Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity

Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler's near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on. Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don't interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain's stuck, what he'll learn next, and more. Read a transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/michael-moritz/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/qixjVoOjjAs on YouTube. Recorded July 21st, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://x.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://x.com/tylercowen on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.com/invite/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:04:57 - On living with difficult art 00:09:44 - On Jewish literature 00:13:00 - On why children don't interrogate their parents 00:15:54 - On returning to Germany 00:23:37 - On stumbling into venture capital 00:28:49 - On obsessives and dilettantes 00:33:03 - On supporting the Booker Prize 00:34:17 - On improving San Francisco's nonprofits 00:37:26 - On controlling your own calendar 00:38:43 - On why Britain is stuck 00:40:06 - On what comes next 00:41:10 - Outro

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am chatting with Michael Moritz. Michael is perhaps best known for his work as a venture capitalist through Sequoia. Before that, he was a very active and successful journalist with several books to his credit, including The First Study of Apple and an excellent work on Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Michael is extremely well-known in addition for his work in philanthropy. For instance, his institution, Crankstart, has been supporting the Booker Prize since 2019. He also is involved in San Francisco Standard. But most importantly, from our point of view, Michael has a new and excellent book out called Auslander:

• 1:09Speaker 00

  One Family's Story of Escape and Exile, which I absolutely recommend to you all. Michael, welcome.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Thank you for that very kind and flattering introduction.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  I have many questions for you in many areas, so let's start with Wales. Did the non-conformism of Methodist Wales make it easier for Jews to settle and feel at home there?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that actually was the case. I think the principal reason that Jews, particularly the ones of my parents' generation, settled in Wales was that those with entrepreneurial attributes were encouraged to settle in South Wales and in some other parts of Britain to set up businesses to encourage local employment and stimulate job growth. I don't think that any aspect probably of the established church or churches made the new immigrants to Wales feel any more comfortable.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  How was Welsh antisemitism different from English antisemitism?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  First of all, I want to be really careful here because Britain opened its doors to my parents. My parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. They both were permitted to come into Britain as teenagers. Both of them were around 14 years old when they were fortunate enough to land in Britain. So Britain was one of the few countries, albeit with quotas, that opened the doors to Jews desperately trying to flee the Nazi stain that was spreading all over Europe. But in the late 1930s, and certainly during the time that I was growing up there, which was predominantly in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s,

• 3:02Speaker 01

  was far less a multicultural country than it is today. So anybody from abroad, they could have been Italian waiters in Soho, or there were very few blacks or anybody from Asia in Britain at the time that I was growing up. So anybody who looked out of the ordinary was considered by the majority of the people, as always happens, a bit of an outsider. That was displayed in a whole variety of ways. But nonetheless, whether it was in Wales, or to answer your question, in England, I'm not sure that it differed all that much.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  According to some sources, the population of Welsh Jews peaked in around 1919 at around 5,000, and then it declined radically. Why did so many Jews leave Wales? Is it just movement to London?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  I don't think it declined that rapidly. I think there were, I don't know how many, in the 60s when I was growing up. Maybe there were 600 families around Wales that were Jewish, out of a population of around, probably back then, about 2.5 million. I think the younger people tended to leave for opportunity. Small countries or Wales and other parts of the United Kingdom that presented limited opportunity for people with ambition meant the younger people in particular tended to leave, and they tended, on the whole, to head towards London.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  You left Wales at age 19, correct?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  1819.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  What was your thought process at the time? Was it screaming, "I have to get out of here," or a marginal decision?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  It was far more conventional than that. I left Wales after I finished high school and I went to university. So that was the first time I'd lived in England. Then, outside of vacations, I never really went back to Wales. Since 1973, my life has been really spent outside of Wales.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  At that young age, were you already interested in art and fiction?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Fortunately enough, I was in both. I'll take the art first, and I think I owe this to my mother, whom I, otherwise I had a fairly strained relationship with. But bless her heart, she was the sort of victim of this age-old prejudice against women and, you know, left school at the age of 15 and always felt a little inferior to people with college and university educations. But she had a really, and I don't know, I never talked to her about it. I don't know where it came from. She had a lifelong affection for the visual arts and for music.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So at home, you know, the radio was always on with her listening to music. And when she took me and my sister to the museum in Wales, the National Museum of Wales, which actually has a pretty good collection of some really interesting impressionist pictures and oddly some Francis Bacon. I think that's what woke my interest in art. And I bought my first picture, which I gave as a gift to my parents when I was 13. And I did so in Cardiff. It was a little watercolor and pencil drawing of a winding mechanism at a pithead,

• 6:27Speaker 01

  these big winding mechanisms that used to sit astride the places in coal mines in Wales where coal came up from below. And I still have that picture. After my mother died, I got it and it hangs in my office at home by my desk.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Is it easy to live with an Otto Dix painting or sketch? Many people think it's ugly. It reminds one of unpleasant things in history, right?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I think the tougher, more strenuous, grueling works of art that other people would have difficulty living with have many layers to them. So you explore them, and they're difficult pictures and they're not easy at first sight. But unlike easier pictures that may be a bit more decorative, they leave room for plenty of exploration as the years go by. And they tell stories. They're redolent of history. They're images of a different epoch. So I think most of the paintings that we've been lucky enough to find over the years, they are tough paintings.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  I feel that way about Haitian art, which has many brutal scenes. So for you, is chagall too sentimental?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  So you don't want to put it on your wall?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  The earliest chagalls I've been drawn to, but neither of us have felt the urge or the need to go out in pursuit of chagall.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  What is your own painting like?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Oh, exasperating.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Neuesaklischkeit or something else? It's like cos?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  No, it's... I don't know if you've ever tried painting or drawing. I didn't take it up until I was in my mid-40s. And so I'd never picked up a crayon or, you know, outside of the obligatory abbreviated art lessons that always seemed to be held later on a Thursday afternoon with everybody waiting for the bell to ring to end school. I'd never taken up a crayon or drew, let alone painted. So if I look back today at what I did early on, it's a lot better. But then, if I look at the works or the paintings that I tried to make, my goodness, it is an extremely humbling experience. But I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. And there's nothing like getting lost in making a painting

• 8:41Speaker 01

  and before you know it, two hours have gone and you have no idea where the time went.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  How has living with the visual arts improved your investing skills?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that it's had any influence whatsoever on investments. I think women...

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Talent identification, isn't it some area where there's always a deeper understanding in the visual arts and you then later can apply those frameworks to individuals or companies? You stay very fresh as an evaluator.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I understand the argument, but I began my life as a journalist and maybe subliminally because I look fairly intently and always look fairly intently at works of art that have caught my eye. I think I've always looked carefully at whatever it is in front of me. It could be a landscape, it could be a building, it could be a person, and have been pretty watchful and have listened carefully. And I think all three are connected when you are trying to take the measure of somebody when you're thinking about forming a business relationship with them.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Now, your father was a classics scholar. Were you interested in Homer as a teenager?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I was not. I suppose like a lot of sons, I tried to get as far away from the classics as possible. And my Latin teacher at school was sure that he had a little Latin genius on his hands since I was the son of a classics professor. And then I proceeded to severely disappoint him for the next three years.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  What in Jewish literature means the most to you?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Well, I devoured, when I was growing up, I devoured the works of, you know, the American Jewish authors who really made their mark during the 1950s and 1960s. And predominantly Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, although there are obviously a string of others as well. But those were the two that, as soon as they published a new book, I immediately went out to buy the book.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And you knew Roth, right? What was he like?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I was very lucky. When I went to university in America, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and here he was, one of the heroes of... Modern literature. He was teaching a small seminar class at the University of Pennsylvania and I enrolled in it. And he was, as a teacher, he introduced me to some, he had edited a Penguin series on Eastern European authors, so he taught from that canon. One of his abiding virtues as a teacher was he prescribed short books to read. So he didn't ask his students to read 600-page tomes. So most of the books that I remember him asking us to read were fairly short, so you

• 11:25Speaker 01

  could really read them without feeling out of breath and then have time to ingest them. And he listened very carefully and was very polite and courteous toward, towards all of his students. And then he very, very kindly wrote me a reference when I applied for a job at Time Magazine. I'm not sure that many people who applied at Time had a reference from Philip Roth. And then later in life, way later in life, our paths crossed again through a mutual friend. And for several years, we were in the habit of going to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and Philip was a mutual friend of the hostess. And so for, I don't know, half a dozen years, we always had Thanksgiving dinner and among

• 12:09Speaker 01

  the guests was Philip Roth. Unless he was in a deep funk, he was always rye and amusing and sardonic.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  How would you describe your current relationship to the Hebrew Bible?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  More distant and remote. I am not an observant Jew and, and haven't been. I obviously identify very proudly as a Jew. And I think my father was completely absorbed with conservative Jew. And he was deeply educated in the Jewish Bible and interpretations of the Jewish Bible. And I think maybe his fascination with it, just like his devotion to Latin, I think drove me away from it. But he had also grown up in a era in Germany, you know, where there weren't very many distractions. And I think the main entertainment of the week, best as I could tell, was going to the synagogue.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Why do you think sons and daughters do not ask more questions about their parents and grandparents' history when they can?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  They're too self-absorbed. They aren't curious. They don't understand that every individual has a story. And on the whole, with every individual, the more that you dig, the more interesting it becomes. They don't know how to ask questions and they don't know how to listen.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  If you could ask your parents something now, what would you ask?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  It wouldn't be one question. It would be, you know, because I obviously have written this book that's a family memoir about what happened to my parents' generation and how that shaped me. It wouldn't be one question, Tyler. It'd be hundreds of questions. All the little, you know, better than I do from all the interviews that you've done. It's the answer to a question that then, then prompts another question. And I probably can't imagine running out of questions for either. But you know, these are, for people who've been through extraordinarily traumatic times, people also suppress memories.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And so it's sometimes difficult to, even though they may be willing and their spirit may be willing, it's very difficult to excavate an answer.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Say it's your grandparents, Max and Minnie, who were killed in the Holocaust. Where would you start with them?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  I think I'd probably start where I do, oddly enough, with founders at the beginning. Because right or wrong, and you know, different people will have different opinions. I just think the first 10, 15 years of life that anybody experiences shapes the individual in profound and deep fashions. Then whatever happens to them subsequently echo through their life. So it's, it's really the details of the circumstances. Imagine being a 10-year-old boy in 1890 or 1891 and you're in a little village beside a river in Germany, in the middle of Germany. But what was life really like? Who woke you up in the morning?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Did you have somebody else sleeping in the same bedroom or in the same bed? Do you remember what you had for breakfast? What were the clothes that you wore to school? I mean, you can just think of hundreds and hundreds of questions. Obviously, my grandfather, the gentleman that you alluded to, Max, he joined the German Army and he served in World War I and was one of the survivors of, you know, the most gruesome, brutal battle in the history of mankind, which was Verdun. And he survived. You can just imagine the number of questions you'd want to ask about that. You know, and that's just one experience. Obviously, an enormously dramatic experience, but you can just imagine the number of questions you'd want to ask about that.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Why do you think it is in the late 19th century that there's such a resurgence of antisemitism in Germany, which for a while, at least by many people, was considered better than average by European standards on this question? Maybe that was an illusion, but something strange seems to happen, right?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I don't know that it was in the 19th century, Tyler. I think it was much more in the early 20th century, after the end of World War I. I think antisemitism in the late 19th century with the Dreyfus Affair in Western Europe was far more prevalent in France than it was in Germany. But I think probably the influx of refugees from the East, from Russia, from the Ukraine, who fled West because of the pogroms, probably didn't help matters in late 19th and early 20th century Germany. But till Bismarck, Germany had always had very strict, like every other country, sort of under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, they'd had very strict prohibitions

• 16:56Speaker 01

  against assimilating Jews. They were only permitted in Germany, and this dates back hundreds of years. It wasn't anything to do with the late 19th century. They were only, in some places, they're only permitted to live in particular places, but there are a whole bunch of professions that weren't available to them. They were tolerated as itinerants, as peddlers, as cattle dealers, as merchants. And then obviously, there were a few who became the favorite so-called court Jews, who helped the various monarchs throughout Germany with their military undertakings and helped finance various other exploits. But they were in a very, very small minority.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  But Jews in Germany, as for Jews elsewhere, had always lived on the outside. And it was Bismarck, Otto Bismarck, who made life considerably easier for them. But even after that, it was still, they clearly weren't in the mainstream.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Why is there such a resurgence of antisemitism today?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Antisemitism has a very long history. It's 2,000 years old. I think it's in the atmosphere of humanity, or has been, or will be. And I'm not complaining about it. I mean, I've benefited vastly from being a Jew, so no, don't get me wrong, I'm not whining about it or anything like that. I just think it's a condition of the human race. And I think it flares up in societies where people feel left behind. They've felt that they've got a rough deal. Maybe it flares up to amongst people who are less well-educated and for whom rabble rousers who want to point accusatory fingers at particular people, whether they're Haitians

• 18:42Speaker 01

  or, or Jews or Somalis, can stir the pot by doing so. Clearly, social media has made it easier to spread these sorts of accusations and rumors. I think the situation in Israel clearly has not helped. And there's this obviously amorphous border between not agreeing with the policies of the Netanyahu government, which many Jews, both in Israel and outside Israel, don't agree with, and antisemitism. So that, at the moment, I think inflames things further. It doesn't help when you have the mayor of New York say he would behest Netanyahu, were

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Netanyahu ever to set foot in.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Why are the Irish in particular so anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I don't know that. First of all, I don't know whether it's true. I don't know the stats. I don't know the data. I would point out that the only connection between Ireland and Judaism or Israel that I know about is that the current president of Israel, his grandfather was the chief rabbi of Ireland.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  There's Leopold Blum also, in Ulysses, of course.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  There is, yes, yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Now, these days, how is it you feel when you revisit Germany?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I hadn't been to Germany for a long time, and I went last summer. And oddly, I'd never been to Munich, which is where my father grew up and from which my grandparents were deported and, and eventually met their death and other relatives too. And Munich today is, on the surface, a charming city, very beguiling, the sort of place one might want to live. But then obviously, every corner has a particular history in Munich, as it does in many European cities. And last summer, I went to an extreme, I don't know who the architect was, or I forget,

• 20:39Speaker 01

  extremely moving building that is the new synagogue in Munich. I actually never go into synagogue, but I have been curious about attending a service there. I tried to get into the synagogue, but because I hadn't filled out application forms, because the security was so tight, because the police were all around it, and because I didn't have the documentation to really prove who I was and hadn't had authorization to be admitted, I couldn't get into the synagogue. And then I went to Dachau, which is very close to the, it's not very far from the center of Munich, which is where several relatives of, of mine had been sent.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I did what tourists do and, and went around it. And I'm not beyond being, obviously being very aware of the history of it. I'm not sure that it stirred up. The one emotion it stirred up was when...

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I was standing in a gas chamber. And it was a gas chamber with multiple ovens. And it was spotless, really, really clean. You know, all the ovens had been cleared. Everything was spotless. And there were these high school students who were obviously bored out of their minds on their iPhones in there and with their AirPods in. And I just stood there for a moment, shutting my eyes, wondering what the heat was like, what the smell was like, what the screams were like, what the work was like, what the stench was like. But that could have been a million years ago.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  But that was the one place that, that really struck me, the vast difference between the scene that I visited and the scene as it was in the early 1940s.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  The media report you're applying for German citizenship?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I actually have it. I've received it.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  You have it. Congratulations. And where in Germany do you feel most at home? Munich?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that I feel at home in Germany. People have asked, why did I apply for German citizenship? Do I expect to be driven out of the United States? Or, you know, I have British nationality as well. No, I don't. Do I expect to be made to feel extraordinarily unwelcome and threatened and terribly frightened in San Francisco? Absolutely not. And do I envisage a time where I would be living in Munich? No. But the one lesson that I took from working on my book was you can never have enough passports. The reason that I applied was the one place, both, you know, in Western Europe and including

• 23:21Speaker 01

  the United States, the one place where the history of the twenties and thirties and the Holocaust is really drummed into a population is in Germany. Doesn't happen in France, doesn't happen in England or Wales, doesn't happen in the United States.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Other than a lot of history and of course detail, at the philosophical level, what else do you feel you learned writing this book? One should have more passports. That's one thing you learned.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, on a philosophical level? I'm not a philosopher, so I don't really know what you mean by.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Every venture capitalist is a philosopher, in my view.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Why is that?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  You have a theory of how the world will be and a theory of what makes people successful. However implicit, you couldn't have written your Alex Ferguson book if you were not in some way a philosopher, right? It's about successful organizations, sustainability, how erasibility can sometimes make you a better mentor.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I think of philosophers as being people like, you know, the great thinkers of the past, Aristotle or Cicero. So I don't think of writing a book about leadership as being particularly philosophical. It's a summation of observations and lessons, but as I said, I'm no student of philosophy.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  They wrote about exile, right? And having to leave.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  They did. They did. The thing I learned most from writing the book was it educated me on how I became what I became. You know, the forces that shaped me, the influences of my parents, the influences of the milieu in which I grew up. All of that shaped who I am. And I understood that a lot better after I finished working on the book.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  In your life, how exactly is it that you moved from being a journalist to being a very successful venture capitalist?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  There was no plan. It was great good fortune. I had wound up working in the San Francisco Bureau for Time Magazine. I worked for Time Magazine for a few years at the sort of beginning of my professional life. And I didn't, when I moved to San Francisco, I really didn't know anything about Silicon Valley. I didn't know anything about the tech industry or the tech business. And obviously it was a lot different, smaller than it is today. And although I was supposed to write about all sorts of different topics, because the bureau in San Francisco covered pretty much everything from, believe it or not, Alaska down to sort of Santa Barbara. The thing that I got attracted by was Silicon Valley.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  There were no technology companies in 1981, 82 in San Francisco unless you count Charles Schwab, who was, you know, had set up his discount brokerage there. And I got really interested in writing about these companies. They were really, really small. You mentioned earlier that I had written a book about Apple. I had got to know Apple fairly well, but at the time, you know, it went public and sold about 100,000 computers, 150,000 computers. So it was really tiny. But I then got introduced through writing about these companies. Atari, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, others. And I'd never met anybody in Wales.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  I'd never conceived of the idea that anyone would start a company, let alone anybody who was 18 or 20 years old. And then I began to understand how some of the mechanics worked. And, and I couldn't start a company. Well, and I joined a company, but it was a little publishing company that didn't require any technical skill or computer science background or electrical engineering or semiconductor know-how. I just didn't have that sort of a background. But through covering these individuals, I then began to understand that there were these investors who invested in their companies. And so I started writing. I did a few stories about the venture capital industry and I got to meet several of the then leaders of the industry, you know, Tom Perkins, who started Kleiner Perkins, and

• 27:17Speaker 01

  then Don Valentine, who started Sequoia. And I had quit Time, had cast my lot with this little publishing company that many, many years later, thanks to the co-founder, was bought by the Dow Jones, but that had nothing to do with me. And I'd left that too. So, you know, wrote letters back then, you couldn't write emails, to the people who ran five venture firms, got rejected by four of them. And then I got really, really lucky and Don Valentine hired me at Sequoia. And I think he thought when some of his peers heard that he'd hired a history major, been a journalist, who didn't have an ounce of technical acumen, never worked for a Silicon Valley company, they thought he'd lost his mind.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Why not publish your book on Don Valentine? Rumor has it, there are only a few copies in your Tuscany hotel.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's not really a book. It's a fairly long profile, not just about Don, it's about the early venture industry.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Many, many people would love to read it.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's kind of you to say that. I'm not sure that there's enough in there to merit a book, but.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  What do most people get wrong about Steve Jobs?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Maybe what a stoic he was and the heroic manner in which he spent his last years, which I can barely imagine. The fact that his native wit, his raw intelligence, the melding of an artist and a capitalist. I think those are the principal things that aren't appreciated about him. And also, I think, the education he received during his years in the wilderness after he got cast out of Apple.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  We think of your interest in Steve Jobs, your book on Alex Ferguson, the art you buy, that you've now written a book on the Holocaust. Is there some general pattern where trying to come to terms with really difficult things? Is this recurring theme in your life? Learning how to paint, that's very hard, right?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I haven't really thought about it that way, but I think life is made richer by having a challenge that you're not sure whether you're up to, up to conquering. So I've always been up for that. But it's more each of these books has really just sprung out of being curious about something, nothing. I'm not sure that there's any greater pattern than unsatisfied curiosity.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  I love Auto Dicks, but most people don't like Auto Dicks. They don't want it hanging on the wall.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Let me know the next time you come to San Francisco. You've got to come and I'd be very happy to show you what we live with.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I'd be delighted to see it.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  That other people wouldn't want to live with.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  I love Lucian Freud as well, the greatest painter of flesh ever, perhaps, right?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Certainly in the 20th century.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe Rubens you could say, but.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  No doubt, no doubt.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  You have Frank Auerbach also?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, big fan.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Underrated in the United States, right?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Yes, but he's having a show at the Metropolitan in, I think it's in two years, in New York.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  I will go, yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Oh, spectacular artist. Yes. You know, Frank, I met Frank on several occasions. In a way, you were asking about Steve Jobs a few minutes ago. Steve, I think most great entrepreneurs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, were obsessives.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Frank Auerbach carried his obsession to new heights. He painted every day of the year, save for one, which was Christmas Day, when he treated himself to a day off and went to Brighton to go to the Brighton Pier on Christmas Day. And then later in life, he decided that that actually, the one day he was taking off, was stealing time from painting. So he abandoned his trips to Brighton. There's an obsessive for you.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  How would you describe your greatest obsession?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I don't know that I am. I'm more of a dilettante because I've got too many interests. And this isn't false modesty on my part. It really isn't. I just think each of these pursuits that I dabble in, each of them, I could do a lot better.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  But that could be an obsession too, right? What you call dabbling in different pursuits.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Or satisfying curiosity.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. What is it you feel you saw early in China? So many people thought China would grow, but the notion that you could invest there and actually get out profit was arguably the better, more important insight. Like around what corner did you see to grasp that?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was a collective effort at Sequoia. It wasn't just me. It was going to visit China and meet people, see what was happening with your own eyes, begin to understand. I'd been to Hong Kong before, but I hadn't been to the mainland. And going to the mainland where so many preconceptions were washed away and gradually beginning to understand, or understanding fairly quickly, that if you wanted a country where capitalism was ablaze in the early 21st century, really ablaze, it wasn't in the US, it was in China. Despite what everybody says about the Communist Party and state control, but it was a country

• 32:15Speaker 01

  where there was a very skimpy, if nonexistent, social safety net and where people had to live or die by either the strength of their education or their wits. Then beginning as the years went by and I got better educated about China having a far keener appreciation of the strengths of a country as it came to grips with what technology had to offer. And Sequoia flourished, and I think it was one of the better decisions that we made for, you know, close to two decades in China, where it was possible to invest in pretty much anything anybody wanted to invest in, any industry.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  And then obviously it's tightened up a lot, obviously, in the last few years. And so the atmosphere and circumstances are different.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Through Crankstart, you've been supporting the Booker Prize. What have you learned doing that?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Oh, how little I know about literature. And I think reading the, you know, I don't read all of the submissions, obviously, and I have nothing to do with the judging of the prize whatsoever. It's as big a mystery to me as it is to everybody else. But I enjoy the challenge of going through, you know, the 12 shortlisted books that come out in the summer or the books that are for the International Booker Prize, because they just open, open your eyes to new authors, countries perhaps that you don't know very much about, circumstances that you don't know too much about. I try to maintain a balance of reading fiction and nonfiction, so the Booker keeps me honest.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Does it feel to you like fiction is in a pretty good place right now? I argue this to my friends, they're often skeptical, but if I think about Ferrante, Canousgard, you know, the Sonya and Sonny book, Hulbeck, Cartarescu, I think there's a lot of great works just in the last 10 years.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would completely agree. Douglas Stewart's one of my favorite authors as well. Despite what everybody says about AI, great storytelling is never going to go out of style, and it begins with words on paper.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  How would you improve the San Francisco nonprofit community? There's a lot of money, there's going to be a lot more money, right? There aren't that many talented people to run nonprofits. Is the whole thing just a mess? Is it doomed? Will it succeed?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think two things. One, it'd be great to have more people in San Francisco interested in contributing in some fashion. The second is, I think having people from the for-profit world, operating philanthropies, is very helpful and sets a different performance standard. So Missy Narula, who's the wonderful CEO of Crankstart, her background before she came with us five years ago was a TPG in Bain. It wasn't in the not-for-profit world.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  And so she has this wonderful ability to straddle both worlds, that she has the sensibility of a person who cares deeply about others and those who are left behind, but also the need for performance that comes out of having spent many years in the for-profit world. I think it's very easy for people to point fingers at philanthropies and/or not-for-profit services and say that they can be run more effectively. And I think that's probably true for lots of them, but you can say even the same for many companies as well. So what you try to do, I think, is set a standard and be the best and also knowing

• 35:52Speaker 01

  that some of the things that you're going to try in philanthropy, just like in business, are not going to work. But I think we've been, Harriet and I have been so fortunate, it really is our job to try and help others who just haven't had the good luck and fortune and circumstances that we've both had.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  There's a great history of the arts in San Francisco, the Beat poets, Wayne Tebow, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead. One could go on and on. Are the next 30 or 40 years going to look like that? Or is everyone just priced out? And, you know, maybe they'll live in Fresno and have a patron in San Francisco.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  I think that's quite possible. Look, we're working very hard. Daniel Lurie, the wonderful mayor of the city, is working very hard to make it far easier to build housing. But if you can't build housing, if developers and people who want to put up new houses are left in the straitjacket, what you're saying, people are going to be priced out of the city, no doubt about it. I think most people are already priced out of the city. The same as they've been priced out of Manhattan. And artists have always needed to go to places where they can afford to live. I noticed that there was a piece in the, I think it was in the New York Times over the weekend about Syracuse, New York, being a great haven for writers.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Part of the reason being that it was affordable, you know, rents were low compared to New York City and Boston, maybe. So, look, housing is a huge problem throughout the country. Housing is the biggest issue, or I think the biggest issue in California, and it's an acute issue in San Francisco.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Now, your book starts with an anecdote where about 20 years ago, you were diagnosed with what is supposedly an incurable blood cancer, and yet here you are alive and kicking and just finished a book. How did it change how you allocate your time over the last 20 years? It's at least some level of uncertainty, right?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It made me want to control my own calendar rather than have others control my calendar.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  And was that good for your efficiency or just good for your happiness?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  More for my content. I'm not sure that I became any more efficient, but probably pretty inefficient. But I did not want to be imprisoned by obligations, the only form part of the life I wanted to lead.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  How do you distinguish between true friends and others?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  I think it's the ones you want around your deathbed.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  And how do you know which ones they are, other than family?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Oh, there are very few of them. You can't have through life, I think it's very difficult to have deep relationships with a lot of people. It's just very hard because it's built on history, it's built on the wavelengths missing, it's built on shared experiences, and there's just not enough time to do that with lots of people.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Why does the United Kingdom seem to be so stuck now, economically, politically, otherwise? In its most fundamental terms, what has gone wrong there? There's a lot of particular mistakes they've made, but why so much correlation in the mistakes?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  I think it's the residue of the arrogance of empire. Obviously, it's the mantle, the pound sterling was the reserve currency 100 years ago or so, and the world's reserve currency. Britain had the world's largest navy, obviously had its, for better or worse, tentacles all over the world, and it was a world power, the world power. And then the mantle was lost to an entrepreneurial country. I don't think Britain has ever recovered from the loss, the position of primacy. And everything since then has been a somewhat feeble, muted, muted reaction to it, where

• 39:41Speaker 01

  you've had these cycles, and there's a new prime minister who was appointed very recently, obviously. You've had these cycles where government is all the answer, and then certainly under the Thatcher years and later to less extent under Blair and Gordon Brown and David Cameron, years where government wasn't seen as the answer. And it's sad to watch, it's sad to witness, but I think Britain overall has suffered from too much government.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Before my last question, just to promote your book again, Auslander, One Family Story of Escape and Exile, I very much enjoyed reading it. Final question, what is it you wish to learn about next?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Iran.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  And how will you do that? It's hard to go there, right?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  And I'm not talking about contemporary Iran. I'm talking about Iran circa, I don't know whether or not I'll go ahead and do it, but I've been reading a lot about it recently, circa 1918, 1920 to 1960, 1970.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  The constitutional liberal era, like 1908, 1911? I'm so curious as to what it was actually like back then.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yes, and I do not pretend to great degree of deep knowledge about it, but I am extremely curious, because I think so many of the issues that we confront today stem back to that period and to what happened in the early 1950s.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Michael Moritz, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Tyler, you've been extremely generous and your questions were just wonderful. Thank you.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Much appreciated.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.