that day would happen, but nobody remembers it now. But it was the number one story on every news channel because wow, that's an exciting story. And

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I just thought to myself, I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms where the hotel room's being trashed and people are doing drugs and crazy things. It's like, yes, that's basically every hotel in Los Angeles right now is being destroyed by some rock band that's throwing a TV out the window. Like we expected in a hotel, we just didn't expect it in somebody's house with Airbnb. And then Airbnb created rules around, you can't rent an Airbnb for a party. And they learned. So I think there's a learning curve with these companies and they do get to scale at a level that is unprecedented. It used to take decades for a company to become an international phenomenon. Now it happens in two, three, four years. I mean, look at Clubhouse. This thing went from being a private

• 44:21Speaker 01

  beta six months ago to being the number one app in Germany and in Japan and here. Like just like that, boom. And it's because there's an ecosystem that has never existed, the App Store. Then there's payments online. And then everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket. When we, the thing people got wrong about entrepreneurship, technology,

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And business, you know, over the last couple of decades was just how big the market was. And then how quickly you could, um, you know, achieve relevancy in these markets.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  We thought the market was like the 60 million homes with broadband. And originally it was like maybe 10 or 20, then it became 60 million. Then I was like, okay, well, how many, how many hours are you at your desktop computer? Well, like probably at our computers for five hours a day, 10 hours a day at work, three hours a day on our own. And then I was like, yeah, nobody's on their desktop computer. Everybody's on their mobile phone and, oh, and by the way, they have it with them. So the people with mobile phones are now using this high speed device with an app store with their credit card in it.

• 45:22Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  In the early days of the internet, people were scared to put their credit card on the internet. That was considered a really dumb thing to do. If you put your credit card on the internet, you're gonna lose all your money. They're gonna, they're gonna hack you or whatever. And now it's just amazing to me how quickly when a company hits, how quickly it can get to a million subscribers or 10 million or a billion users, right?

• 45:42Lex Fridman?

  And there's all these networks, like social networks that allow the spread of the viral spread of like a new startup, a new company, a new app to be announced.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  A meme, anything, an idea, a podcast, right?

• 45:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, single thing, it just, a single meme could change the world. Speaking of Clubhouse, I mean, I just wanna, we're saying so many interesting things, but there, there was a magical moment with Vlad and Elon on Clubhouse.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  That was wild.

• 46:07Lex Fridman?

  Yes, is there, do you have thoughts about that interaction? Which felt like so many aspects of this whole situation feels like totally novel, surreal, like it's defining a new era.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  It is, yes.

• 46:23Lex Fridman?

  Like a billionaire, the richest human on earth is interviewing,

• 46:29Lex Fridman?

  the person at the center of one of the most interesting mass scale, like, uh, power battles in finance ever, perhaps.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And by the way, seven movies have been sold.

• 46:43Lex Fridman?

  And just that.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Two weeks. Just think about how fast things are moving, Lex. This thing happens.

• 46:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Like, people had the idea to short the stock six months ago. They start doing their research, they build an army, they execute the trade. The system goes down. Robin Hood raises three and a half billion dollars in four days. Elon is interviewing them on Clubhouse on Sunday after the Wednesday it happened. And now here we are, it's 10 days later.

• 47:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Doesn't it feel like it's been 10 months?

• 47:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  It's been 10 days, Lex.

• 47:13Lex Fridman?

  It's been 10 days.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  10 days.

• 47:15Lex Fridman?

  Plus, there's like a new president, all these things, and everyone forgot, like, what?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  There was an insurrection. By the way, we also almost had a revolution at the Capitol where a bunch of crazy people who have guns and body armor, and then a bunch of them who are just YOLOing in cosplay.

• 47:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Took over the Capitol.

• 47:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, so, and the other more dramatic thing to me is...

• 47:35Speaker 01

  That was one month ago.

• 47:36Lex Fridman?

  That was one month, and the President, the President of the United States got banned from every major social network. And, uh, which I think I'm still, uh, deeply troubled by is Parler being removed from AWS. That changed the way I, that changed a lot of things. As, as somebody who's an aspiring entrepreneur, that changed the way I see the world. That little, maybe I'm being over dramatic, but...

• 48:01Speaker 01

  No, you're not. I think you're paranoid for a reason. You're paranoid for a very good reason, which is, as big as these companies can become, they are beholden to the mob. And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled, they're going to get canceled because you can't lose your entire audience. You could lose your whole customer base, and you could lose all your employees. I think what's interesting about your fear about Parler and AWS taking off is we went from being like a social network, which is, you know, the software layer. And then we went to like the infrastructure layer, you know? And they'll even go after like CloudFlare, which is a CDN provider, right? They're just like a plumbing, you know, it's like, sort of like the telephone. So we're, we're basically holding everybody responsible on the whole chain of events here.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And what that's going to do is, you know, I'm not a huge believer in crypto, but distributed computing, um, where nobody, and decentralized and distributed computing platforms, um, and open standards. Podcasting's an open standard, the web is an open standard, FTP was an open standard, but Twitter and, you know, uh, Facebook are closed.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And what's going to happen is we will see a group of individuals create peer-to-peer networks for social media where nobody can control it. And the same for cloud computing, where, you know, there's a crypto project where everybody will, and I invested in a company that tried to do this and got sold and it didn't work out. But take your hard drive on your computer at home, you give, you know, a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive over to the cloud. And then everybody else does their terabyte. And then all of a sudden, you've got this virtual cloud and anybody can store stuff on it and it's all encrypted and then nobody can stop it. And that could be tweets, it could be videos. And so this idea that, you know, YouTube will be able to tell people, to kick people

• 49:49Speaker 01

  off because they're skeptics of, I don't know, the pandemic or the vaccine, or they've, you know, they'll make things that are more censorship resistant. I think that'll be the reaction to all of this.

• 49:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is my question for you, going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you. Is there, like with Clubhouse, do you see competitors, do you think it's possible that another, perhaps more decentralized, or another kind of social media will emerge that will take on Twitter and Facebook and might be able to replace them? If you look at the whole landscape, with Clubhouse and everything else, do you think some other company might emerge?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  There'll be 10 versions of Clubhouse. We looked at social networking, we thought Friendster was it. Like Friendster was so good, nobody would be able to compete with that, it was growing so quickly. And then MySpace was a juggernaut and they hit 100 million in revenue and 100 million users. And it was like, well, that's game over. And then Facebook and LinkedIn and Snapchat and FriendFeed and countless others, you know. So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category and 80% of the category will be owned by the top two or three players.

• 50:55Lex Fridman?

  But will those players change, do you think? What's your sense?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, if we, if Facebook hadn't bought Instagram, it would be a company in decline right now. People would be shorting the stock, right? Facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down. And Instagram saved them and WhatsApp saved them. So, you know, that's another kind of weird moment in history that they were able to accumulate that much power and consolidate that much power. Instagram should have never sold to them. That should have gone public. They had just raised money from Sequoia. And they had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation and they didn't need to sell. And that was a big mistake to sell. They should have kept going and they should have took on Facebook. And if Instagram was a standalone company right now, it'd be worth 500 million.

• 51:33Lex Fridman?

  Do you think?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  500 billion, yeah.

• 51:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Facebook might buy Clubhouse has been?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  They'll probably copy it. I mean, Zuckerberg has no moral compass or ethics or anything. I mean, he's a marauder. I mean, he basically copied Snapchat seven times.

• 51:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Like he did Poke and he just kept trying and trying and trying. And it's part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders and the Instagram founders left is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful in terms of his ability to copy.

• 51:59Lex Fridman?

  What do you, what do you think makes a great leader in that sense? Cause okay, so when I look at Zuckerberg.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  He's a great executor.

• 52:07Lex Fridman?

  Is he a great executor?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I don't think he's a great leader.

• 52:09Lex Fridman?

  I was bullish on, I was excited to buy Facebook in the very early days. I thought it was an exciting opportunity to connect people and stuff started going wrong in certain kinds of ways. And again, maybe it's our human nature, but I attribute a lot of that to the leadership.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, the guy started it because he was unable to ask girls if they were single and on a date. I mean, that was this explicit.

• 52:32Lex Fridman?

  Be a good motivator. That could be a good.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it does. I mean, the motivation of 18, 19 year old men is, yeah, pretty clear. He was just trying, he had no game. He had no game and he needed to know who was single. So he could, you know, at least have a shot at getting a date.

• 52:48Lex Fridman?

  A little creepy, a little creepy. Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  You know, he, he, I think was so obsessed with engagement and winning. And he's, he's kind of like one of those friends you have who's just really good at playing a video game, but maybe doesn't see the bigger picture in life. And I mean, there's a reason why everybody who worked for him hates him and doesn't talk to him anymore. And then actively derides him, like so many, the people who sold WhatsApp to him, then backed other projects like Telegram and said horrible things about him on the way out. And these are the people who made billionaires and they really don't like him. So I think there is something that he does that does not breed loyalty. But he's very successful in his focus, which is growth is all that matters. He's a marauder and taking friction out of products and processes is the playbook of Silicon Valley for the last decade or two.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  So whatever the friction is.

• 53:36Lex Fridman?

  Poetry, what you're saying right outside. You're speaking so fast that I almost forget that you're, you're dropping bombs. But so removing the, removing friction and you're saying Facebook is exceptionally good.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  He was the best at it. I mean, at Uber, they were like. We're going to take out tipping. We're going to take out the need for you to take out your credit card and do payment. It's just going to be in your wallet. You got picked up, you leave, that's it. And I was like, we should have tipping. And they're like, it adds a step. And we're trying to have no steps. You put your address in, you click the button, and you do nothing else. And so we've been obsessed here in Silicon Valley is how many clicks can we take out of the process?

• 54:12Lex Fridman?

  I guess Amazon is incredible at that as well.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. One click was the start of it. And then you look at Clubhouse as an example, you open Clubhouse and you see rooms, you click on it, you're listening. So in one click, you're listening. And then in one click, if you raise your hand, you get invited, and you say yes, you're speaking. So it's two clicks to speak, one click to listen.

• 54:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I mean, the only way they could make that app work even faster is if you opened it up and your microphone was turned on and you, which is

• 54:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Kind of scary, but that is the next evolution. And what happens when you go that fast is you get unintended consequences. And so this is why Facebook has had more fines than any company in the history of Silicon Valley, just giant fines for doing stuff like this. And one of them was, I don't know if you remember when they created groups, or if you have a group for your podcast, but you know, you can just add people to a group without their permission. And there was this famous case when they first came out with it. Somebody created a NAMBLA fake group, National Men Love Boy Association, or whatever, like pedophilia association. And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself, and like 20 other famous people in Silicon Valley. And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it, and they're like, you're in NAMBLA? And I'm like, no.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Facebook, and then Zuckerberg's response was, well, if your friends put you in that NAMBLA group, you should get new friends. And it was like, you got put in there too.

• 55:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  And then the sad part about it was, there were a group of young men who were gay and who were in college, and there was a gay choir in their college, and the person who was coordinating their Facebook group added them. So Zuckerberg, it wasn't enough for Zuckerberg to make it so anybody could add anybody to any group, because it will grow faster, let alone you have to confirm you want to be added to the group. What it also did was posted it on their walls to increase engagement. And what they inadvertently did was they outed a bunch of 18, 19 year olds in college to their families. Because they joined the gay men's choir at some college. And this is the kind of way, you know, this is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself

• 56:11Speaker 01

  and to do better, is you have to really think, well, there is my incentive to grow faster. And then there's what's right for society and for the individual. You gotta think it through, think it through.

• 56:22Lex Fridman?

  It's sometimes very difficult. This is where vision is required to anticipate the unintended consequences. And it seems like Mark Zuckerberg is not very good at that. Hey, you've talked to so many great leaders in this world privately and publicly. What do you think makes a great leader of these tech companies? Is, do you have an example? Like, is Elon to you a great leader? He's also a controversial one, right? There's

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:50Lex Fridman?

  There's a love and hate, controversial in the sense that there is, and I know a lot of people who've worked with him, for him, that there's also a love hate relationship. The hate comes from the fact that they get pushed extremely hard. It's a, it's a very competitive environment, but it's, but it's a positive one because it's, there's a vision that's underlying. It's similar to the Steve Jobs thing. And it has to do with the, back to our Michael Jordan discussion as well, that there seems to be the demons involved and tension and just

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:25Lex Fridman?

  Anxiety, all those kinds of things.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  If you want to do great things, there will be some suffering. And, you know, there'll be some pain and it's not easy if you want to change the world. And then some people have this expectation that it's going to be easy. And what you'll typically find for any great leader who's trying to do something super ambitious, like if you want to be like, if you're a rich guy and you start like a restaurant and you don't care about making money and people have made restaurants before, like you could be high fives and everybody could love you, whatever. But if you want to change the world, you want to do something hard driving, there's going to be sacrifice involved. And so the problem is people are looking at something that is an Olympic caliber sport or a Navy SEALs like effort.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice. We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal like Michael Phelps and say, oh, my God, he had to get up at 4:00 AM every day and he had to swim and he had to do an ice bath. Oh, my God, that poor guy, he suffered, he was tortured. People were super mean to him. They put him in an ice bath. It was like, no, he wanted to be the greatest swimmer of all time and he knew what the sacrifice entailed. And then what happens in work, in business, is that people conflate like, oh, well, I went to work to make a living to pay my bills versus Michael Phelps' approach to getting gold medals, or Michael Jordan, or pick the person, Elon, or Jeff Bezos. And when you look at the reviews of like a place like Amazon, there was this incredible

• 58:55Speaker 01

  story in the New York Times where people were, I don't know if you remember it, this is the worst place you could ever work, Amazon. And we talked to 200 people and they all told us, they all described for us in the New York Times, a culture of cutthroatness and brutality that has never before been seen. And then you see all these people who worked for Bezos for 24 years, from when they graduated with their MBAs until today. And they've never left the company and they are ride or die forever. And what you're seeing there is, there's a mismatch of people going to work in an extreme sport or an extreme endeavor who should not do that. There are people who should go out into the

• 59:38Speaker 01

  rice fields and pick rice. And then there's another group of people who are samurai and who wield a sword and who take on missions that are dangerous. But if you're a rice picker and that's what you do and you feel safe, just, you know, getting a couple grains of rice, put them in a basket, cleaning it, and then, you know, whatever, that's valid work. No big deal. I'm not deriding and I'm sort of, but that is one group. And then there's people who are samurai. And you cannot conflate the two. You cannot compare the two. And that's what is happening right now in business. Whenever you see these stories about this person at this company is like a tyrant and they're so horrible and they yelled at somebody, like if you're in the field and you're taking the beach at Normandy

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  and it's D-Day, or, you know, you gotta take the hill or you gotta whack Osama bin Laden and you're the Navy SEALs and like a rudder, a rotor gets knocked off the back of the Black Hawk. Like, this is serious shit. Like, don't do it if you're not serious.

• 1:00:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  And if you're not serious about changing the world, why would you go work for Bezos? Why would you go work for Elon Musk? Don't do it. Don't go work there.

• 1:00:44Lex Fridman?

  Uh, this is, this is, uh, let me just sit back and enjoy the beauty of, uh,

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean,

• 1:00:49Lex Fridman?

  all of that. That's music to my ears, but I'm not sure what to do with it because it, it, it's conflicting to a lot of the things I hear from the way you're supposed to kind of act. And, uh, I, I think in order to do great things, you have to, I, I always admired people that lose their shit a little bit because they're so passionate.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Lex Fridman?

  And, and like, you know, you know, and apologize and all those kinds of things, but like, there's a tension, there's a drama to the creative process when, especially in the early startup. You know, you're not, this is not like the work-life balance idea doesn't even apply.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Work-life balance, ridiculous.

• 1:01:29Lex Fridman?

  It's, yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  It's a ridiculous concept. Like, the idea that there's like work-life balance in a startup is ridiculous. If you're looking for work-life balance, do not go to a startup or any kind of ambitious company. There is a series of places you can work in the world.

• 1:01:43Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Where you do not need to do anything more than what's put in front of you. And you just put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole, pole, and you go home. And you get your, like, you know, you, you get your little, you know, bits and grains of rice and you, you go heat them up and eat them. That's it. And then there's this other thing, which is the extreme pursuit of changing the world and sacrificing. And we have a generation of people, or multi-generations of people who are soft. They're just soft. I mean, what is the big struggle we've had to deal with in America in our lifetimes? Like 9/11 and we, we didn't have the Vietnam War and then we had this like weird Iraq wars and Middle East wars that were

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  kind of like a small number of people went and we sent drones. Like, we have not had to sacrifice. Gen Xers, you know, maybe the tail end of boomers experienced the Vietnam War, regrettably. But, you know, we've had a couple of generations now, three, I guess, that just haven't had to suffer.

• 1:02:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  And so we're soft as Americans. We're soft. And then you look at people in China and we're like, oh my God, these poor Chinese people are living in these tiny cramped apartments. Like, they were living. In like essentially lean to's in northern China with no running water or like one spigot of ice cold water for the entire village like they're thrilled to be joining the middle class even if it's the bottom of the middle class right they've taken hundreds of millions of people in China and moved them into the middle class and we're like oh my god these people are suffering it's like you know they're up to four dollars an hour three or four dollars an hour in the factories there and they were just two decades ago at you know I don't know it was probably 50 cents an hour something crazy like that and now they've improved

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  the quality of life there so much just like America did 200 years ago or 100 years ago they've improved it so much in China that now they're getting outpriced for factories from Vietnam Sri Lanka Pakistan India and people are moving and people in China are moving the factories out of China into other countries

• 1:03:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam and other countries so this is the way of the world you know people move up and they get a better lot in life for their families and just in America we've gotten soft and there's a generation and how do people die in America now suicide obesity heart attacks anxiety I mean we're suffering from things that if you told people 100 years ago that the number the top ways Americans would die would be overeating and suicide they'd be like what you're literally killing yourself or eating yourself to death that's what's happening in America

• 1:04:17Lex Fridman?

  And and when everybody not everybody on mass there's a large number of people who have become softer and softer capitalism creates an environment where there is people that still step up amidst that with a big dream and challenge the conventions and that human spirit just arise above that is Elon's example that Jeff Bezos example

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Countless countless examples

• 1:04:38Lex Fridman?

  And and they push you know the limits of those of human beings that are willing to step up and you know I I you know I think about sort of how to create a company that that amidst all of this softness

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah

• 1:04:55Lex Fridman?

  still creates a revolution it's not it doesn't seem trivial it seems like how do you build a culture that's once healthy but also unhealthy in the way that

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  It's all top down

• 1:05:09Lex Fridman?

  pursuit is

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  It's all top down everybody just you asked earlier what leadership was and I never answered the question I think you know what leaders do is they set the example they set the bar And if you look at someone like Elon, you know, we're personal friends for 20 years. And he is indefatigable. Like, I mean, the guy has a stamina that is just phenomenal. Like, he does not get tired. He works relentlessly. And he sets that standard for the rest of the team. And I think, you know, Bezos is very sharp and likes to debate stuff and is very, you know, and Jobs was just incredible at design and figuring out how to bridge that gap. So they just, leaders set the standard. They set the standard. And you know that your time is over as a leader when you can't set the standard. And that's when you have

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  to pass the baton, right? And Bezos did that. And Bezos now is saying, you know what? I'm 57. I'm the richest guy on the planet, depending on the week. And I would like to do some other challenges. But I don't want to grind it out at Amazon for another 25 years. I want to do other things. And so he passed the baton. And that's the healthy thing to do in that regard. I do think there is a time period in which you can run that hot. And then at a certain point, you have to then change, just like an athlete might go to be a coach, right? And you, or a commentator. And so, you know, being an entrepreneur is brutal. It's, you know, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Anybody who says anything differently is kidding themselves. You're going to have to sacrifice if you, and there's

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  competition. And America has to fight. If America does not win capitalism, and China does, it is literally the end of the human species. It's, it's over for humanity. Right now, everything has been going really well in terms of the number of people living in poverty is plummeting. A life, you know, lifespans have been rising. Science is booming. The economy is booming. All these things are incredible. The one thing that's kind of stagnant right now is the number of people living in democracy versus under authoritarian rule. It's flat. So when you look at all Steve Pinker's charts and he's really excited, there's one you're going to see that's flat. And I think we peaked with 53 or 54% of people on the planet

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Earth being in a democracy. And now it's going below 50. And it's because some of the democratic, you know, Western countries don't have the population growth of some of the communist and socialist countries, and authoritarian countries. And we have to make sure that we're, we win capitalism. We must win economically. That is the battlefield. The battlefield of science, technology, and money, and economy, finance. That's the battlefield. China wins.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Authoritarians win. And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room and say, "It's time for you to be reeducated." Or they can put three or four million people, Uighurs, into prison camps and say, "You know what? This religious thing, that's counter to what is productive for us. Therefore, we're going to shave your heads and we're going to have you literally pick cotton in the fields." They have Uighurs with no sense of any kind of arc of history in the fields, picking cottons as slaves in what can only be described by every humanitarian organization as a concentration camp. And every Jewish person I know takes great offense when somebody uses the Holocaust as a metaphor, except in the case of the

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Uighurs right now. And every Jewish person I've talked to has said to me, "That is a Holocaust. That is millions of people going to genocide because of their religious beliefs." And I'm an atheist, but if people want to believe a certain religion, fine. But China's approach is, "We need to win capitalism so bad, we need to win on the global stage so bad, we can't have any of this religious stuff going on here." That is a distraction from winning and beating America. And then in America, the people who are going to make us win are the entrepreneurs, and the scientists, and the technology, and our education system, and finance. And we're vilifying those things. It's pretty dark.

• 1:09:05Lex Fridman?

  It's dark, but I still believe that the vilification is just in the space of Twitter, in the space of ideas.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  I think that's probably a good.

• 1:09:12Lex Fridman?

  And entrepreneurs win out in the end. They don't listen to that.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  I believe that.

• 1:09:16Lex Fridman?

  And they'll build, "We'll get the rocks up."

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Some of them do, actually. In their darkest moments, I can tell you that they turn off their Twitter accounts and they... I've had to sit down with a number of entrepreneurs and say, "Turn off Twitter. This is not healthy for you. This is not a healthy pursuit." Because, don't read the comments. If you do, it's like a full-contact sport. You should just take it as like professional wrestling or something. But stay focused on building companies and advancing the human species through science and technology. I mean...

• 1:09:44Lex Fridman?

  As you're describing, you've hosted this week in startups for how many episodes?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  11 years, almost 1,200 now.

• 1:09:51Lex Fridman?

  1,200. So you've talked to some of the great leaders in business in general. Is there a common... Thing that you see or

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Really messed up relationship with their parents. Like just find me a great entrepreneur. I will show me the trauma. Their dad was like, you're not good enough.

• 1:10:11Lex Fridman?

  In the teenage years, is that, is that truly, is there something?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  There is definitely something.

• 1:10:16Lex Fridman?

  Like hardship of at some point in their life.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, and there's definitely something with immigrant parents. That is a bit of a stereotype out here, but I've heard from many investors like that's like their. Oh, did you, are you, were your parents immigrants and did they beat into you that you have to succeed? And you feel the need to succeed because they suffered to get you to this country. Like there is an archetype there that I hear. When I started investing, I heard from a lot of people was like, yeah, you want to find those immigrant founders who are coming out of Stanford because they had to fight to get there. And their parents had to fight, right? So it's like two huge fights and there's so much at stake as opposed to somebody who's fifth generation and like had everything handed to them and they were legacy and got into schools for free. But I think in general, the ability to get people to join you on that journey.

• 1:11:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Is so critical. So you have to be charismatic and it doesn't mean like you're an extrovert. There are introverts who are super charismatic. And there are soft spoken people. They don't have to be like super vivacious or rambunctious people. They could be just quiet assassins, but you need to be able to get people to come on the journey with you. You have to be that storyteller and you have to have that passion. And then you have to transfer that enthusiasm to investors, the press, to customers, to all the stakeholders. And if you're enthusiastic about it and you're engaged, then it's easier for people to come on that journey. And that's why people really start to think about, well, what is the purpose of what I'm doing? And it sounds corny and I, when I first heard that, I was like, it's kind of corny.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  But then I read this book by, I've got his name, Rick something. He wrote the purpose driven church. And he had spoken at a TED or something and everybody went crazy about it. And he's like, a church should have one purpose, one single thing they do. And like his church, which was like one of these mega churches in San Diego, just wanted to do education for this specific country. And that's all they did and they just, they benchmarked this. I think it's very important to have a purpose and a mission, not everything. But you know, a specific purpose of some kind of joy that you want to put into the world, you want to solve some kind of big, hard problem. And then everybody knows why you're coming to work every day. And then for the founder, when you dread going to

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  work that day, and you don't feel like solving that problem anymore, that's the, that's the tell. And a lot of times I meet young founders, I'm like, why are you doing this? And they're like, well, I was looking for an idea. And this is the one I came up with because I think I'll make a lot of money. And it's like, you're gonna quit. You're gonna get to month nine or 10 of this, and you're gonna run out of money, or like, your CTO is gonna quit, then your CFO is gonna quit, and you're gonna lose your biggest customer, and you're just gonna say this is not worth it. You know, and if, you know, using, you know, Bezos, or, you know, Elon's examples, they, they just needed to see this, the world change for, in very specific ways. And Steve Jobs, you know, they needed to see a change. And it doesn't matter if they made money, or they were losing or winning, they just

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  went to work every day, and they had to change it.

• 1:13:12Lex Fridman?

  It's almost like they didn't have a choice.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  No choice.

• 1:13:15Lex Fridman?

  Elon makes it sound like it's torture, his whole journey, but he can't help it.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Having been a witness to it, you know, just as friends for, for that long, I have never seen an entrepreneur suffer more than him. And, you know, he's been public about that, like, you do not want to be me. He has suffered to, for those companies. He has suffered to get them where they are. It has not been easy.

• 1:13:37Lex Fridman?

  Can you second analyze Elon in that aspect? Like, is there, is it just he can't help it? He must see the change that he hopes for in the world?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  He's just incredibly hardworking, and he's very talented as well. And I don't think people understand that. He actually is a really brilliant engineer. At the end of the day, he actually knows what he's doing. And he asked the right questions. I mean, people were kind of aghast that he was asking Vlad such good questions. And they're like, oh, my God, Elon's the best journalist on the planet. And it was like, anybody who knows Elon knows he asks great questions. I mean, I've been, I used to have dinner in LA. And my book agent also was Sam Harris's agent and Sam and I met through John Brockman and we became friends because we lived near each other and I was friends with Elon. And then I used to invite them to both dinner in Brentwood because one lived in Bel Air,

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  one lived in Santa Monica and I lived in Brentwood and we would go to this place, Paponi, it's Italian restaurant. And every Tuesday for years, we would just, the three of us, every other Tuesday or so, we'd have dinner. And I'd sit there and Sam wanted to know about AI and Elon's talking about artificial intelligence because he's on the board of DeepMind and Elon wanted to know about atheism and meditation and all this other stuff that, you know, Sam was an expert on. I got to sit there and like, just listen to these two guys talk.

• 1:14:56Lex Fridman?

  And they have both piercing intelligences, but Elon, he goes straight to the gut, like the questions that no engineer wants to hear is like, just the basic stuff that it's like, why the hell are you doing it this way?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Lex Fridman?

  When the obvious solution is like much easier or this or that, like, why haven't you tried this?

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  He can figure things out. I mean, he's a problem solver. I mean, and that's another thing, like, I think the great entrepreneurs can look at a problem with very fresh eyes, like almost consistently. And Bezos described that as day one thinking, right? Like, just pretend this is day one every day.

• 1:15:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  And then other people use the term first principles.

• 1:15:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  But it basically means like, when you see a problem, pause for a second and really think through what is the best possible solution here? What are some alternative solutions and get from everybody? Like, how do we solve this problem? And what people do sometimes, they get in a rut. They just come to work and they just go through their email, they do whatever they did the day before, they don't think, why are we doing this?

• 1:15:55Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  And is there a better way to do it? Now, you can get so obsessive about that, that you can over engineer stuff and you can never actually ship a product.

• 1:16:03Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  So there have to be some pragmatism and some goals and some dates associated with that, but it is a very cool thing to really think like. I wonder if we actually made the batteries ourselves, what that would look like. Or I wonder if we could get to two day shipping, you know, or I wonder if we do same day shipping. Like you need to have somebody who's willing to say, you know what? Fuck it. Let's set a crazy audacious goal. Two day shipping of any product, anywhere in the United States. And once you throw the gauntlet down like that, now everybody knows they're rowing in the right direction, two day shipping, Amazon Prime. And that's what people didn't realize about Amazon. The business wasn't the shipping of those products. It was getting you to sign up for Amazon Prime. Then they have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime for 10 bucks a month.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  I think globally it's probably cheaper, but that was the driver of that business was all of those people. Cause they would, you're an Amazon Prime subscriber? Do you know how much you pay?

• 1:16:57Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. It started at $50 and I think they even had like 40, 50, $60 was like the testing in the early days. And now it's, I think $149.12, $13 a month. If you pay for the year, I think it goes down to 10 bucks a month, 120. And you're like, wow. And it's like, yeah, you're paying $13 a month for the privilege of shopping at Amazon. But you would, you say it's the greatest thing in the world because anything I need, you know, if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad or a camera goes bad, you get it here, you know, within a day or less.

• 1:17:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  It's pretty amazing.

• 1:17:30Lex Fridman?

  You've already been dropping bombs, incredible advice on startups in general. But let me maybe go straight in and ask, is there advice for somebody that wants to go big? To build the big startup to help them succeed?

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very similar to the advice I give to investors because now I, I teach angel investing because there's so many people want to invest. And so I wrote a book on that angel, and then I do a course called Angel University that I teach six times a year. And then I have a syndicate called the syndicate.com where I invest in companies. There's 6,500 people who are members of that. It's the largest syndicate in the world. In fact, the first deal we ever did was calm.com. The meditation app, we put $378,000 into it when it was a $5 million product, a $5 million company. So we bought six or seven percent of the company. It's now worth $2 billion. So you can do the math on that. We still own 5%.

• 1:18:17Lex Fridman?

  What year was that?

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Six years ago, so probably seven, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014. And nobody else would invest in calm.

• 1:18:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  But Sam Harris was the reason I did because I asked Sam.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Tell me about meditation. And he's explaining it to me. And I said, what about this? Like, you have to have like a mantra? How does it work exactly? I know positive. He's like, well, you know, you should just go to UCLA and talk to Diana Winston. And like, there's this whole project there. And I'm like, UCLA does meditation? So yeah, there's a mindful institute there, like teaching people to be to teach meditation. And they're doing PTSD and I'm doing brain scans. And I was like, oh. And then I talked to the UCLA people and they're like, it's real. Yeah, like we, we taught Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal did.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  You know, that's how they won their championships. They meditated. And I was like, hmm. If UCLA is doing it, Sam says it's cool. Well, fuck it. I'll put money into that. And that's the second biggest investment in my career after Uber. And it will in all likelihood, become the biggest. I mean, it's between Uber, Robin Hood and Calm. And long story short, when I'm teaching people to angel invest, there's really two things that you cannot cannot fake. One is a product that is built really well. So if you look at Calm, Robin Hood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, these products are transcendent. They're well constructed. There's craftsmanship to them. They're, they're great products.

• 1:19:37Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying not fundamentally like the idea, but the execution of the actual craftsmanship of the construction?

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  The actual product is amazing. Then there's customers. And that every business has ultimately a customer and that customer, if they are in fact delighted by that product, that's the magic. Because you need a team to build the product. And then you need customers to use the product. And really, those three vectors are undeniable. Now, you can have great teams that build a bad product. Doesn't happen too often. Or you could have customers who don't like the product. But generally speaking, a great team will build a great product or a good product that iterate and then eventually delight customers.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  And so, most people say the team is the most important, but there's a lot of smart people out there. And let's assume that you can have, you can raise money for your idea, or you have money, or you can just convince people to do it for free. If you make a great product and it connects with users, that's the magic. You look at Clubhouse, it's actually a really well-designed product. And that product is connecting with customers. And if you were to talk to the customers, or look at the product, you would see a well-constructed product and a delighted customer. And you can tell the delighted customer by just the amount of time they use it. That's called engagement. It's a fancy word for how much they use it. And Snapchat, when that was going around, and they were trying to raise money, they had a fraction of the number of users. But the top, maybe third, were opening

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  the app every hour. And that, nobody had ever seen that before. People were using Facebook, you know, a couple of times a day, the top users. But nobody had ever seen people using it every day, for 100 days in a row, every hour. And I was like, what's going on here? I was like, oh, the ephemeral messaging, and then the streaks. They had created these streaks between people where, you know, every day, and then people would be like on vacation, like, I just have to open my streak and keep my streak with Lex, that we chatted every day going. And so they had this like addictive nature to it. And that's why Clubhouse was able to garner so much investment, is the number of hours people were using it every month, was just unbelievably off the charts.

• 1:21:50Lex Fridman?

  Some of that is execution, but some of it is the weird magic of the

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Product market fit.

• 1:21:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So there's something, I mean, Clubhouse, there's a, it's still a mystery to me, because I also use Discord voice. There's an intimacy to voice.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Well, you've got people's, yeah, tent.

• 1:22:07Lex Fridman?

  It's, well, but like, the video gets in the way, actually, in a weird way. There's a privacy when you just use voice.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  People are not taking showers now, Lex. I mean, we're in a pandemic, and people just roll out of bed.

• 1:22:19Lex Fridman?

  And the hair thing, nobody's getting haircuts.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Nobody's hair is good. Nobody's getting haircuts. People are wearing gym clothes. I mean, Zoom is just horrific to be on Zoom for five hours a day. It is exhausting.

• 1:22:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, it does make me wonder what the, what, once we emerged from the pandemic, whether a product market fit, how that evolves with, with Clubhouse and all of those kinds of things.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, Clubhouse is a beneficiary of the pandemic, for sure. When do you think, the pandemic, when do you think? Deaths will be under, let's say 200 a day and we'll have 200 million people on the other side of this because that's kind of what it takes, right? You got to get to 150, 200 million people on the other side in America.

• 1:22:56Lex Fridman?

  I haven't, you know, I personally stopped deeply thinking about this because I've been frustrated for so long that

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  You checked out.

• 1:23:05Lex Fridman?

  I almost checked out because it psychologically allows me to carry on because I thought for many months now that testing needs to be done at scale.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  And it still hasn't gotten done.

• 1:23:18Lex Fridman?

  It has.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  So ridiculous.

• 1:23:19Lex Fridman?

  We gave up basically on testing.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  We gave up?

• 1:23:21Lex Fridman?

  Because we're, and we're all sitting there waiting for vaccine to come along and the distribution of the vaccine is not, you know, it's struggling from the same kind of things as the testing is going to take quite a bit of time. So it does, if everything goes great, meaning there's not a second strand of the virus that's going to create a second major wave, that I, I'm cynical enough to think that it won't be until midsummer that we start opening back up.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's going to be May, June. I'm a little bit earlier than you. I've been tracking it. It's like 1.5 million shots in arms a day. I think this vaccine's been undersold. I mean, it's a miracle. Not one person who was in the trials died who took it and only one went to the hospital and they weren't even put on a ventilator. So, and the hospitalizations are plummeting and we're at 10% now in the United States at the pace we're going at 1.5 a day. I think when the Johnson Johnson one comes out next month, it'll be 3 million a day, maybe two and a half. And we already have 100 million people who've likely had it. So I've been doing the math. I think we're like 60 days away, February, March. Yeah, sometime in April, I think anybody's going to be able to get a shot and the number of deaths is going to go below 200 a day.

• 1:24:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  And once that happens, I think people have had enough of this. They're just going to go YOLO.

• 1:24:38Lex Fridman?

  I but see the the crucial piece for me that I've been focusing on is the the social media aspect of how the it's not just about the reality of deaths. It's about the state of the collective intelligence of the human species, which is determined by our communication on social media. So we could, yeah, we can be collectively afraid. The fear can spread or it could be YOLO can spread. Or it could be like all different kinds of misinformation. And of course, during the election year, the politics influences our perception of what is true and not. But, you know, having real rigorous nuanced conversation about this kind of stuff is the way

• 1:25:24Lex Fridman?

  is the way out of this. And that's where social media really comes in because social media drives division, where people form tribes and so on. And it feels like it's honestly a technology problem. You know, people say it's a human problem, but it just feels like I believe people are good and technology can enable them to be thoughtful.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  We talked earlier about, you know, the magic of Silicon Valley and then maybe going too far with the Facebook groups example where, you know, you take out all that friction. What happened was that we used to have something called RCRON, reverse chronological order. That's how you consume a feed. So any kind of social feed like Twitter was in reverse chronological order. The newest thing was up top and you would just work your way backwards. And so it gave this like really fresh feeling. And then a guy named Dave Moran and the team over at Facebook realized, you know, there are some things that got a lot of attention two hours ago. And the stuff since then has not been as important. But if you missed that, there was a really good tweet where there was a really good update, like somebody had a baby.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Let's, that's kind of, can we get the baby one at the top? And I was like, well, how would we do that? How would we know that that's the important one? It's like, well, let's, let's put a like button on it. And let's see how many comments there are. So if it gets a lot of likes or comments or retweets, let's show those first and then we'll kind of mix in the most recent stuff. And so when you're on Twitter and then when Facebook did that, Facebook became so addicting because Facebook was on, what has got the most engagement? Put that first. So every time you open up Facebook, get the dopamine hit. And then what happens when you see the Bart mitzvah photo? Or, you know, the enraging story about some injustice in the world? You retweet it, you write a comment, you share it on your wall.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  And thus this addiction to the outrageous, the outlandish, the inspiring occurred. And it used to be like inspiring stuff, puppies or some heartwarming story. And then it got dark. And then people started to realize if I want to show up on the top of my friends feeds, if I say something controversial or I'm outraged, I get to the top. And then that's when outrage culture came in. And then that's when cancel culture came in. Everybody started to realize if I try to cancel that person for being a racist or a sexist or a horrible human being, or whatever they did that's wrong, I get to the top of the feed. And we all collectively started playing a very weird video game, which is how outraged can we all be? And to get to the top of the list.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  And then of course with Trump, he realized it and he's like, okay, yeah, I'm just gonna make fun of a celebrity and I get more retweets. Okay, I'm gonna make fun of Rosie O'Donnell for being overweight or something. And he just starts attacking people.

• 1:28:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  And people are like, oh my God, what did he say? And he copied that from Howard Stern. Cause he was in New York and he used to be on Howard Stern. And Howard Stern took over all the dialogue in the eighties and nineties because he was outrageous. And then Trump did that. And then social media incorporated that into the operating system. It became the actual device of social media was the ding ding ding ding ding. We've got something incredible for you. Everybody salivates like Pavlov's dog, you know? Oh my God, I can be outraged. That's what's got to be undone. And the only way for that to be undone is these things can't be billions of people where. The most outrageous thing that happened in the world today, in the last five minutes, is now in front of you. And that's why people have anxiety, they don't sleep, and they doom

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  scroll all night, is because the human mind was not meant to process this much suffering, pain, anger. And that's why we have all this mental health issues. Also, you know, young girls, or even adults, watching other people post their private jets and their vacations, and you know, YOLO adventures on their Instagram, to the point at which young people are now faking being on private jets to put on their Instagram, and creating like, this crazy FOMO around their Instagrams. Like, now, we wonder why people are unhappy. Like, if you think everybody's on a private jet going to some Michelin star restaurant, or whatever the coolest thing in the world is

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  today, like, going to the Grammys, going to whatever, Coachella, Burning Man, like, you're like, oh, but I'm home. I'm in my house. And I'm not at Burning Man.

• 1:29:43Lex Fridman?

  Feeling inadequate.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:29:45Lex Fridman?

  So this whole system is creating the wrong set of incentives. I tend to believe it's possible to still have extremely high engagement and create a successful, profitable business while encouraging personal growth, like, encouraging people to be the best version of themselves. I just think we haven't, we got the first generation of social networks. I think a new generation needs to be built.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Is that your plan for a business, to do a social network?

• 1:30:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, I have a longer term plan, in terms of ambition, which is, I believe in being able to have deep connection between human and AI systems, like partners, friends. There is a connection to there with social media. I do think AI has a strong role to play in representing us, in guiding us in how we consume social media. So this algorithm that controls the feed for Facebook is a somewhat centralized algorithm. But instead, to give more power to the people, individuals, to where each one of us have our own algorithm.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Bring your own effort.

• 1:30:51Lex Fridman?

  BYOA. BYOA, I like it.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Instead of bringing your own alcohol, bring your own algorithm. Well, I mean, if you thought about it, if we came and said, I want, when I look at my Twitter feed, I would like to see the people with Who are the most helpful in the world, generous, kind, intelligent, considered, you know, commenting on things that I don't already know about because I want to open my worldview. That could be a beautiful thing for society. And actually, Jack was talking about potentially on Twitter, letting people bring their own algorithms and sort their feeds themselves. This would be a wonderful thing. I think it's one of the reasons Clubhouse has resonated is it's such a diverse group of people that I've been able to drop in on conversations with people who are nothing like me.

• 1:31:37Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  And listen in and hear conversations that I wouldn't normally be privy to. And I, my, everybody's like, oh, come join as a speaker. I want to do a room with you. I get asked every day, can we do a room? Can we do a room? Ask an angel investor, talk about startups? And I'm like, my usage of Clubhouse is going on my Peloton treadmill, putting Clubhouse on, picking a room and just listening.

• 1:32:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  It's so delightful for me as a podcaster where my job is to talk, to sit back and just put in a couple of miles and play chess and listen to a Clubhouse discussion that is about relationships or, you know, some fashion or hip hop or whatever it is that I'm not part of. I just sit there and I listen. And you learn. It's like such a delightful thing. I always think about these kids who go to college. And I've always been so jealous of these Ivy League kids. They go and they're like, oh, I gotta go to class. And I'm like, I would just love to sit there and listen to Professor Lex talk.

• 1:32:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  You know, like what a privilege to sit there and let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn.

• 1:32:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That's the beauty of podcasting. But of course, Clubhouse creates a whole nother experience where its conversations is different.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  I think it's going to be the in-between. I like it as a, you release your podcast, like you and I are going to release this podcast, right? And then at some point I'll have you on my pod when you launch your startup. And then at some point, somebody's going to be like, you and I will run each, and I ran into you. I saw you were on Clubhouse the other night and I was busy, but I was almost going to click on you and say, let's start a room together. But you and I will start a room together with Eric Weinstein or somebody, or Sam Harris will jump in or Elon. And we'll have a different experience, which will just shoot the shit. And it'll act as like a fabric. And a little filler between the tent pole podcast, right? Like you and Eric, you've done three, I think with Eric.

• 1:33:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with your four. I haven't released the fourth yet.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so I watched all three because I really thought your U way and him like giving you advice is very interesting dynamic. I thought it was a very interesting dynamic. And I find him like a fascinating cat. We know everybody in common, except we've never met. It's very weird because you know, you, you think about the social graph in the real world. This is why I think augmented reality is going to be such an amazing product. I just have one killer feature I want for augmented reality. We wear our glasses. And when I look at you above your head, I see the relationships we have and the things we've done together.

• 1:34:01Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Right? So I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris or you had Elon on the podcast on this date. Or you and I were both at Burning Man in 2016.

• 1:34:11Lex Fridman?

  The most meaningful element of our connection.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:34:14Lex Fridman?

  Network. Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  And then, because we would discover that through small talk, but imagine you're like at a party and you look and it just, people glow. And you just see a glow around a person and like green means you have some financial relationship. Blue means you have some friendship one. Yeah, or yellow means you have friendship one. Blue means you know, nothing about each other. You have no connections. You're like, wow, these blue people I have no connection to.

• 1:34:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  These people, that one's glowing red. We know seven or more people in common.

• 1:34:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  And those are the seven people. Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other.

• 1:34:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  That could, and that's sort of happened with Facebook member or MySpace where you were like, oh, you know, that person, friend of a friend.

• 1:34:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  But that's what is going to be AR is like, this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat and they just have those glasses. You know, forget about VR. It's just nauseating and whatever. But AR where you put the glasses on, you see the real world, but you augment it.

• 1:35:07Lex Fridman?

  You make, just like you were saying, you make it frictionless, a very low friction.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Lex Fridman?

  To make a deep human connection because you have all the basic elements there already.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Now think about the unintended consequences of what I just described. It could get creepy and weird.

• 1:35:22Lex Fridman?

  The privacy thing.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  I mean, people will, here's the thing, people, your privacy is an illusion. Like all this information is there and then.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  People are more than willing to give up privacy in exchange for some value. You know, it's a value trade.

• 1:35:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  And giving if, if my Tesla, when I'm driving in the direction of my house just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks and that friction's gone, I'm willing to give Tesla my location and my home address. Right?

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I'm not willing to give Zuckerberg anything. I don't trust him, but you get the idea. I mean, it will be that way with like DNA and other things. At some point we'll just be like, yeah, just take my DNA. Like I don't, yeah, sure. People can look and see that I'm a mental midget and my IQ is like lower than, I don't want to bring the bell curve up or whatever. But, but you could, you could figure out like, if we all put our DNA and it's sequenced online and like, oh yeah, you know, Lex has got 10 more IQ points than J Cal and you know, Sam's got 10 more than Lex. And all of a sudden people are like all bent out of shape about it. But what if they, we did that and they were like, and by the way, you also, all three of you are going to get Parkinson's unless you do X, Y, and Z.

• 1:36:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Unless you eat more blueberries or whatever we figure out.

• 1:36:32Lex Fridman?

  They're going to accept it pretty quickly. Yeah, that's.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Brave new world.

• 1:36:35Lex Fridman?

  Brave new world. I, I, I have to ask you, you're, just like you were saying, you're one of the world experts in investing and, and.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  In startups.

• 1:36:44Lex Fridman?

  In startups. Yeah. Uh, VC and so on. From the perspective of the startup, I was always kind of skeptical of raising money. It, it feels like people do it too quickly, too easily. But I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. When is the, when should a startup raise money? And from the perspective of the investor, when should the investor invest in the startup? Like, is there a timing thing here? Is there, um, what? Yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  It's, it's a, it's a very important question because the venture capital community is only going to fund, you know, sub 1% of enterprises started in the, in the United States every year. Like maybe 10 basis points of them, like one in a thousand. And the reason is, It's jet fuel. You only want to take that money if you really want to build something big and you want to build it fast. And when you put jet fuel behind a startup, as we've seen with other rockets, things can blow up and people can die. You know, it's not people literally dying, but the business can go up in smoke, right? Like rockets get blown up all the time at SpaceX as part of their ambitious plans. And startups, seven out of 10 startups we invest in go to zero.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Now, if you were to start the business and only build it off customer revenue and use your own money and go nice and slow and grow 10% a year, the chances of you blowing up the rocket are very low because you're riding a bicycle. You can go a little faster, but the bicycle can only go so fast. And once you start taking that money, the way the portfolio, the way venture capital is constructed as a, in the mix of like MIT or Harvard's endowments is, you know, we're going to put some money into safe things and then we're going to have these really binary things over here. And they probably put 5% in venture capital traditionally. It's grown to 20% just as a function of how successful

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  it's been. So, you know, the Harvards of the world and MITs probably want 5% or 10% in venture, but it's grown to 25% because, you know, companies like Airbnb and Uber have grown so big and Tesla. But the goal is, in these venture funds, we're going to invest in 30 names and one or two of them are going to return three times the capital we've deployed. So it's a $300 million fund and there's 30 names and they each got 10 million. That means one of the 10 million is going to return the fund plus. So that means it has to grow 30x and then 60x to double the fund. And you're really supposed to be doing three times cash on cash. So that $300 million fund's expectation is in 10 years to return 900

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  billion, triple the person's money, as opposed to the stock market, which doubles your money in the same period. So you're supposed to do 25% annualized returns in order to triple the money. And maybe I have an outlying chance of four or five times the money, which does happen sometimes when you have an outlier in your portfolio like Uber or Facebook was. And what that means is the venture capitalist behavior in the game they're playing is different than you as the founder. You as the founder, you may really care about this and it dying really matters to you. And then you got a venture capitalist who's like, we're betting on 30 names. We need two of them to hit it out of the park, maybe three, and nothing else is meaningful. So now you start thinking about the game theory there.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  You're dealing with, you know, money that is coming in that only cares about you going 100X.

• 1:40:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  It's a whole different ballgame. Whereas if you build off revenue, you don't have to do that. And if you look at a company like com.com, we invested at 5 million. The next round they did was 250. They were so capital efficient that they grew from $10,000 a month in revenue to millions of dollars a month in revenue over those four years since we invested and they didn't raise money in between.

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  It was unbelievable and I've only seen this happen three or four times.

• 1:40:38Lex Fridman?

  So it doesn't happen, this capital efficient meaning based on customer revenue alone plus some small amount of fundraising, you're able to go, like, how hard is it to do that?

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  It takes extreme product market fit. You have to have a great price for your product that has a great margin. Um, yeah. And if you're doing something in hardware, it's probably impossible because it's super capital intensive. So it's probably got to be a software business. Hardware businesses take a lot more.

• 1:41:06Lex Fridman?

  Do venture capitalists get in the way at all of the business or do, is it possible for them to get out of the way?

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you, if you get young venture capitalists who are starting their career, they're very nervous and scared because they're putting all these bets.

• 1:41:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  And then there's a very weird thing that happens. The bad news comes first. So companies that don't work out, go out of business immediately.

• 1:41:28Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  So if it's not going to be com or Robin Hood or Uber, those take, you know, you have one of those great successes somewhere in your five, six, seven, eight as an investor. What is the first five years like? The first five years, you feel like an idiot because you, let's say you make these 10 bets.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  In year two, two or three of them come back and they don't have product market fit and they're out of money.

• 1:41:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  And they say, can we have more money? And you say, no, we have to go get it from somebody else because you have to prove that there's still a market for it. We may keep our pro rata. We may put a little bit in to maintain our percentage ownership, but we're not going to give you another big chunk of money.

• 1:42:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  And that company dies. So now you've got 10 million, poof, up in smoke. Boom, 10 million up in smoke. So this is called the J curve where your performance goes down. And then it's only in years four, five and six, it starts going up. And what you're seeing right now is the people who started like I did in 2000, you know, just 11, 12 years ago, in 2009, I started investing. We all look like geniuses. Why? We're at the end of the cycle. We invested after, when the stock market was on the floor after the financial crisis. And it's gone straight up since. So everybody looked, there's a couple of little blips in there, but generally speaking, there hasn't been like a major crash, with the exception of the pandemic crash, but that bounced right back. And so, you know, it takes a decade to figure out if you're good at it.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  And then if the market crashes again, everybody feels like, and again, the cycle starts again. So you are now, as a founder, you are now inserting yourself into that casino.

• 1:42:57Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  And now you've got all these other forces pushing and pulling and you're growing. Let's say your company was growing 50%. You feel like, wow, I'm successful. I made a million dollars last year and now I'm doing a million and a half. And, and the first thing a VC is going to say is, how do we triple? We're moving, we're growing too slow.

• 1:43:12Lex Fridman?

  See, but that's like you said that beautifully is a rocket fuel. It's a, in, in the sense, it's a kind of motivation. It's a drive. I mean, it's a positive.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  So if you want that.

• 1:43:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  That's like.

• 1:43:23Lex Fridman?

  If you want that.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  If you want that, if you want to go to Navy SEAL school, you're going to be in pain and they're going to put that hose in your face while you're underwater with your hands tied behind your back in the pool and you're going to be choking and they may have to do CPR on you in like every couple of years, tragically. Somebody dies in Navy SEAL school.

• 1:43:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Doesn't mean we're getting rid of the Navy SEALs.

• 1:43:43Lex Fridman?

  Brock, if he dies, he dies. I don't know if you know David Goggins is by any chance.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  I do. I mean, I don't know him personally, but oh my lord.

• 1:43:49Lex Fridman?

  So I'm, I'm running 48 miles together with him in person in a month.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  What? You're doing an ultra marathon?

• 1:43:55Lex Fridman?

  With him and probably other stuff because he enjoys just breaking people, making them cry.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Oh my god, I'm so jelly.

• 1:44:03Lex Fridman?

  So no, I, well, I offered, we, we agreed a while ago to do a podcast and he's like, oh yeah, come, we'll do it this day.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Is he in the Bay Area?

• 1:44:13Lex Fridman?

  I don't know where the hell he is, but we're doing it. And I don't think I'm supposed to say where it is, but it's not anywhere close to anywhere of this. It's in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:44:21Lex Fridman?

  But he seems to be in a bunch of different locations, like he, he's in Oregon or something like that.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  What does he do for, outside of writing books and being inspirational? Does he actually train people or like?

• 1:44:32Lex Fridman?

  No, he, he's just, he's a full-time insane. Like he fights forest fighters like for a few months a year. As a farmer, like unpaid labor. Like he, you know, there's a bunch of people who are like him, like Navy SEALs and so on. That kind of make a career out of motivational speaking, all that kind of stuff. He's not interested in any of that. He's literally interested in just doing hard shit all the time.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Breaking himself.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  Breaking himself personally.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Seems like he wants to break himself and that, that book is amazing and the audio book's amazing when he's talking about how fat he was. And how he just had to go and keep running and his like legs are broken and he's just a super pain and he just goes through it. It's really inspiring.

• 1:45:17Lex Fridman?

  Inspiring thing also.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Are you going to videotape yourself doing this?

• 1:45:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  I can't wait to see you get destroyed.

• 1:45:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  This is going to be so entertaining for the, for the Lex audience.

• 1:45:27Lex Fridman?

  The pain. But the other inspiring thing is he's, he's happily married.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 1:45:32Lex Fridman?

  And there's a partnership there that's, you know, everybody finds a, this attention as a push and pull that's beautiful, I think. But in speaking of beautiful push and pull, how about that transition?

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 1:45:48Lex Fridman?

  You and Chamath, on, he's a friend of yours.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Bestie. We're besties.

• 1:45:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, good friend. I mean, he's, there's very few people in my life, him, Elon, David Sacks, John Brockman's. Very few people have supported me as much as those folks. I mean, I owe him a huge debt.

• 1:46:03Lex Fridman?

  So he's also a co-host on the All In Podcast.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  We taped episode 21 today.

• 1:46:07Lex Fridman?

  Oh, today?

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, every Friday now. They want to do every Friday. They're addicted like me and you are to podcasts.

• 1:46:12Lex Fridman?

  So you're going to release it when?

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  It's probably released as we're sitting here.

• 1:46:16Lex Fridman?

  As we're, okay, beautiful.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  I can't wait. Special guest on it. We had Draymond Green from the Warriors phone in, so we had our first guest.

• 1:46:23Lex Fridman?

  Awesome.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's really funny because he plays poker with us and we're all besties. So.

• 1:46:28Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful. So you guys went pretty heated.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  Yes, we did.

• 1:46:33Lex Fridman?

  Against each other versus Rob on Robinhood.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:35Lex Fridman?

  Maybe, there's just two things I want to ask.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Lex Fridman?

  First, on the actual Robinhood discussion and the Wall Street Best discussion, can you still man his argument? What was the nature of the disagreement? Where?

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:46:47Lex Fridman?

  Where, yeah, what, what is the little, because I don't think it's as big as of a space as it came off as sounding.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:46:54Lex Fridman?

  What is the nature of the disagreement?

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  He felt that Robinhood turned off trading because the hedge funds told them to, and that they were bowing down to the pressure of the hedge funds. That's not true. But in a vacuum of information, you know what happens to people's minds? Conspiracy theories abound, and sometimes there is a conspiracy theory, and sometimes there's just the appearance of impropriety or a bunch of related things. Like, when you look at the Trump situation with Russia, like, was Trump trying to coordinate with Russia? Or were the Russians just screwing with a bunch of like neophyte idiotic dipshits? Like, you know, Donald Trump Jr. who don't know any better.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And they don't know that you shouldn't meet with the Russians. And if you do meet with the Russians, you are probably a useful idiot. You probably should tell the FBI. Like, they're just a bunch of idiots in all likelihood. Who knows?

• 1:47:50Lex Fridman?

  And there's a vacuum of information.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  And there's a vacuum of information. We don't know. And the Russians are trying to compromise everybody. So would you call it a conspiracy? Or would you call it an attempted, you know, conspiracy? There was no conspiracy here. What it was, was Robinhood needed to raise billions of dollars to stay solvent, in all likelihood, and they weren't allowed to talk about it. So they were forced into not talking about it in all likelihood and had to come up with that money or shut down. And then what got me upset with Chamath, and we had a talk afterwards that people don't know about. I'll talk about it here for the first time, on Sunday. We had to have a little, we had to air it out.

• 1:48:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. In the episode after, you guys sounded like you've had a private, you've made a-

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  We had a private discussion, just one-on-one. And we said, listen, we love each other. We're besties. We've always been there for each other. What happened here? And what happened there is I'm fiercely loyal to my folks, whether it's Chamath or Travis from Uber or Saks or whoever. I'm just a loyal guy.

• 1:48:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  And I'm always ride or die with my founders. If I invest in them, even if they make a mistake, and Uber made plenty of mistakes, I always went on CNBC on my podcast and said, hey, we're going to fix these things. I'm in touch with the team. Mistakes were made. We're going to solve them. This is a group of people with great intent who want to make the world a better place. And you know what? I was hated for, for a period of time with Uber. I was hated for it last week with Robinhood. I got a lot of blowback. But I think in both of those cases, eventually I was right. Uber's doing great stuff in the world. Robinhood's doing great stuff in the world. And I like to be loyal to my investments and my partners to, to just, I feel like if you invest and you're on the team, you know, you have really three choices. You can either fight for your team. You can go silent or you can throw your team under the bus.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  And I've watched investors throw the team that they invested in that made them a bunch of money under the bus. Not acceptable to me. And being quiet's not acceptable to me. So I always ask the founder, do you want me to, is it okay if I go out and defend you publicly? If they say yes, I do it. And then-

• 1:49:50Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful, by the way, because what else do we have in this world if not friendship?

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Loyalty means everything to me. I grew up in Brooklyn where if you were not loyal and you, you know, and you were not loyal to your crew, then you were a Ronin. You were a, you know, out there on your own, flailing in the, you know, and trust me, you do not want to be on your own in 1970s, 80s Brooklyn, Manhattan. Like, you need to have a crew with you. I've gotten into, you know, you don't want to get into a fight with 10 guys and be alone. Or just be with, you, you need a crew to survive. So I just learned early, and my dad, who owned a bar, just drilled into me being loyal. And so for whatever reason, I'm a bulldog when it comes to loyalty. And Chamath came out and said, you know, these guys need to go to jail and they're scumbags. And I, and I'm trying to defend them and I'm in a position where I can't defend them

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  because I don't have complete information. There is no complete information. It's in the heat of the moment and then it becomes the number one story. And it's my number three investment. And Chamath has a competing company, SoFi. And he's killing my guys and then I started killing his guys.

• 1:50:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, we're like, wait a second, we're best friends.

• 1:50:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  And we're swinging our swords at each other and we're a group of the seven Samurai who fight together. When did we turn on each other? And then everybody else who's on the pod, the two Davids, who, you know, both on the spectrum a bit, they got little ass burgers or whatever. No offense, Lex.

• 1:51:15Lex Fridman?

  None taken.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  I'm not saying, you know, there is a, you know, if you're into AI and you, you know, you might be somewhere.

• 1:51:23Lex Fridman?

  Not a coincidence, yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Might not be coincidence. Anyway, we upgraded the two Davids firmware. We're going to upgrade your firmware after this. I'll give you, yeah. You're on the 1.5. You have the three emotions now or should we add a fourth? Do you want to go with joy?

• 1:51:34Lex Fridman?

  I'm in the 2.0 already.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  You're on the 2.0. You got the joy. How's it working up?

• 1:51:39Lex Fridman?

  Difficult.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  It's difficult. You'll get there. Just let it happen, Lex. Just let the, let the joy happen. So anyway, we just talked about it offline and we decided like, listen, we didn't pregame that episode. And I happened to be skiing with my family. I'd taken the first like vacation since this goddamn pandemic started. And I was having a wonderful time and then this whole thing blows up. I'm coming off the mountain. Just, you know, having a great time with my daughter skiing and, you know, and then I'm mixing it up with him and, you know, he had a short fuse about it because he was triggered. He told me because he really feels like he's fighting to defend, you know, the everyman. And I was like, that's what my team's doing. That's why they named the company Robinhood.

• 1:52:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  We're on the same side here. And then over time, we've started to see the explanation come out and, you know, people who are friends are going to have disagreements. In the podcast, it happened to happen very publicly and we didn't know it was going to become the number one story in the world. If Trump still had his Twitter handle, this would not have been a story. Trump would have said something about GameStop and he would have co-opted the entire conversation. So in a way, going back to our censorship discussion, I might actually be in favor of Trump being censored. Only because, only because how delightful has it been since January 20th?

• 1:52:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  That we can all focus on something other than him.

• 1:53:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  He was exhausting. I mean, the amount of cycles he took on our processors.

• 1:53:07Lex Fridman?

  He monetized the conversation. And now this is a little bit more of a distributed, like this.

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody gets a chance to be the number one news story. Everybody gets a chance to, to discuss it, but.

• 1:53:18Lex Fridman?

  So on a scale of one to 10, how much do you love Chamath?

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Oh, it's 11. I mean, I love Chamath. I mean, we played cards last night. We're, we're besties and, you know, I would, I would, I would literally jump in front of a bullet for him.

• 1:53:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, what's the lesson in that discussion? Cause it was super, I wouldn't, I, I think the love was felt and the respect was felt throughout, even when you guys are going pretty vicious on each other. I, is there a lesson to be learned? Do you regret any of that conversation?

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I think he, he, he told me that he regretted some of the things he said. He said publicly on the podcast, like, listen, I was a little hot. I may have said things in the heat of the moment. But I don't live with too much regret because I always think about intent. It's one of the nuance and intent have been totally lost. The idea that we could have any of kind of a nuanced discussion about things seems to have been forgotten. And the fact that people don't look at people's intent, if you hurt somebody's feelings or you disrespect somebody, or you, you do something mean or whatever, I always look at the intent. You know, and I've had people attack me and I look at the intent and I'm like, hmm, that person feels bad about themselves.

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  Or maybe I said something and I insulted them and that's why their blowback's there. So I always try to think, what's the intent of the person? And then almost universally, you talk to somebody and you find out you ascribe some crazy intent. That's not there. And they're like, oh yeah. You know what happened? I got in a fight with my spouse and I, I didn't sleep last night and I've had a lot of anxiety about my business. And I, I just snapped and said something about you. And it's like, oh, okay. Like I literally had somebody on Twitter. This past summer, I had said something. I was complaining about a New York Times journalist and something I thought was wrong.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  And this person was a fan of that journalist and they went, I kid you not, onto my social media account, found a picture I'd taken about the, how blue the sky was one day. They reverse image searched the tree line, found the tree line on Google image search, somehow with a reverse image search, found an old listing that some broker had listed on their like website of my house and then posted my home address, the value of my home and.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Doxed me on Twitter. And I'm like, what is going on here? So I call the person.

• 1:55:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  And I look them up and they work in private equity in Boston. And I look and I'm like, this person works in, it's a July 4th week. So, and I, when I look at the person's LinkedIn, we have seven people in common. So going back to the AR conversation, I'm like, okay, this person literally just doxed me. I asked him to take it down. They told me they won't take it down. And then I look and I, so then I DM him back on Instagram, on Twitter. And I said, by the way, your boss, Susan, uh, and I know seven people in common. And these are the seven people. Here's a screenshot. What is she going to think when I call her on Monday and you've doxed me? Here's my phone number, if you'd like to talk. He calls me. I said, what's going on? Why would you do this?

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  He's like, well, I really pissed off about what you said about this person. I was like, you understand I've had like two or three stalkers, like, and anybody who's a high profile like I am, like, or medium profile? You're gonna have weird things happen. You literally put my home address, you put my family at risk. What if I put your home address? On my, I have 400,000 followers or 300,000 followers. You have like 300. What if I post your address? He said, well, I wish you wouldn't do that. I was like, well, I asked you kindly to take my address down. And I said, are you married? Do you, I said, I said, how old are you? You like 25 or something? He's like, no, I'm 42. I was like, you're 42 years old. I said, are you married? Do you have kids? He's like, yeah, I just had a baby like six months ago. I'm like, you're home with your wife. It's July 4th weekend. You're doxing Jason Calacanis because you're upset at me because I said something about a New York Times runner.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  He's like, yeah, this is the biggest mistake of my life. I said, I tell you what, let's forget it ever happened. And he wrote me back and he said, I just wanted to thank you for how you handled it. My wife said, I'm a complete fucking moron and. My wife says a complete fucking moron and I'm really sorry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I wrote her back. I said, I wrote her back and I said, my wife says the same thing to me all the times. I'm walking to the club. It's totally fine.

• 1:57:33Lex Fridman?

  This, this, this.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  But intent, nuance, it matters, right? And the person could be having a bad day and they do something stupid they regret. And what am I going to do? Cancel the guy?

• 1:57:41Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Or, or if I had called his boss, he would have been fired immediately.

• 1:57:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  And then I gotta live with this guy got fired and he's got a kid. And, and what is this personal destruction? Why are we doing this to each other? Life's hard enough.

• 1:57:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Life's hard, right? Like just getting through the day is hard.

• 1:57:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And, and that little bit of empathy, uh, thinking about the intent of the person allows you to then sort of de-escalate this kind of conversation that social media wants to escalate.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  So social media.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  Back to what we were saying.

• 1:58:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  If, if this, in, in, in my younger years, I would have retweeted the guy's home address and my address and would have called his boss and tried to get him fired or whatever. And it's like, now I'm just like, what? Why are we attacking each other? Life is so hard. I mean, this is what the pandemic, I think, should make everybody realize is like, look at that, how hard it is. Life is hard. And then just think about all the people suffering right now who are at home. The single mom or dad with two or three kids at home, in public school. Maybe they've been laid off and their kids aren't learning and they're in a tiny apartment. I mean, this has been brutal for a lot of people and not to mention people losing loved ones or maybe some people got Corona and now their lungs are still not right.

• 1:58:52Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you about love?

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  I'm feeling it, you know, like we're an hour or two here, Lex.

• 1:58:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you feel.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  We could become besties.

• 1:59:02Lex Fridman?

  We're good.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  I feel like we got a bromance going here, Lex.

• 1:59:05Lex Fridman?

  I feel it too.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's Eric Weinstein level, but I feel like it's close.

• 1:59:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm feeling the love, but you, we talked about the,

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Lex Fridman?

  There's music to my ears, your whole rant on the, the Olympic nature of a startup.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:24Lex Fridman?

  Is there a role, like what role does love, family, friendship play in that brutal pursuit of excellence that is building a startup, building a company, or building any, creating anything new in this world?

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Such a great question and totally unprepared for it because I know we would ever ask me about that. So I think it's why you've, you've, you've got quite a following on your podcast is that you're able to ask these questions. And I could tell one story because, you know, I don't talk about, I try not to talk about relationship with Elon that often because, you know, he's so famous now. I mean, when we met, I used to go out to parties with him and people like, oh my God, you're Jason Calcas. I was like, yeah. And like, who's your friend? I'm like, that's my friend Elon. He's, and they'd be like, what? He's doing rocket ships. But he's told this story publicly. So I can tell it. And I would never talk about anything that he hasn't already talked about publicly, especially since he's so high profile. But it was a pretty funny moment. He, there was a moment

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  in time when Tesla almost went out of business and you've probably heard the story many times, but it was during the financial crisis and they were running out of money. And I said, you know, let's go get a steak. And we're in LA and we drove to BOA and I had my orange Tesla Roadster and he had his P1 or P2, like the red one that I think is in space now. And we drove to the valet and we had a steak together and we're sitting there. And I said, you know, I read the story in Gawker or whatever, you know, New York Times, you're, you only got like five weeks of money left in Tesla. He goes, it's not true. I was like, oh, thank God. He goes, we have two weeks. I was like, oh God. I

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  was like, well, what's going on with the rocket ship company? Yeah. You know, like, you know, I know you did the one last month and you, don't you have one coming up? He's like, yeah, we got the third one coming up. I was like, well, how's that going? He said, well, we blow that one up. There's no more SpaceX. I was like, so two weeks of money left in Tesla and SpaceX, she blew up the first two rockets, she blew up the third SpaceX's over. He's like, yeah. I was like, I can loan you a couple million dollars. I don't have like a ton. He's like, it's okay. Our friend beep has loaned me some money. And Elon's been super public about this. I would never tell the story unless he hadn't been, but he was talking, he never said who it was, but somebody had loaned him money to keep him afloat. He was, he was functionally bankrupt. I mean, he had the equity in the companies, but the equity

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  was quickly becoming worth zero and the financial crisis. And he's figuring out if he's going to go on vacation for Christmas or not. And he's on the phone trying to, you know, you know, save the, save both companies. And I said, certainly there must be some good news. And he takes out his BlackBerry. To date this conversation, there are no iPhones. Takes his BlackBerry and he starts swiping and he says, don't tell anybody. This is what I'm building. And he shows me the Model S.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  And nobody knew that he was working on the Model S. We knew he was doing the roadster and was trying to save the company. And I looked at it and I was like, that's gorgeous. It was the clay models. So it was a full size clay model. So there's human beings standing around a clay version of this tiny little BlackBerry picture. I'm scrolling through on the, remember that little pad of the ball on the BlackBerry? I'm scrolling through it. I'm like, this is fucking great. And I just said to him, I was like, what's the range going to be? He says, well, I think we get 250 miles. I was like, 250 miles? He's like, yeah, I think it'll be the safest car ever. I said, what is it going to cost? He says, I think this could cost eventually 50, $60,000. I said, Elon, if you make that car, you'll change the goddamn world. You have to, this company must

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  survive because the roadster is for like 2,000 people in the United States. This car is for every person in the United States. Every single person in the United States needs, will want this car if it's $50,000. And maybe some of the people who, you know, have 20 or 30,000 dollars won't be able to afford it, but they'll all want it. It's gorgeous. And he said, you really think so? I said, yeah. So I got home and I talked to my wife Jade and I said, you have the checkbook? She does all the finances and stuff like that, pays every of the bills and whatever. And I said, yeah, don't tell anybody. Elon's making this great car. And I wrote two checks for $50,000. And I just took out a piece of paper and I wrote, E, comma, love, love the new car. I'll take two.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  And I signed it. I kissed the two $50,000 checks, put them in the envelope, and I FedExed it to him for Monday delivery. And I said to Jade, "That $100,000 is going to be gone in 48 hours because it will pay for one or two days of payroll on Tesla." So we just added like, instead of two weeks of row, he's got 12 days.

• 2:04:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  And the checks don't cash, but then I read a story that he's closed the money, he saved the company in like the next week or two. And a couple of months later,

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  the checks get cashed. And I'm like, okay. Three years later, I get an email. "Your reservation number," it's from Tesla, "your reservation number is 0000001." And then five seconds later, "Your reservation number is 000073." And I forwarded the number one to Elon. I said, "You know, I can't take number one, signature number one. I can't take that. That's yours."

• 2:04:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  And he's like, "Oh, I've got five of them. And besides, you're the first person who ordered it." And I was the first person who had seen it.

• 2:04:50Lex Fridman?

  You're gonna get me to be teary eyed.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  And then I, I know, it was a very, it was.

• 2:04:53Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful moment.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  It was an incredible moment for both of us. And we talk about it sometimes, you know, those moments in time. And when you, to your point about love.

• 2:05:00Lex Fridman?

  That's like the darkest moment, one of the darkest moments in his life, probably.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  I think it was, I can tell you it was the darkest period of his life, for sure. And he's been very public about how dark that was. And I think, you know, this is why I have great sympathy for the entrepreneurs of the world, like the suffering and the pain. And when he talks about the suffering and the pain that all of these founders have felt, and then we were throwing rocks at them and were criticizing them as they try to change the world and save humanity. And in Tesla's case, I mean, they weren't, you know, they weren't like delivering pizza. I mean, they were trying to get us off of fossil fuels. Like, this was a big, heady mission to literally save the environment, the planet, humanity. And the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him, it was always perplexing to me why any human being

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  who is standing on God's green earth would want to throw rocks at the guy who is trying to stem the dam of global warming that is about to engulf all of us. How dare they throw rocks at that guy?

• 2:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  There's so many people you could throw rocks at. There's somebody who's making the Juul vaporizer. Throw rocks at that scumbag, no offense. But like, whoever's making the Juul things and is, you know, selling pina colada flavor to 12-year-olds, like, throw rocks at them. Somebody's doing something, you know, abhorrent, but not E. I mean, and, uh, yeah. Anyway, that, that car is, you know, up the road here, sitting under a cover with 20,000 miles on it in my garage. And then the roadster number 16 is in the garage next to it. And every day I walk by the two of them and I get a warm feeling in my heart because I know he did it. Against all odds, against all odds, he pulled it off.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  And it was that moment, that month in that 2000, I think it was probably December, January, December of 2008, I think. You know, it's just 12 years ago, when you think about 13 years ago, it was dark. I mean, it was dark and they, they almost had the same thing happen, uh, you know, in the model three production in June of two years, three years ago. And I remember him just trying to get the model three out the door and the company almost crashed then. Most of these companies have, you know, these kinds of moments. And, and I think friendship is you get what you give. You get what you give. And if you are there for people, you're going to feel so good about having done that.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  And then the, the, the reciprocation effect, which you probably know very well, is so great in the world that anytime you're kind to people, you build this incredible bond. And then what, what are we at the end of the day, Lex? Besides a series of memories with the people we love. That's all it is. It's just a series of memories and moments. It's just moments. You ever see Blade Runner? Yes, of course. Do you remember what Rucker Harris says at the end? All of these memories gone, like tears in the rain. I mean, that's our existence. It just all goes away at some point. It's just these drops of rain. Each, each of those memories is just like one snowflake or one drop of rain and they're

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  all lost at some point, but they're here now. And that's why we have to be there for each other. That's why I feel like what I do is so important in this world. And I get such great meaning out of it, just being a friend, just having these conversations. What you're doing on your podcast, just talking to intelligent people and spreading the word and the disciple, uh, the gospel of what they're saying and amplifying it. You're inspiring so many people. Every podcast you get 500,000 people, a million people watch these videos. And there's some kid in Sri Lanka or some little girl in Afghanistan who's going to stumble upon this on YouTube. And they're going to change the world in the next century. Because it's not just about America. Like, our story is almost over, right? Like, we were the story of the last 200 or 300 years. I hope it keeps going.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  But there's all these other places in the world, Sao Paulo and Africa, where people now have access to these videos. And somebody will hear this video and go, Elon did it. Oh, and that guy Jason was his friend. And, oh, and Lex does those interviews with the... Oh, yeah, I could do it, too.

• 2:09:08Lex Fridman?

  Your little magical moment of love amidst the suffering with Elon, because you've talked about it, it'll have these ripple effects. It's fascinating to think about.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  So weird.

• 2:09:18Lex Fridman?

  In decades to come, and new entrepreneurs being born, new, more love being put out there, and more support through these rough times when you're, people are trying to create new things. I mean, that's a, that's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful, I'm glad you think of friendship in this way. I'm deeply grateful that you're loyal.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Every time you invest...

• 2:09:41Lex Fridman?

  In the way you are.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, it costs you nothing to make this investment either. The, the amount of time it takes to be bitter or angry, sitting at home, to be disappointed, you could just channel that same amount of energy into being loyal, loving, kind, and there for people. It just only takes the intention, right? The water is gonna, those emotions are gonna flow, right? Like, Sam would always tell me when I was struggling in my life, and I talked to him, he'd say, you know, Jason, your brain is spewing all these ideas. Imagine you're standing, sitting by a river, and the river is all your ideas. You are not a slave to any one of these ideas. They're just whipping by, like each of those little waves in the river. You can pick one of those ideas out and look at it, examine it,

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  and either keep it, or throw it back in the river and let it go. And I was like, wow, Sam. That was like, of my entire friendship with Sam Harris, that was like the one moment where I was just like, oh, my God. All my life, I've wondered about all these thoughts in my head, insecurities, you know, imposter syndrome. Like, I didn't go to MIT, you know? I'm not the smartest guy. But somehow I made a career writing little 50K checks, and now, you know, $3 million checks, but whatever, you know? Little checks and being a journalist and doing this little podcast. And it's headed, it's headed up to something. And I kind of, I'm proud of it. I'm 50, and I'm kind of proud of what I did. And I, and I wake up every morning, I retire, and I say,

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  I kind of like what I do. I kind of like having the conversation and writing the check and then being on somebody's team. And I got offered to be in these giant mega funds. And they said, Jason, you're an idiot. You invest in 60 companies a year, you know, 500K at a time. You put $30 million a year to work. Come work with us. Write one $50 million check. And then you can go to Aspen and Cabo and Coachella and not work. But why are you doing all this work? It's like, well, the $50 million check is like, it's like a formality. It's just like being an ATM. Like, the companies are already huge by that time. I really want to meet the two people with the idea. I want to meet them in year one.

• 2:11:49Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  I want to meet them on day zero. I want to be the guy who wrote the first, second, or third check. I want a guy who wrote the 3000th check, the last check. It's fucking boring.

• 2:11:58Lex Fridman?

  And make that basic human connection and also be there, be with them through the rough times, be with them with that first. I mean, the first early successes, I mean, that's a beautiful.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  So great. When they, when, when, when a founder and their team get product market fit, and you just know it's going to work. Oh, man, Lex, it's when, when Cal would email me and they'd say, we added, you know, the company's been growing and we're not going to go out of business. But we added some sleep stuff and then we added this other function and we have a streak now. And we grew 10x in the last, you know, three months. And we're good. You know, I was like, oh, that's nice. It's real nice. It's like, it's a nice feeling when you, well, because so many of them die. We talked about that J curve early. Imagine it's like, it's like all these baby turtles going out to the ocean and the

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  seagulls are ripping them to shreds and then their sharks are eating them. But then like a couple of the turtles make it and they become wise old 100 year old turtles.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  You know, and you're like, yep, I remember when you catched. And like all of your brothers and sisters were ripped to shreds by the seagulls and you made it into the water and then you made it out to the deep water. It's a pretty great feeling.

• 2:13:15Lex Fridman?

  I think there's no better way to end it.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 2:13:18Lex Fridman?

  The talk of the cruelty of life, that suffering that is life.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:13:22Lex Fridman?

  And the love amidst the suffering. Jason,

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:13:25Lex Fridman?

  I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You're one of the most special people in Silicon Valley.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Thanks, Lex.

• 2:13:32Lex Fridman?

  And maybe you'll also call me in one of the rough times.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:35Lex Fridman?

  I'm sure there'll be many.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  There will be, yeah. You know, there's one expression, nobody gets their alone. Nobody gets their alone. And anybody who thinks that they got their alone is delusional and kidding themselves. And they will at some point wake up and realize, oh shit. There were a lot of people who helped me get here. I need to write a couple of gratitude letters. I got a gratitude letter the other day from a friend of mine who I helped. And it was one of the, you know, you know about these gratitude letters people are writing? It turns out Martin Seligman in, um, uh, was it Authentic Happiness? Anyway, the guy who really studied happiness and joy, turns out one of the greatest amplifiers of joy in your life is to thank somebody for doing something for you.

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  And somebody who I had helped just wrote me a letter. And I got in Christmas and I had the stack of Christmas cards and I hadn't opened them. And it's the second week of January and I was just getting to like the last stack. And I opened it up and I almost missed it. It's incredibly heartwarming letter about how meaningful, like certain things I had done to help along the way. And how he'd always appreciated my counsel. And I was just like, well, this happened 25 years ago. And you wrote this letter now. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was just like, wow, you know, if you're hearing this, there's probably 10 people who are really instrumental in your lives,

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  in your lives. Go ahead and call them on the phone, write them an email, or even better, just write a letter. And send it to them and just tell them you're thankful. And let me tell you something. The amplification of joy in your life will go 100x, 100x when you tell somebody you love them and that you really appreciate them and that what they did for you was magical. So just, and you can look it up, gratitude. Gratitude is like one of these incredible forces.

• 2:15:24Lex Fridman?

  Amen.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  I'm grateful for being on the pod.

• 2:15:26Lex Fridman?

  I'm grateful. You wasted all this time with me. I love it.

• 2:15:32Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jason Kallikanis. And thank you to our sponsors, Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and Rev Speech to Text Service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from the man himself, Jason Kallikanis. "The number one reason a startup shuts down is not running out of money. The number one reason a startup fails is that the founder gives up." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.