The following is a conversation with Jason Calacanis, who's an entrepreneur, investor,
author of Angel, How to Invest in Technology startups, and as many people may know, he's
a fun, brilliant, long-time podcast host of This Week in Startups, and co-host of the
All In podcast with Chamath Balahapatia, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, who all happen
to be poker buddies and self-proclaimed besties.
The result is always a great listen due to both the love and the heated disagreements.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, FourSigmatic
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 game theory problem off and on for a few
years in undergrad and grad school.
I found the distributed, complex system aspect of finance and economics in general fascinating.
But now, I find even more fascinating the human side of the whole thing.
Ideas of greed, power, freedom, and truth.
Wall Street Bets, Robin Hood, and the whole beautiful mess around this topic allows us
to have great conversations about human nature and the systems that underlie the rise and
fall of civilizations.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,
support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Jason Colicanus.
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 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 online 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?
In full disclosure, I was an angel investor in Robin Hood before they launched.
And when I met the founder Vlad and his partner, 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
founder's 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 and-
I love the image of all of this, you hang out with Elon at a crappy bar.
Yeah.
I mean, it is the worst bar in the peninsula.
Like just garbage on the floor and like cheap beer and warm beer and like you pick up your
pine glass and be lipstick on it.
It's brutal.
Classy.
Not your lipstick.
You understand?
Somebody else's lipstick.
Yes.
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.
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 gonna pitch me on a startup and you're gonna sell
your algorithm to other people.
And if it was so good, why wouldn't you just use it yourself and print money?
He's like, yeah, yeah, no, no, that's not our business.
Our business is we're gonna create an app to get millennials to trade stocks.
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 gonna 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 went 250K into debt for school and now can't
get a job.
Those people?
And he's like, yeah.
I'm like, okay, they have no interest in their future, but they're gonna trade stocks.
He said, yeah, that's the opportunity.
I was like, how are you gonna make money?
And he said, well, that's the best part.
It's gonna be free.
And I said, so your idea is to get a group of people who have no interest in saving for
their future to trade and your business model is free.
And he said, yes, I said, I'm in.
Because in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas that nobody believes in are the ones
that have the greatest returns.
I mean, Uber, I introduced to about 25 investors and three of us said yes.
So a full 12% of the community who saw that deal decided to do it.
So your sense about this idea being good had to do with the fact that this guy was just
the 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?
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, it wasn't, is this going to work?
It was almost positively not going to work.
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, what would that look like?
And that's what the world needs more people doing.
And so when you looked at Robinhood, 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 Robinhood sense,
this group of sophisticated insiders who have more access and more access to capital, but
we will figure out how to solve this problem.
And most things don't work.
It's like the Wikipedia.
There's no way the Wikipedia would ever work, except it did.
You're like, how is this ever going to work?
You're not paying anybody, but it's both the largest corpus of an encyclopedia ever.
So I think Robinhood actually succeeded.
And then what we saw was this system and a lot of the systems in our society, whether
it's the political system, the Constitution of the United States, education, higher education
which you're involved in, and then even the financial system, we have not stress tested
and stress tested it.
And we don't actually know all the edge cases and how it works.
So Trump was able to just really put this crazy stress test.
Is the democracy going to hold?
Are we going to break this 200-some-year-old experiment?
And then we looked at the financial markets and it turns out there were more people shorting
the stock 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.
I was surprised that nobody knows the list of people who were shorted and you guys were
trying to figure that out.
Yeah, there's no transparency on a lot of these systems.
And if you call to try to short a stock, 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 try to find like a 73 Mustang Grande in gold, and you're
going to 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 and 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, there's some grand
conspiracy here.
So the Robinhood'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 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.
Yeah.
So in some sense, Robinhood enabled this very like the magic of this distributed system
of Wall Street bets, right?
He said Wikipedia, 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, I would have guessed it would never work.
But if it does work, it changes everything and it did.
And Robinhood, 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.
Yes.
And it's very easy when these companies get big, 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.
I'm going to rent my couch or my extra room to somebody like a serial killer or I'm going
to stay in somebody's house like a serial killer's house and 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 Uber or Airbnb, people replace their cars and Uber was not competing ultimately
with taxis.
They were competing with car ownership, public transportation, walking, or just not going
out.
And then you look at Airbnb.
A lot of people who stay in an Airbnb would not be taking a trip to Kyoto if not for the
fact that they could get a $75 beautiful room with great reviews in Kyoto for three weeks.
It inspires people and it manifests a market because the product is so transcendent, right?
And I think that's one of the things that 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, you could talk
about it.
You can watch YouTube videos, but at a certain point, you got to get on the mountain.
At a certain point, you got to put some chips in the pot and it's going to be painful.
Like poker is going to be painful.
You're going to lose a lot of money.
That's why you should play at the small tables first and even in trading, you look at people
who are doing this crazy trading and game stop, a company that's worth maybe a couple
of billion dollars, but certainly not tens of billions of dollars.
Of course, the people who are throwing their money and last are going to lose it.
I think everybody knew that.
And so it was a momentum play and 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 to build their stack back up.
But that's really the only thing I am concerned about is there are people who will play poker,
a 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 the average person's behavior based upon somebody who can't control their
ability to drink.
Two glasses of wine instead of 20.
How does this whole thing end?
Probably in tears.
For who?
Yeah.
Who's crying?
Is everybody crying?
Exactly.
Who's crying when?
So I think there were some of the hedge funds that were crying initially.
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 army, some of them might have broke ranks and then shorted the stock.
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 have said, okay, it's $200 or $300.
Maybe I'll join the short movement now that they've covered.
And they could have shorted their double agents.
So people have to understand this stuff is gnarly.
And it's a free for all.
I mean, it is a literal free for all.
There's a kind of morality, like a big statement that Wall Street Bets made in terms of like
the elites can't just push us around.
They can't bully around.
But at the same time, they're also interested in making money.
What's your sense?
You said that some of the people in the Wall Street Bets might have broken off and shorted
the stock.
Are they more interested?
There was an emergent like morality that emerged and said like, we're not going to put up with
the centralized elites, but is that going to continue?
Are they going to fight the power structures that are bad for society, or 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 evils that manipulate the market?
What's your sense?
You know, it really feels like the Dark Knight series of films where like some people just
want to see the world burn.
I think there is a contingent of people who just literally want to see chaos.
You know that contingent on some of these forums who just want to create chaos, right?
So there's certainly that chaos contingent, but I think overall what the arc will show
is a group of people getting massively educated.
You see it in crypto as well.
There was like a three-year period where all of these failed entrepreneurs who I knew
who couldn't build companies were then coming back to me after their companies has failed
or after they gave up or couldn't clear 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 you're going to destroy
Airbnb because everybody's apartment is going to be on immutable ledger.
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 as a feature?
That does not seem like a good feature.
And they couldn't explain it.
They were 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, entrepreneurship is bad, technology is bad, and polarization
of wealth and people getting rich is a bad thing.
When I grew up, I'm 50 now.
But when I was a Gen Xer growing up, we kind of maybe too much idolized Bill Gates and
people who were 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 gets globally distributed, whether
it's Tesla or SpaceX or Google or Airbnb or Uber or Robinhood, 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
established colleges and stuff like that, less competition for accreditation degrees,
things tend to get a little weird, don't they?
And people tend to be protected and that's not good, you need competition.
Doesn't mean that people shouldn't have global health care, it doesn't mean that 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.
But we'd like you to be entrepreneurial.
And then you have somebody like the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, who disappears for a
couple of weeks.
Who's that?
No.
Exactly.
Who's Jack Ma?
I was like, he kind of disappears for a couple of weeks, then he comes back and he's really
sorry about the things he said and then he disappears again and like, we have to be
very careful if China wins capitalism, this is going to be an existential threat for humanity.
Yeah.
The Chinese are no joke.
I mean, they are seriously focused and they are picking the winners.
It's a very weird system because it is in fact, I don't know what you call it, like communism
capitalism is such overloaded terms, but they do encourage entrepreneurship and they do
a good job of it.
Oh, yes.
But then they're like the surveillance thing and they're controlling things in a way.
It's weird because it seems to work really well for them in the short term.
Yes.
It's definitely got short term benefits.
So the question is like, how that gets distorted and becomes worse and worse and worse, which
you potentially might be.
And I think on the entrepreneurial spirit, which you have apotheos all centered around
the entrepreneurial spirit, 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 treating the word billionaires if it's a bad word.
But in general, all the difficult things we're going through in this country, it seems like
the way out is going to be making the entrepreneur the hero of society of letting that young
kid with a big dream and the guts to take the big risk and build something totally new,
giving them a chance and whatever that involves.
I don't think it's about taxes.
I don't think it's about regulation and all that stuff.
It's about us in just public discourse saying that kid, that guy, that girl, they're bad
asses.
Encourage them to do it.
We have to have people buy in to the fact that they have that opportunity.
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.
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 it a lot and they're battling in their
minds to protect poor people.
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.
Once in a while, I'll tweet something where I say, 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.
You can take the lectures.
This is amazing.
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.
They're like, yeah, but they don't have internet and I'm like, here's the chart of internet
penetration in America and they're like, well, poor people don't have internet.
I'm like, really?
Find me any downtrodden person without a smartphone with a high speed connection.
That capitalism provided for $12 a month or $15 a month, it's very hard to find that.
We have it so well in this country and there's so much opportunity, but people don't believe
it.
That's actually one of the problems.
See, the average American still watches four or five hours of television a day.
Often I meet people and they're like, I need a technical co-founder, but all I need is
a million dollars and I'm like, okay, well, what is your skill?
They don't have a skill.
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.
Well, as my friends say, I'm Harris, I think your friend as well says, everybody has a
million ideas an hour.
You don't really get credit for those.
Even when you're asleep, your idea is spewing ideas, zero credit for your ideas.
It's all about execution.
You have to believe that you yourself can be the core of that execution.
You yourself can build the thing and no matter what your circumstances are, you could talk
about 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.
Build the best country in the world, right?
Yes.
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, the skill
you need to refine is the ability to learn new skills.
If you become good at learning a new skill, and Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine, has really
pioneered this, he can get to 60 or 70% of 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 a group vacation in Italy, and there was a
basketball court.
And I said, let's go, let's go shoot some hoops, I've never shot before.
And I was like, okay, come on, I'll teach you.
And Tim is fabulously uncoordinated.
People don't know this.
Yes.
Like, he tried to dribble a basketball and do a layup, 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.
Did you watch Breaking Bad?
Like, yeah, I'm like, okay, that's about 400 hours.
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.
But if you even know enough about to set this up, you would then be able to hire a team.
Correct.
And you'll be able to call them and they're bullshitting 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.
The process of learning how to learn is essential there because I did martial arts, jiu-jitsu
and so on.
And it's so funny to watch.
I did take one though, yeah.
I took one though.
It was awesome.
It's funny that there's some people that do an activity for years because just sort
of elaborate on something you were saying about hours.
It's not always the amount of hours, it's the quality that you put in.
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 we'll
show you your blunders and mistakes.
And I'm like, oh, I'm spending no time reviewing my losses in chess and I just want to play
the next game.
I should really review these losses and figure out what mistakes I made.
And when I started doing that, I was like, oh, I'm getting better.
Right?
So some deliberate practice really works.
And if you want to take it all the way, Magnus Carlson, shout out to the guy, he has an
app, but there's a few other coaching apps where you focus on the end game.
You focus drilling in particular.
You basically don't play the game at all, you just focus on drilling the different aspects.
The openings.
The end game.
The end game, yeah.
And there's different kinds of puzzles.
So you can really make it into a deliberate practice.
Not to make this episode sponsored by chess.com, but they literally have puzzles.
So I was like, oh, and it's $100 a year for this product.
And I just thought to myself, this is capitalism.
They don't need to charge you $100 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 documentary, The Last Dance?
Like half of it.
I'm still working through it.
I mean, he's so competitive and petty.
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
to win.
That's capitalism.
And when people are competing, man, look at what Elon did to the space of cars.
Like every, they were literally laughing at him in the first 10 years, electric cars,
ha ha, that company will got a 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 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 pandemics from ever happening again.
And before that, Bill Gates was banging his fist and Jeff Skull was doing the movie Contagion.
I mean, for two decades, people have been banging their fist.
We have to be prepared for this.
And everybody's like, yeah, whatever, YOLO.
It's not going to happen.
And now it's happened and people are like, we need to be able to destroy every pandemic
and virus before it happens.
And 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.
And that is against all rules and regulations about 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 an endorsement deal.
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.
But we won't, soldiers, firefighters, but we won't let people get paid to do a challenge
trial.
Weirdly risk averse in certain areas that are completely don't make any sense.
And this is where the world needs to be.
We could have said these thousand people, young people, who we know are in all likelihood
not going to have a bad outcome, but there's a possibility.
But it's very low and it's certainly lower than riding a motorcycle.
It's lower than riding a motorcycle.
People ride 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'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.
We would have been over by now.
So we get to challenge all of the 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 have people give up their organs for money.
We obviously understand, but there's a reasonable discussion about, well, maybe there's a level
of risk in a global pandemic.
I mean, we fought the Nazis.
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 our challenge trial is reasonable or not, if I were to do
that on Twitter, they'd be like, oh, Callicanus wants to give poor people coronavirus in order
to save rich people.
It's like, no, I didn't say that.
But you and I could have a reasonable discussion about our challenge trial, something we should
consider in a acute situation where millions of people are going to lose their lives.
So that's an example of capitalism and 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.
You were able to- In Korea and Finland, all over the place.
You could have done mass manufacture.
So there, there's a little bit of a failure of capitalism to step up.
And I don't know if you agree with this, but it seems that the blame is to be placed at
the regulators and the various institutions.
Pretty capitalism and all likelihood is what stopped it here in America.
I mean, I had friends who had imported them from other countries, the testing kits, and
you've probably been to parties where people had these kind of testing kits from other
countries and we're sitting here and they're just approving them now.
Really in February, month 11 of the pandemic in America, we're going to have testing online.
Really.
I mean, even if these tests were 80% effective and they're 95% effective, mass producing them,
we should have sent them, you know, in every postal, anybody with a post office box should
have, you know, with 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,
and closing their borders and masks.
That's the combination that works.
So 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-
I give them that until June.
I wonder how history will remember this whole period.
I'd love to ask you, because you were an early investor in Robinhoods and you sort of, 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, like 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?
Yeah.
So you have a kind of a balance view on the whole thing, which is really nice.
We've talked about what Robinhood did right, I think.
Can you sort of steelman Chamath's argument of what Robinhood did wrong in the last few
days?
Yeah.
I mean, communication is always the number one issue with these startups, right?
And if you have to get ahead of any problem and you have to put all the bad news out immediately.
And in the case of Robinhood, it seems based on what has been in the papers and what Robinhood
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've got to put up a billion
dollars, two billion dollars, three billion dollars, we can't do that overnight.
And I think that they were in an uncomfortable situation of going on TV and saying, we have
a liquidity crisis, that could be like a run on the bank, everybody then logs in at the
same time to Robinhood and tries to sell every share they own because they're afraid that
the whole thing's going to collapse, right?
So I think there was this kind of like black swan event and they probably didn't communicate
at all that well.
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 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 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.
Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity.
There might be non-disclosures in place that we're not aware of where they're not allowed
to talk about certain relationships.
I see.
And that results like in Vlad's case, and that results in you being like acting weird
or nervous or nervous.
Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous, you know, so it's 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.
We have people who stand on top of their motorcycles and drive down the road on a motorcycle and
we don't blame Yamaha for or Harley Davidson for some idiot standing on the seat of their
motorcycle on a highway going 60 miles an hour.
We just say that person's an idiot.
But when new technology comes out, we blame the technology, not the person operating it.
Yeah.
And if you are going to operate, we basically vilify and indemnize and I think that that
is part of it.
Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb, we always thought, what if somebody trashes
your apartment?
And then sure enough, a bunch of methads rented this poor woman's apartment.
She left all of her stuff in it and then a bunch of methads had a drug party, destroyed
her apartment, ripped up all her photos and went crazy.
And we knew that day would happen, but nobody remembers it now.
But it was the number one story on every news channel because wow, that's an exciting story.
And I just thought to myself, I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms where
the hotel rooms 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 learn.
So I think there's a learning curve with these companies and they do get to scale at a level
that is unprecedented.
It used to take decades for a company to become an international phenomenon.
Now it happens in two, three, four years.
I mean, look at clubhouse.
This thing went from being a private beta six months ago to being the number one app
in Germany and in Japan and here, like 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.
The thing people got wrong about entrepreneurship, technology and business over the last couple
of decades was just how big the market was and then how quickly you could achieve relevancy
in these markets.
We thought the market was like the 60 million homes were broadband and originally it was
like maybe 10 or 20.
Then it became 60 million.
Then it was like, okay, well, 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 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.
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 going to lose all your money.
They're going to hack you or whatever.
And now it's just amazing to me how quickly when a company hits, how quickly it can get
to a million subscribers or 10 million or a billion users, right?
And there's all these networks, like social networks that allow the spread of the viral
spread of like a new startup, a new company, a new app to be announced, a new express.
Anything, an idea, a podcast, right?
Like, I mean...
Yeah, a single meme could change the world.
Speaking of clubhouse, I mean, I just want to, we're saying so many interesting things,
but there was a magical moment with Vlad and Elon on clubhouse.
That was wild.
Yeah.
Do you have thoughts about that interaction, which felt like so many aspects of this whole
situation feels like it's totally novel, surreal, like it's defining a new era, like a billionaire,
the richest human on earth is interviewing the person at the center of one of the most
interesting mass scale, like power battles in finance ever, perhaps.
And by the way, seven movies have been sold, two weeks, just think about how fast things
are moving, Lex.
This thing happens, 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 $3.5 billion 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.
Doesn't it feel like it's been 10 months?
It's been 10 days, Lex.
It's been 10 days.
10 days.
Plus, there's a new president, all these things that, and everyone forgot.
Oh, and there was an insurrection, by the way, we also have 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, took over the Capitol.
Well, so, and the other more dramatic thing to me is-
That was one month ago.
That was one month, and the president of the United States got banned from every major
social network, and which I think I'm still deeply troubled by is Parler being removed
from AWS.
That changed the way, that changed a lot of things.
As somebody who's an aspiring entrepreneur, that changed the way I see the world.
That little, maybe I'm being overdramatic, but-
No, you're not.
I think you're paranoid for a reason.
You're paranoid for a very good reason, which is, as big as these companies can become,
they are beholden to the mob.
And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled, they're going to get canceled
because you can't lose your entire audience.
You can lose your whole customer base, and you can lose all your employees.
I think what's interesting about your fear about Parler and AWS taking off is we went
from being a social network, which is the software layer, and then we went to the infrastructure
layer, and they'll even go after Cloudflare, which is a CDN provider.
They're just a plumbing, it's sort of like the telephone.
So we're basically holding everybody responsible on the whole chain of events here, and what
that's going to do is, I'm not a huge believer in crypto, but distributed computing, where
nobody and decentralized and distributed computing platforms and open standards, podcasting is
an open standard, the web is an open standard, FTP was an open standard, but Twitter and
Facebook are closed.
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 there's a crypto project where everybody will, and I invested in a company that tried
to do this and got sold and didn't work out, but take your hard drive on your computer
at home, you give 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 YouTube will be able
to kick people off because they're skeptics of, I don't know, the pandemic, or the vaccine,
or they'll make things that are more censorship resistant, I think that'll be the reaction
to all of this.
Well, this is my question for you, going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you.
Is there, 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?
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 Friend Feed and countless others.
So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category, and 80% of the charity glory
will be owned by the top two or three players.
But will those players change, do you think?
What's your sense?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
I mean, if 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 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.
Do you think Facebook might buy Clubhouse has been...
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, like he did poke, and he just kept
trying and trying and trying, and part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders and the
Instagram founders left is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful in terms of his ability to
copy.
What do you think makes a great leader in that sense?
Okay, so when I look at Zuckerberg...
He's a great executor.
Is he a great executor?
I don't think he's a great leader.
I was bullish on, I was excited about 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.
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 as explicit.
That could be a good motivator.
That could be a good motivator.
Well, I mean, the motivation of 18, 19-year-old men is pretty clear.
He was just trying to...
He had no game.
He had no game, and he needed to know who was single so he could at least have a shot
at getting a date.
It's a little creepy.
It's a little creepy, yeah.
He, I think, was so obsessed with engagement and winning, and 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.
There's 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 he 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.
So whatever the friction is...
You know what you're saying, right?
I was like, you're speaking so fast that I almost forget that you're dropping bombs,
but so removing friction and you're saying Facebook is exceptionally good at...
He was the best at it.
I mean, at Uber, they were like, we're going to take out tipping, we're going to take out
the need for you to take out your credit card and do payment.
It's just going to be in your wallet.
You got picked up, you leave, that's it.
And I was like, we should have tipping, and they're like, it adds a step, and we're trying
to have no steps.
You put your address in, you click the button, and you do nothing else.
And so we've been obsessed here in Silicon Valley is how many clicks can we take out
of the process?
I guess Amazon is incredible at that as well.
Absolutely.
One click was the start of it.
And then you look at Clubhouse as an example, you open Clubhouse and you see rooms, you
click on it, you're listening.
So in one click, you're listening.
And then in one click, if you raise your hand or you get invited and you say, yes, you're
speaking.
So it's two clicks to speak, one click to listen.
Yeah.
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, which is 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 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 Man, Love Boy Association or whatever, like
Pedophilia Association.
And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself and like 20 other famous people in
Silicon Valley.
And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it and they're like, you're in Nambla?
And I'm like, no.
Facebook, 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.
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
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.
Well, it's sometimes very difficult, this is where vision is required to anticipate the
unintended consequences.
It seems like Mark Zuckerberg is not very good at that.
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?
Do you have an example?
Is Elon to you a great leader?
He's also a controversial one, right?
Yeah.
He's got a love and hate, a controversial in the sense that there is, and I know a lot
of people work with him for him, that there's also a love-hate relationship.
The hate comes from the fact that they get pushed extremely hard.
It's a very competitive environment, but it's a positive one because 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 in tension and just anxiety,
all those kinds of things.
If you want to do great things, there will be some suffering and there'll be some pain,
and it's not easy if you want to change the world.
Some people have this expectation that it's going to be easy.
What you'll typically find for any great leader who's trying to do something super ambitious,
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, you could be high fives
and everybody could love you or whatever, but if you want to change the world, you want
to do something hard driving, there's going to be sacrifice involved.
The problem is people are looking at something that is an Olympic caliber sport or a Navy
Seals like effort.
In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice.
We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal like Michael Phelps and say, oh my
god, he had to get up at 4 a.m. every day and he had to swim and he had to do an ice
bath.
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.
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 a place like Amazon, there was this incredible story in the New York Times where people were,
I don't know if you remember it, this is the worst place you could ever work, Amazon.
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 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 getting a couple grains of rice, put them in a basket, cleaning it, and then whatever,
that's valid work, no big deal, I'm not deriding it, I'm sort of, but that is one group, and
then there's people who are samurai, and you cannot conflate the two, you cannot compare
the two, and that's what is happening right now in business, whenever you see these stories
about this person at this company is like a tyrant and they're so horrible and they
yelled at somebody, like if you're in the field and you're taking the beach at Normandy
and it's D-Day or you know, you got to take the hill or you got to whack Osama bin Laden
and you're the Navy SEALs and like a rudder, a rotor gets knocked off the back of the black
hawk, like this is serious shit, like don't do it if you're not serious, and if you're
not serious about changing the world, why would you go work for Bezos, why would you
go work for Elon Musk, don't do it, don't go work there.
This is, let me just sit back and enjoy the beauty of all of that, that's music to my
ears, but I'm not sure what to do with it because it's conflicting to a lot of the
things I hear from the way you're supposed to kind of act and I think in order to do
great things, you have to, I always admired people that lose their shit a little bit because
they're so passionate and like, 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.
Work life balance, it's ridiculous, 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 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 and you go home and you get your like, you know,
you get your little, you know, bits and grains of rice and you go heat them up and eat them.
That's it.
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 didn't have the Vietnam War and then we had this like weird Iraq wars
and Middle East wars that were kind of like a small number of people went and we sent
drones.
Like we have not had to sacrifice.
Gen Xers, you know, maybe the talent 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.
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 twos 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 $4 an hour, $3 or $4 an hour in the factories there.
And they were just two decades ago at, you know, I don't know, it was probably 50 cents
an hour, something crazy like that.
And now they've improved the quality of life there so much, just like America did 200 years
ago or 100 years ago, they've improved it so much in China that now they're getting
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.
Because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam and other countries.
So this is the way of the world, you know, people move up and they get a better lot in
life for their families.
And just in America, we've gotten soft and there's a generation.
How do people die in America now?
Suicide, obesity, heart attacks, anxiety, I mean, we're suffering from things that if
you told people 100 years ago that the number, the top ways Americans would die would be
overeating and suicide, they'd be like, what?
You're literally killing yourself or eating yourself to death.
That's what's happening in America.
And when everybody, not everybody unmasked, there's a large number of people who have
become softer and softer.
Capitalism creates an environment where there's people that still step up amidst that with
a big dream and challenge the conventions and that human spirit just arrives above that
as Elon's example, that Jeff Bezos example.
Countless examples.
And, and they push, you know, the limits of those, of human beings that are willing to
step up.
And, you know, I, you know, I think about sort of how to create a company that, that
amidst all of this softness 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 an Olympic pursuit is?
It's all top-down.
Everybody just, you asked earlier what leadership was and I never answered the question.
I think, you know, what leaders do is they set the example, they set the bar.
And if you look at someone like Elon, you know, we're personal friends for 20 years.
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 to pass the baton, right?
And Bezos did that.
Brilliant.
And Bezos now is saying, you know what, I'm 57.
I'm the richest guy on the planet, 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, or a commentator.
And so, you know, being an entrepreneur is brutal.
It's, you know, seven days a week, 12 hours a day.
Everybody who says anything differently is kidding themselves.
You're going to have to sacrifice.
If you, and this competition, and America has to fight, if America does not win capitalism
and China does, it is literally the end of the human species.
It's over for humanity.
Right now, everything has been going really well in terms of the number of people living
in poverty is plummeting, life spans 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 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 win capitalism.
We must win economically.
That is the battlefield.
The battlefield is science, technology, and money, and economy, finance.
That's the battlefield.
China wins, authoritarians win.
And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room and say, it's time for you
to be reeducated, or they can put three or four million people, Uyghurs, into prison
camps and say, you know what, this religious thing, that's counter to what is productive
for us.
Therefore, we're going to shave your heads, and we're going to have you literally pick
cotton in the fields.
They have Uyghurs with no sense of any kind of arc of history in the fields picking cottons
as slaves in what can only be described by every humanitarian organization as a concentration
camp.
And every Jewish person I know takes great offense when somebody uses the Holocaust as
a metaphor, except in the case of the Uyghurs right now.
And every Jewish person I've talked to has said to me, that is a Holocaust.
That is millions of people going to genocide because of their religious beliefs.
And I'm an atheist, but if people want to believe a certain religion, fine.
But China's approach is we need to win capitalism so bad, we need to win on the global stage
so bad.
And 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.
It's dark, but I still believe that the vilification is just in the space of Twitter and the space
of ideas.
I think that's probably a good...
And entrepreneurs win out in the end.
They don't...
I believe women.
And they'll build...
We'll get the rocks.
And 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, as you're describing, you've hosted this week in startups for how many episodes?
11 years, almost 1200 now.
1200.
Yeah.
So you've talked to some of the great leaders in business in general.
Is there a common thing that you see or...
Really messed up relationship with the parents.
Like just find me a great entrepreneur.
I will show me the trauma.
Their dad was like, you're not good enough.
In the teenage years, is that truly, is there something?
There is definitely something to do.
Like hardship at some point in their life.
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, that's like their, oh, 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?
There is an archetype there that when I started investing, I heard from a lot of people is
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 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 quite 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 when I first heard that, I was like, it's kind of corny.
But then I read this book by, I forgot 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 them, I think it's very important to have a purpose and
a mission, not everything, but a specific purpose of some kind of joy that you want
to put into the world.
You want to solve some kind of big, hard problem.
And then everybody knows why you're coming to work every day.
And then for the founder, when you dread going to work that day and you don't feel like solving
that problem anymore, that's the tell.
And a lot of times I meet young founders and I'm like, why are you doing this?
And they're like, well, I was looking for an idea.
And this is the one I came up with because I think I'll make a lot of money.
And it's like, you're going to quit.
You're going to get to month nine or 10 of this and you're going to run out of money
or like your CTO is going to quit, then your CFO is going to quit and you're going to lose
your biggest customer.
And you're just going to say, this is not worth it.
And if using Bezos or Elon's examples, they just needed to see the world change in very
specific ways.
And Steve Jobs.
They needed to see a change and it doesn't matter if they made money or they were losing
or winning.
They just went to work every day and they had to change it.
It's almost like they didn't have a choice.
No choice.
Elon makes this sound like his torture, his whole journey, but he can't help it.
Having been a witness to it, just as friends for that long, I have never seen an entrepreneur
suffer more than him.
He's been public about that, like you do not want to be me.
He has suffered for those companies.
He has suffered to get them where they are.
It has not been easy.
Can you analyze Elon in that aspect?
Is it just he can't help it?
He must see the change that he hopes for in the world?
He's just incredibly hardworking and he's very talented as well.
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.
People were aghast that he was asking Vlad such good questions and they're like, oh my
god, Elon's the best journalist on the planet.
It was like, anybody who knows Elon knows he asks great questions.
I used to have dinner in LA and my book agent also was Sam Harris' agent.
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, one lived in Santa Monica and I lived in Brentwood and
we would go to this place, Papone, it's an 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 Sam was an expert on.
I had to sit there and just listen to these two guys talk.
They have both piercing intelligences, but Elon, he goes straight to the gut.
The questions that no engineer wants to hear is just the basic stuff that, why the hell
are you doing it this way when the obvious solution is much easier or this or that?
Why haven't you tried this?
You can figure things out.
He's a problem solver.
That's another thing.
I think the great entrepreneurs can look at a problem with very fresh eyes almost consistently.
They base those to describe that as day one thinking, just pretend this is day one every
day and then other people use the term first principles, but it basically means 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?
How do we solve this problem?
What people do sometimes, they get in a rut, they just come to work and they just go through
their email, they do whatever they did the day before and they don't think, why are we
doing this?
What 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.
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
or what if we do same-day shipping?
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.
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.
They have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime for $10 a month, I think globally
it's probably cheaper, but that was the driver of that business, it was all of those people
because they would, you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, do you know how much you pay?
No.
Exactly.
It started at $50, and I think that 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 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 say it's the greatest thing
in the world because anything I need, if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad or
a camera goes bad, you get it here within a day or less.
Yeah.
It's pretty amazing.
You've already been dropping bombs, incredible advice on startups in general, but let me
maybe go straight in and ask, is there advice for somebody that wants to go big to build
the big startup to help them succeed?
Yeah.
It's very similar to the advice I give to investors because now I teach angel investing
because there's so many people who 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 TheSyndicate.com where I invest in companies, there's 6,500 people
who are members of that.
It's the largest syndicate in the world.
In fact, the first deal we ever did was com.com, the meditation app.
We put $378,000 into it when it was a $5 million product, a $5 million company, so we bought
six or 7% of the company.
It's now with $2 billion, so you can do the math on that.
We still own 5%.
What year was it?
Six years ago.
It was probably, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014, and nobody else would invest in com, but Sam Harris
was the reason I did because I asked Sam, tell me about meditation and he's explaining
it to me, and I said, what about this, you have to have a mantra?
How does it work?
Exactly.
I know positive.
I was like, well, you should just go to UCLA and talk to Diana Winston, and there's this
whole project there, and I'm like, UCLA does meditation, so yeah, there's a mindful institute.
Teaching people to teach meditation, and they're doing PTSD, and I'm doing brain scans on
them, and I was like, oh, and then I talked to the UCLA people, and they're like, it's
real, yeah, we taught Phil Jackson, and Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O'Neal, 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, Robinhood, and Com, and long story short, when I'm teaching people to angel
invest, there's really two things that you cannot fake.
One is a product that is built really well.
So if you look at Com, Robinhood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, these products are transcendent, they're
well constructed, there's craftsmanship to them, they're great products.
So you're saying not fundamentally like the idea, but the execution of the actual craftsmanship
of the construction.
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 could have great teams that build a bad product, it 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.
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 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
the fancy word for how much they use it, and Snapchat, when that was going around and they
were trying to raise money, they had a fraction of the number of users, but the top, maybe
third, were opening the app every hour, and nobody had ever seen that before.
People were using Facebook a couple 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 every day, and then people would be on vacation, I just have to open
my streak and keep my streak with Lex that we chatted every day going, and so they had
this 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.
Some of that is execution, but some of it is the weird magic of the-
Product market fit.
Yeah, so there's something, Clubhouse, it's still a mystery to me, because I also used
Discord voice, there's that intimacy to voice.
Oh, for sure.
Well, you have people's, yeah, tent.
Well, but the video gets in the way, actually, in a weird way.
There's a privacy when you just use voice.
People are not taking showers now, Lex.
I mean, we're in a pandemic, and people just are all out of bed.
And the hair thing.
Nobody's getting haircuts.
Nobody's hair is good.
Nobody's getting haircuts.
Yeah.
People are wearing gym clothes.
I mean, Zoom is just horrific to be on Zoom for five hours a day.
It is exhausting.
Well, it does make me wonder what once we emerge from the pandemic, whether a product
market fit, how that evolves with Clubhouse and all those kinds of things.
Yeah, no, Clubhouse is a beneficiary of the pandemic, for sure.
When do you think the- when do you think debts will be under, let's say, 200 a day, and we'll
have 200 million people on the other side of this?
Because that's kind of what it takes, right?
You got to get to 150, 200 million people on the other side in America?
I haven't, you know, I personally stopped deeply thinking about this because I've been
frustrated for so long that- You checked out.
I almost checked out because it psychologically allows me to carry on.
Because I thought for many months now that testing needs to be done at scale.
And it still hasn't gotten done.
It has been so ridiculous.
We gave up, basically, on testing.
We gave up?
Because 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 that 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 am cynical enough to think that it won't
be until mid-summer that we start opening back up.
Yeah, I think it's going to be May, June.
I'm a little bit earlier than you.
I've been tracking it.
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.
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, 2.5.
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 and 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.
And once that happens, I think people have had enough of this.
They're just going to go yolo.
But see, the crucial piece for me that I've been focusing on is the social media aspect
of how 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 yeah, we can be collectively afraid.
The fear can spread or it could be yolo can spread or it could be all different kinds
of misinformation.
And of course, during the election year, the politics influences our perception of what
is true and not, but having real rigorous nuanced conversation about this kind of stuff
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.
It feels like it's honestly a technology problem.
People say it's a human problem, but it just feels like I believe humans are good.
Technology can enable them to be thoughtful.
We talked earlier about the magic of Silicon Valley and then maybe going too far with the
Facebook groups example where you take out all that friction.
What happened was, we used to have something called R-Chron, reverse chronological order.
That's how you consume to 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 really fresh feeling.
And then a guy named Dave Moran and the team over at Facebook realized, 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.
Somebody had a baby.
Can we get the baby one at the top?
And it was like, well, how would we do that?
How would we know that that's the important one?
Well, 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, you get the dopamine hit.
And then what happens when you see the Bart Mitzvah photo or the enraging story about
some injustice in the world?
You retweet it, you write a comment, you share it on your wall.
And thus this addiction to the outrageous, the outlandish, the inspiring occurred.
And it used to be like inspiring stuff, puppies or some heartwarming story.
And then it got dark and then people started to realize, if I want to show up on the top
of my 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.
And then of course, with Trump, he realized it and he's like, okay, yeah, I'm just going
to make fun of a celebrity and I get more retweets.
Okay, I'm going to make fun of Rosie O'Donnell for being overweight or something.
And he just starts attacking people and people are like, oh my God, what did he say?
And he copied that from Howard Stern because he was in New York and he used to be on Howard
Stern and Howard Stern took over all the dialogue in the 80s and 90s because he was outrageous.
And then Trump did that and then social media incorporated that into the operating system.
It became the actual device of social media was the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
We've got something incredible for you.
Everybody salivates like Pavlog'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 scroll all night.
It's because the human mind was not meant to process this much suffering, pain, anger.
And that's why we have all this mental health issues.
Also, you know, young girls or even adults watching other people post their private jets
and their vacations and 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, we wonder why people are unhappy.
Like, if you think everybody's on a private jet going to some Michelin star restaurant
or whatever the coolest thing in the world is today, 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.
Getting inadequate.
Exactly.
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.
Absolutely.
Is that your plan for a business?
This is your social network?
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.
Bring your own algorithm.
That we got together.
Bring your own algorithm.
B-Y-O-A.
B-Y-O-A.
I like it.
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, 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.
Yes.
And listen in and hear conversations that I wouldn't normally be privy to.
Everybody's like, oh, come join us as a speaker.
I want to do a room with you.
I get asked every day, can we do a room?
Can we do a room?
Ask an angel investor.
Talk about startups.
And I'm like, my usage of Clubhouse is going on my Peloton treadmill,
putting Clubhouse on, taking a room and just listening.
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 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 such a delightful thing.
I always think about these kids who go to college and I've always been so jealous of these
ivyly kids they go and they're like, oh, I got to go to class.
And I'm like, I would just love to sit there and listen to Professor Lex talk.
You know, what a privilege to sit there and let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn.
That's the beauty of podcasting.
But of course, Clubhouse creates a whole nother experience for its conversations.
It's different.
I think it's going to be the in between.
I like it as you release your podcast.
You and I are going to release this podcast, right?
And then at some point, I'll have you on my pod when you want your startup.
And then at some point, somebody's going to be like, you and I will run it.
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 Hila.
And we'll have a different experience, which we'll just shoot the shit.
And it'll act as like a fabric and a little filler between the tentpole podcast, right?
Like you and Eric, you've done three, I think, with Eric.
Yeah, we just four.
But I haven't released the fourth yet.
Okay.
So I'm a watched all three because I really thought you're you way and him like,
giving you advice was very interesting dynamic.
And that was 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 think about the social graph in the real world.
This is why I think augmented reality is going to be such an amazing product.
I just have one killer feature I want for augmented reality.
We wear our glasses.
And when I look at you above your head, I see the relationships we have.
And the things we've done together.
Yes.
Right?
So I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris or you had Elon on the podcast on this date.
Or you and I were both that burning man in 2016.
So that's the most meaningful element of our connection.
Correct.
Network, yeah.
And then because we would discover that through small talk, but imagine you're like at a party
and you look and it just people glow.
And you just see a glow around a person and like green means you have some financial
relationship, blue means you have some friendship one yellow or yellow means you have friendship
one blue means you know nothing about each other.
You have no connections.
You're like, wow, these blue people have no connection to these people.
That one's glowing red.
We know seven or more people in common.
And those are the seven people.
Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other.
That could and that's sort of happened with Facebook.
Remember our MySpace where you were like, oh, you know that person, friend of a friend.
But that's what is going to be ARs.
Like this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat and they just have those glasses,
you know, forget about VR.
It's just nauseating and whatever.
But AR where you put the glasses on, you see the real world, but you augment it.
You make just like you were saying, you make it frictionless, a very low friction to make
a deep human connection because you have all the basic elements that are ready.
Now think about the unintended consequences of what I just described.
It could get creepy and weird.
The privacy thing.
I mean, people will, here's the thing.
People, your privacy is an illusion.
Like all this information is there.
And then people are more than willing to give up privacy in exchange for some value.
You know, it's a value trade.
And giving, if my Tesla, when I'm driving in the direction of my house,
just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks and that friction's gone,
I'm willing to give Tesla my location and my home address, right?
Yeah.
I'm not willing to give Zuckerberg anything because I don't trust him, but you get the idea.
I mean, it would 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 you could figure out like,
if we all put our DNA in a sequence online and be like, oh yeah, you know,
Lex has got 10 more IQ points than Jay Cal.
And you know, Sam's got 10 more than Lex.
And all of a sudden people are like, all bed data 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,
unless you eat more blueberries or whatever we figure out.
They're going to accept it pretty quickly.
Yeah, that's.
Brave new world.
Brave new world.
I have to ask you, you're, just like you were saying, you're one of the world experts
in investing in startups, yeah, VC and so on.
From the perspective of the startup, I was always kind of skeptical of raising money.
It feels like people do it too quickly, too easily.
But I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
When is the, when should a startup raise money?
And from the perspective of the investor, when should the investor invest in the startup?
Like, is there a timing thing here?
Is there a, what, yeah.
It's a, 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 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 and 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.
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 it's been.
So, you know, the Harvard's of the world and MIT's 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 in Tesla.
But the goal is, in these venture funds, we're going to invest in 30 names and one or two of
them are going to return three times the capital we've deployed.
So, it's a $300 million 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 million,
triple the person's money, as opposed to the stock market, which doubles your money in the
same period. So, you're supposed to do 25% 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.
You're dealing with money that is coming in that only cares about you going 100X.
Yes. 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 million. They were so capital efficient that they grew from
$10,000 a month in revenue to millions of dollars a month in revenue over those four years since
we invested, and they didn't raise money in between. Wow. It was unbelievable. And I've only
seen this happen three or four times. So, it doesn't happen all of this capital efficient,
meaning based on customer revenue alone plus some small amount of fundraising,
you're able to grow. How hard is it to do that?
It takes extreme product market fit. You have to have a great price for your product that has a
great margin. 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. Do venture capitalists get in the way at all of the business or do bosses
to get out of the way? Yeah. If you get young venture capitalists who are starting their career,
they're very nervous and scared because they're putting all these bets. 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. So, if it's not going to be Com or Robinhood or Uber,
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 let's say you make these 10 bets. In year two, two or three of them come back and
they don't have product market fit and they're out of money. 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 they're still in 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.
And that company dies. So, now you've got 10 million 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 or five and six that starts going up. And what you're seeing right now is the people who
started like I did in 2000, you know, just bit 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, 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. And then if the market
crashes again, everybody feels like an idiot again, the cycle starts again. So, you are now,
as a founder, you are now inserting yourself into that casino. 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. Now I'm doing a million and a half.
And the first thing VC is going to say is, how do we triple? We're growing too slow.
See, but that's like you said that beautifully is the rocket fuel. It's,
in a sense, it's a kind of motivation. It's a drive. I mean, it's a positive.
So if you want that, that's if you want that, if you want that, if you want to go to Navy Seal
School, you're going to be in pain and they're going to put that hose in your face while you're
underwater with your hands tied behind your back in the pool and you're going to be choking.
And you may have to do CPR on you. And like every couple of years, tragically,
somebody dies in Navy Seal School. Yeah. Well, it doesn't mean we're getting rid of the Navy
Seal. Like Rocky, if he dies, he dies. I don't know if you know David Goggins is by any chance.
I do. I mean, I don't know him personally, but oh my Lord. So I'm running 48 miles together with
him in person in a month. What? You're doing an ultramarathon? With him and probably other stuff
because he enjoys just breaking people, making them cry. Oh my God, I'm so jelly.
So, you know, I, well, I offered, we agreed a while ago to do a podcast and he's like,
oh yeah, come, we'll do it this day. Is he in the Bay Area? 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. But he seems to be in a bunch of different
locations. Like he's in Oregon or something like that. What does he do for outside of writing
books and being inspirational? Does he actually train people or like? No, he's just, he's full
time insane. Like he fights forest fires 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. Breaking himself.
Breaking himself. He seems like he wants to break himself. And that, that book is amazing.
And the audio book is amazing when he's talking about how fat he was and how he just had to go
and keep running and his legs are broken and he's just super pain and he just goes through it. It's
really inspiring. The inspiring thing also. Are you going to videotape yourself doing this? I can't
wait to see you get destroyed. Yeah. Well, this is going to be so entertaining for the, for the
lack of audience. The pain. But the other inspiring thing is he's happily married. Oh, good. And
there's a partnership there that's, you know, everybody finds this attention as a push and
pull that's beautiful, I think. But in speaking of beautiful push and pull, how about that transition?
You and Jamat, he's a friend of yours. Besties. Besties. Yeah. Good friend. I mean, he's,
there's very few people in my life, him, Elon, David Sacks, John Brockmans,
very few people have supported me as much as those folks. I mean, I'm a huge debt.
So he's also a co-host on the All In podcast. We taped episode 21 today.
Oh, today. Yeah. Every Friday now. They want to do every Friday. They're addicted,
like me and you are to podcast. So you're going to release it? When?
It's probably released as we're sitting here. Okay. Beautiful. I can't wait.
Special guest on it. We had Draymond Green from the Warriors phone in. So we had our first guest.
Awesome. Yeah. So it's really funny because he plays poker with us and we're all besties. So.
Beautiful. So you guys went pretty heated. Yes, we did.
We had each other versus Rob on Robin Hood. Yes. Yeah. Those are two things I want to ask. Yeah.
First, on the actual Robin Hood discussion and the Wall Street Best discussion,
can you steel man his argument? What was the nature of the disagreement? Where?
So. Where? Yeah. What, what is the little, because I don't think it's as big as.
Yeah. Spaces. It came off as sounding. So.
What is the nature of the disagreement? He felt that Robin Hood turned off trading
because the hedge funds told them to and that they were bowing down to the pressure of the
hedge funds. That's not true. But in a vacuum of information, you know what happens to people's
minds, conspiracy theories abound. And sometimes there is a conspiracy theory and sometimes there's
just the appearance of impropriety or a bunch of related things. Like when you look at the
Trump situation with Russia, was Trump trying to coordinate with Russia or were the Russians just
screwing with a bunch of neophyte, idiotic dipshits like Donald Trump Jr. who don't know
any better? And they don't know that you shouldn't meet with the Russians. And if you do meet with
the Russians, you are probably a useful idiot. You probably should tell the FBI. They're just
a bunch of idiots in all likelihood. Who knows? And there's a vacuum of information.
And there's a vacuum of information. We don't know. And the Russians are trying to compromise
everybody. So would you call it a conspiracy or would you call it an attempted conspiracy?
There was no conspiracy here. What it was was Robinhood needed to raise billions of dollars to
say 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 air it out.
Yeah, in the episode after you guys sound like you've had a private you've made up.
We had a private discussion, just one on one. And we said, listen, we love each other. We're
besties. We've always been there for each other. What happened here? And what happened there is,
I'm fiercely loyal to my folks, whether it's Chamath or Travis from Uber or Saks or whoever.
I'm just a loyal guy. And I'm always right 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 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 just,
I feel like if you invest and you're on the team, you know, you have really three choices. You're
either fight for your team, you can go silent, or you can throw your team under the bus. And I've
watched investors throw the team that they invested in that made them a bunch of money under the bus,
not acceptable to me. And being quiet is 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.
That's beautiful, by the way, because what else do we have in this world if not friendship?
Loyalty means everything to me. I grew up in Brooklyn where if you were not loyal,
and you were not loyal to your crew, then you were a Ronan. You were out there on your own,
flailing in the, you know, trust me, you do not want to be on your own in 1970s, 80s Brooklyn, Manhattan.
Like you need to have a crew with you. I've gotten into, you know, you don't want to get to 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 Shamath came out and said, you know, these guys need to
go to jail and there's gunbags and I'm trying to defend them. And I'm in a position where I can't
defend them because I don't have complete information. There is no complete information.
It's in the heat of the moment. And then it becomes the number one story. And it's my number
three investment. And Shamath has a competing company, SoFi. And he's killing my guys. And
then I started killing his guys. And then all of a sudden we're like, wait a second, we're best
friends. 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 a little Asperger's or
whatever. No offense, Lex. None taken. None taken. I'm not saying, you know, you're in AI and you
know, you might be somewhere. It's not a coincidence. Yeah. Might not be a coincidence. Anyway, we upgraded
the two Davids firmware. We're going to upgrade your firmware after this. I'll give you a, yeah.
You're on the 1.5. You have the three emotions now. Or should we add a fourth? You want to go
with joy? I'm in the 2.0. You're on the 2.0. You got the joy. How's it working out in the joy chip?
It's difficult. It's difficult. You'll get there. Just let it happen, Lex. Just let the joy happen.
So anyway, we just talked about it offline. And we decided like, listen,
we didn't pre-game that episode. And I happened to be skiing with my family. I had taken the first
like vacations since goddamn pandemic started. And I was having a wonderful time. And then this
whole thing blows up. I'm coming off the mountain, just 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. We're on the same side here. And then over time, we've started to see the
explanation come out. And, you know, people who are friends are going to have disagreements.
In the podcast, it happened to happen very publicly. And we didn't know it was going to become the
number one story in the world. If Trump still had his Twitter handle, this would not have been a
story. Trump would have said something about GameStop. And he would have co-opted the entire
conversation. So in a way, going back to our censorship discussion, I might actually be
in favor of Trump being censored, only because, only because how delightful has it been since
January 20th, that we can all focus on something other than him. He was exhausting. I mean,
the amount of cycles he took on our processors. And now this is a little bit more of a distributed
like this. Everybody gets a chance to be the number one new story. Everybody gets a chance to
discuss it. So on a scale of one to 10, how much do you love Chamath? Oh, 11. I mean, I love
Chamath. I mean, we played cards last night. We're besties. And, you know, I would, I would,
I would literally jump in front of a bullet for him. I mean, what's the lesson in that discussion?
Because it was super, I wouldn't, I think the love was felt and the respect was felt throughout,
even when you guys are going pretty vicious on each other. Is there a lesson to be learned?
Do you regret any of that conversation? No, I mean, I think he, he, he told me that he
regretted some of the things you said he said publicly on the podcast. Like I said,
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 as one of the new nuance and intent have been
totally lost. The idea that we could have any of kind of a nuanced discussion about things seems
to have been forgotten. And the fact that people don't look at people's intent. If you hurt somebody's
feelings or you disrespect somebody or you, you do something mean or whatever, I always look at the
intent, you know, and I've had people attack me and I look at the intent and I'm like,
that person feels bad about themselves or maybe I said something and I insulted them and that's
why their 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 didn't sleep last night and I've had a lot of anxiety about my business and 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. 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 how blue the
sky was one day. They reverse image search, 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 doxed me on
Twitter. And I'm like, what is going on here? So I call the person. And I look them up and they
work in private equity in Boston. And I look and I'm like, this person works in, this is 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 at it. So then I DM him back
on Instagram, on Twitter. And I said, by the way, your boss, Susan, 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? 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 in anybody who's in high profile, like I am like, we're medium profile, you're going to 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's like, 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? I said,
how old are you? Like 25 or something? He's like, no, I'm 42. I was like, you're 42 years old. I
was like, are you married? 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 Caliganis
because you're upset at me because I said something about a New York Times writer.
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 time. She's like,
welcome to the club. It's totally fine. 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? Or if I had called his boss, he would have been fired immediately. And then I got to
live with this guy, got fired, and he's got a kid. And what is this personal destruction?
Why are we doing this to each other? Life's hard enough. Life's hard, right? Like just get into
the days hard. Yeah. And that little bit of empathy, thinking about the intent of the person
allows you to then sort of de-escalate this kind of conversation that social media wants to escalate.
Yes. Back to what we're saying. If this, 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, 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 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.
Can I ask you about love? Oh, sure. I'm feeling it. We're an hour or two here, Lex.
Yeah, you're feeling it. We could become besties. I feel like we got a bromance going here, Lex.
I feel it too. I don't know if it's Eric Weinstein level, but I feel like it's close.
Yeah, I'm feeling the love. But we talked about the,
the music to my ears, your whole rant on the Olympic nature of a startup.
Is there a role, like what role does love, family, friendship play in that brutal pursuit
of excellence that is building a startup, building a company or creating anything new in this world?
It's 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 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 Kalkas. I was like, yeah, and like, who's your friend?
I'm like, I was my friend Elon. And they'd be like, what? He's doing rocket ship stuff.
But he's told this story publicly so I can tell it. I would never talk about anything that he
hasn't already talked about publicly, especially since he's a high profile, but it was a pretty
funny moment. There was a moment 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 they said, you know, let's go get a steak.
And we're in LA, 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 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, well, what's going on with the rocket ship company?
Yeah. You know, like, you know, I know you did the one last month and don't you have one coming
up? He's like, yeah, we got the third one coming up. I was like, well, how's that going? I 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, you blew up the first two rockets, you blow up the third SpaceX is over. He's like,
yeah, I was like, I can load you a couple million dollars. I don't have like a ton. 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 anybody he was talking. He never said who it was.
But somebody had loaned him money to keep him afloat. He was functionally bankrupt.
I mean, he had the equity in the companies, but the equity was quickly becoming worth zero and
the financial crisis. And he's figuring out if he's going to go on vacation for Christmas or not.
And he's on the phone trying to 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. He takes out 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.
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 being standing around,
a clay version of this tiny little BlackBerry picture. I'm scrolling through on the,
remember that little pad or the ball on the BlackBerry? I'm scrolling through and I'm like,
this is fucking great. And I just said to him, it's like,
what's the range going to be? I said, 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 $50,000, $60,000. I said, Elon, if you make that car,
you'll change the goddamn world. This company must survive because the Roadster's 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 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, did you have the checkbook? She does all the finances and stuff
like that and pays every 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 the new car, I'll take two. And I signed it. I kissed the two 50,000
checks, put them in the envelope, and I fed X to two 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. And
the checks don't cash. But then I read a story that he's closed the money, saved the company
like the next week or two. And a couple of months later, 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 00000001. And then five seconds later, your reservation number is 000073. And I forward the
number one to Elon. And I said, I can't take number one, signature number one, I can't take that,
that's yours. And he's like, oh, I got five of them. And besides, you're the first person who
ordered it. And I was the first person who had seen it. You're going to get me to be teary-eyed.
I mean, that's a beautiful moment. It was an incredible moment for both of us. And we talk
about it sometimes, those moments in time. And to your point about love. That's like the darkest
moment, one of the darkest moments in his life, probably, that period of time. 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 we're criticizing
them as they try to change the world and save humanity. And in Tesla's case, I mean, they weren't,
you know, they weren't like delivering pizza. I mean, they were trying to get us off of fossil
fuels. Like this was a big, heady mission to literally save the environment, the planet,
humanity. And the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him, it was always perplexing to me,
why any human being who is standing on God's green earth would want to throw rocks at the guy
who is trying to stem the damn of global warming that is about to engulf all of us.
How dare they throw rocks at that guy? There's so many people you could throw rocks at. There's
somebody who's making the jewel vaporizer throw rocks at that scumbag. No offense. But like,
whoever's making the jewel things and 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 yeah, anyway, 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 roads are number 16s 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. And it was that moment, that month in that
2000, I think it was probably December, January, December of 2008, I think. It was just 12 years
ago when you think about 13 years ago. It was dark. I mean, it was dark. And they almost had the same
thing happen, you know, in the Model 3 production in June of two years, three years ago. And I
remember him just trying to get the Model 3 out the door and the company almost crashed then.
Most of these companies have, you know, these kind of moments. And I think friendship is,
you get what you give. You get what you give. And if you are there for people, you're going to feel
so good about having done that. And then the 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 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 of those memories is just like one snowflake
or one drop of rain. And they're all lost at some point, but they're here now. And that's why we
have to be there for each other. That's why I feel like what I do is so important in this world.
And I get such great meaning out of it, just being a friend, just having these conversations.
What you're doing on your podcast, just talking to intelligent people and spreading the word and the
disciple, the gospel of what they're saying and amplifying it, you're inspiring so many people.
Every podcast, you get 500,000 people, a million people watch these videos. And there's some kid
in Sri Lanka or some little girl in Afghanistan who's going to stumble upon this on YouTube. And
they're going to change the world in the next century, because it's not just about America.
Our story is almost over. We were the story of the last 200, 300 years. I hope it keeps going.
But there's all these other places in the world, San Paolo 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 Lex does those interviews with the, oh, yeah, I could do it too.
Your little magical moment of love amidst the suffering with Elon, because you've talked about
it, it'll have these ripple effects. It's fascinating to think about it. And that gets to come
in new entrepreneurs being born, new, more love being put out there, and more support through
these rough times when people are trying to create new things. I mean, 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. Every time you invest, you are. Here's the thing, it cost you nothing to make this
investment either. 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. Those emotions are
going to flow. Sam would always tell me when I was struggling in my life, and I talked to him,
he'd say, Jason, your brain is spewing all these ideas. Imagine you're sitting by a river,
and the river is all your ideas. You are not a slave to any one of these ideas. You're just
whipping by each of those little waves in the river. You can pick one of those ideas out and
look at it and examine it, and either keep it or throw it back in the river and let it go.
And I was like, wow, Sam. That was like, of my entire friendship with Sam Harris,
that was 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, imposter syndrome. I didn't go to MIT. I'm not the smartest
guy. But somehow I made a career writing little 50K checks and now $3 million checks, but whatever,
little checks and being a journalist and doing this little podcast, and it's ended up to something.
And I'm proud of it. I'm 50, and I'm proud of what I did. And I wake up every morning,
I could retire, and I say, I kind of like what I do. I kind of like having the conversation,
and writing the check, and then being on somebody's team. And I got offered to be in these giant
mega funds. And they said, Jason, you're in it. You invest in 60 companies a year,
500K at a time, you put $30 million a year to work, come work with us, write $150 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 a formality. It's just like being
an ATM. The companies are already huge by that time. I really want to meet the two people
with the idea. I want to meet them in year one. Yes. I want to meet them on day zero.
I want to be the guy who wrote the first, second, or third check. I want a guy who wrote the
3,000th check, the last check. That's fucking boring. And make that basic human connection.
And also be there and be with them through the rough times. Be with them with that first.
I mean, the first early successes, I mean, that's beautiful. So great. When a founder
and their team get product market fit, and you just know it's going to work,
oh man, Lex. When Com would email me and they'd say, 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 three months. And we're good.
You know, I was like, ah, that's nice. It's real nice. It's a nice feeling. Well,
because so many of them die, we talked about that J-curve early. Imagine it's like
all these baby turtles going out to the ocean and the seagulls are ripping them to shreds and then
their sharks are eating them. But then a couple of the turtles make it and they become wise old,
100-year-old turtles. And you're like, yep, I remember when you catched
and like all of your brothers and sisters were ripped to shreds by the seagulls and you made it
into the water. And then you made it out into the deep water. It's a pretty great feeling.
I think there's no better way to end it. There it is. The talk of the cruelty of life,
the suffering that is life, and the love amidst the suffering. Jason, I've been a fan of yours
for a long time. You're one of the most special people in Silicon Valley. Thanks, Lex. And maybe
you'll also call me in one of the rough times. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there'll be many.
There will be, yeah. There's one expression, nobody gets there alone.
Nobody gets there alone. And anybody who thinks that they got there alone
is delusional in 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 I was one of the... You know about these gratitude letters people are writing? It turns
out Martin Seligman and... Was it authentic happiness? Anyway, the guy who really studied
happiness and joy turns out one of the greatest amplifiers of joy in your life is to thank somebody
for doing something for you. And somebody who 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 the last stack and I opened it up and I almost
missed it. It's an incredibly heartwarming letter about how meaningful 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. I was just like, wow, you know, if you're hearing this, there's probably 10 people
who are really instrumental in your lives, in your lives. Go ahead and call them on the phone,
write them an email or even better, just write a letter and send it to them and just tell them
you're thankful. And let me tell you something, the amplification of joy in your life will go 100x.
100x. When you tell somebody you love them and that you really appreciate them and that what
they did for you was magical. So just... Then you can look it up gratitude. Gratitude is like one
of these incredible forces. Amen. I'm grateful for being on the pod. I'm grateful. You wasted all
this time with me. I love it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jason Calacanis and
thank you to our sponsors, Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Forcigmatic
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 Calacanis. 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.