The single biggest thing that America has right now going against it is that we have four or five companies Facebook Apple Amazon Microsoft Google that sucks up the enormity and the overwhelming majority of all talented technical human capital because if you are a smart young kid, you know a guy or girl graduating from a college and you know how to code or you know, how you know how to do something unique. How do you turn around?
Around to your family and say I'm going to go on work at the startup for 80 grand a year or this nonprofit or something else versus going and getting paid a million dollars a year. And at one of these big companies, it's really impossible. Right? I mean, I don't know your situation, but when I graduated that was the biggest Sword of Damocles over my neck was the student debt that I had and so but when they go there what products are they working on this is unfettered free agent is imagine that you had a professional sports League where there was no salary cap. What?
You do you would go and hire and you would sign every single grade player stick them on the bench.
You be guaranteed to win a championship, you'd be a monopolistic championship winner or year in year
out you're saying that they get paid to do nothing because what you say the beds that's what I thought of yeah.
No. No, that's that's six. That's is that is the exact explicit strategy.
Zach we are back this week. It's going to be jamaat Paula Bhatia who's a rock star investor Visionary entrepreneur, but before that we're going to talk about maybe the greatest thing I've ever been associated with which is that we helped get stimulus Checks In
This relief bill and as we're having this conversation text is still getting finalized. It looks like it's going to be six to seven hundred dollars for every adult and child but that adds up to something like a hundred fifty billion dollars that are going to that's going to go out in the form of checks right as people needed the most and thank you to everyone who helped make that happen. I'd love to walk through some of how it happened. Thank you for our audience.
It's so this is let's be clear on this we both agree 600 or 700 dollars per person is not enough that we're bigger. We want more than that. However, it is way better than 0 so walk us through I'm beaming right now because I've been particularly the past we've been working on this for a couple of months, but the pic particularly the past couple weeks. We really started to kick butt and National media is never going to give you
The a lot of Savannah scenes anyway, but they're not going to be like Andrea Aang saved the day, but I actually believe you have saved the day and it's and Humanity for it actually has saved the day and in a healthy way. So walk us through.
What has happened from your end and and then where we how we got to where we are right now? So if you remember in the run-up to the election Nancy Pelosi and minuchin and to a lesser extent McConnell just couldn't come to a deal and there was a moment when there was a 1.8 trillion dollar offer that had some problems but it was still like to me like the best offer. I'd seen on the table and I went out I went public and said hey we should probably
About taking that deal because that's like the best it's going to get Mitch McConnell hates it and right now they have political interest in trying to get something done. So that deal did not happen and after the election Humanity forward pivoted very very hard to lobbying for cash relief. We become casualties.
Organization that can see machine if you yeah advocacy and you know what it reminds me of and you and I joke about this act. There was a headline in the onion 10 years ago, which was the American people hire a lobbyist to represent their interests on Capitol Hill and there's like a picture of a lobbyist. It gets paid lots of money and that headline stuck with me for 10 years because I thought that's a pretty good idea. Like maybe we should hire a lobbyist just to hang out and be like, hey, you know would help the people stimulus checks for the record. I think the onion has
The most insightful hilarious headlines like sometimes like there's a reason they had a gesture back in the day sometimes satires. The only way to like cut to the core of the truth. So Kudos the onion. Yeah, so we had this pivot to talking to members of Congress and I've had over 65 zooms with different house members Senators over the last number of weeks and I have to say anytime one of those meetings hits my schedule. I got so pumped.
Because I thought to myself that there's at least some chance that this conversation will lead to unlocking tens hundreds of billions of dollars for the American people. Yeah. So we've been working on it and then about two weeks ago still no deal group of bipartisan Senators step forward and said, hey, here's a 900 billion dollar compromise bill that ended up getting all sorts of momentum because there were some Republicans on it some Democrats on it and it looked like it could pass the Senate which has been the
I don't like this whole time and that did not include stimulus checks. The the 900 billion was unemployment insurance love it coronavirus costs and resources love it. Obviously like some for vaccine distribution. The disputed elements ended up being Aid to cities and states which I completely support and this liability Shield. So this bipartisan gang of
editor's could not agree on those two elements. And so they cut the 900 billion dollar package by a hundred sixty billion or so with the city and state government Aid in a separate bill now simultaneously, we were having conversations with members of Congress letting them know look all your people love cash relief economists. Love it. 74% of Americans are forward including a majority of both parties, and we got enough folks excited.
There was a bipartisan Bill led by Representatives Lisa blonde Rochester of Delaware's a Democrat and David McKinley of West Virginia who's a republican. So that's bipartisan cash relief bill that percolated in the house a couple of weeks ago and that was a result of you know, those 65 plus conversations over a period of weeks where we've been paying various members. So then at the last mile when they couldn't agree on this city and state
Government Aid then they ended up swapping in the stimulus checks of $600 or so for every adult and child which costs, you know about that much money. Like let's call it a hundred sixty billion dollars. So when I got the call saying that send me this checks are in because of us like I jumped for Joy I ran around and like grabbed Evelyn and was like, I think this is like the greatest thing I've ever done.
Cuz you think about the tens of millions of Americans who are struggling right now getting six hundred dollars a person. Like let's say that you have, you know to folks in your household that would qualify could be like a single mom and a child. I mean $1,200 in January is going to be a game-changer couldn't agree more that I like in my mind. We should be doing you're doing something much more dramatic on going for everyone. But realistically this bill when it first hit the the senate floor didn't have any stimulus check.
X in it, you know like and so the fact that I went from a not having stimulus checks to stimulus checks is a major major win and thank you to the team at Humanity forward. Thank you to everyone who's donated to our efforts because this return we did the math. It's something like a million extra turn on what we've spent on Direct lobbying and we spent much more in a lot of other things we've given ten million dollars away to folks or so, but we haven't spent that much money on lobbying. It's been a lot of my time.
You know and my time costs nothing in our calculation. So it was like yeah and but really it's everyone who helped Elevate this movement to a point where members of Congress and senators are happy to take a meeting with me, you know, like like that that's actually in many ways the accomplishment of the last couple of years where we elevated our movement to a point where folks will meet with me because I'll know look Yang's got a lot of fans he's got and you know million person mailing list like social media following the million, so
Thank you. We freaking did it we helped get real relief to the American people. And again the highest point of my career thus far it makes me so proud. I'm so excited to be part of it. And I think it's a couple things one just for just make sure everybody knows. We think it's fundamentally fundamentally ridiculous that it took this long and this much work to make this happen. It seems like a no-brainer to help your people in the pandemic. If you're a Canadian you've received tons of money for the economy doesn't crash. So your
He doesn't crumble. So we're behind the curve as a nation and its really frustrating but I will say this when we ran Andrew we were frustrated when we met the leadership and the people in charge in some ways. We didn't think they were in touch with a lot of the people we were talking to, you know, and our conclusion and my conclusion particular was that the Cavalry wasn't wasn't coming to save us. There was no Cavalry and we were it and this
this
Effort and frankly quick success. Like we haven't been doing this that long for us to have as much influence as we did on getting this through shows to me that we have to be the Cavalry doing something was one better than nothing but two so so powerful because no one's doing anything like we were going to senators and congressmen and women and saying hey your constituents are hurting. They need cash everybody supports it. And what was their reaction Andrew? I didn't even know that that makes sense to me. Thank you.
Telling you that I'll fight for what they what they didn't see was the numbers like all of them expressed. Like wow 74 percent approval rating like that's as high as it gets, you know, and there's no reason they would have known that necessarily. Yeah without us providing it. It's been a real education. So there are two things mean put very simply like, we're in a deep dark hole. Our government should be helping to dig us out. I think it is ridiculous that people are hemming and hawing about the cost of water.
Er When the house is on fire. It's like just get the hoses out and and started going to work. And so it should be in the trillions of dollars, but there are two things we can influence in my mind number one is what's the size of the overall relief the higher the better in my view which it like multiple trillions. Yes. We should do that especially for the second thing is the cop. Yeah. The second thing is the composition of the aid. It's like if you have a higher proportion go directly to people and families. That's a win if you have a lower proportion.
To make a corpse that are just going to like stick it on their balance sheet and show with it and probably, you know, frankly for a low people anyway, like Walt Disney did like that that's a loss. So so those are the two things I'm trying to influence is like more is better more to people is better. And on this one there was even a chance I would we were told that like, you know, there might have been less on the table like that like there's no guarantees. So when they had this disputed hundred
60 billion or so and sitting in state aid, there was no guarantee that was going to get replaced like because what they did is they separated the legislation into the part that everyone agree on and they separated that part. So the fact that stimulus checks got in there like grew that relief package by hundred sixty billion or so and it went directly to people. So those are the goals were chasing and if anyone listening to this things like wow, I like, you know, you want to be a part of this. Please do follow Humanity.
Ford become a recurring donator to humanity forward think of it as like the best investment you'll ever make because this stuff works like, you know, I was joking but it's like lobbying fucking works. No wonder companies do it like it works. Like, you know, we like like blew my mind the complete do we spent you know, what we spent like 9 million dollars giving money to people and families and that was awesome, right?
Right, but we spent a hundred twenty thousand. Let's say giving it to some lobbying firms that we liked and trusted and to go fight for people and now we're getting billions to go to people. Yeah, you know, it does make one think about the ratio and to be clear. This is like a magical moment. We were in the right place the right time we had some great legislators likely someone Rochester and McKinley and really came out to board it, right? Yeah, like a bunch of other folks. So a lot of things had to converge at the same time, but I can genuinely
A I believe that we were integral to this happening. You know, like if we have not been working it then there was a real chance that this does not happen and I couldn't be happier and prouder like that. This it is wild. It's like this is the Pinnacle of impact on human life that I've can actually point to, you know topping this is going to be difficult.
But we should definitely keep trying because you know, like the crisis is going to rage on there are going to be more relief bills coming out of Congress in the new year for sure because the city and state government piece is still there Democrats are going to fight for it rightfully by the way in my view. So they're going to be more relief packages and we have to keep on trying to improve them. Yeah, you called me yesterday. And you said Zack this is the greatest thing I've ever done and not from a like I did this because
A lot of people did this but more on like as a you know, you look at your career and you take reflecting yourself and what impact you had in the world and said look we can we could hang it up right now and feel proud about the level of Dent we put in into other positive Dent. We put in other people's lives, you know, and we're not quite hard of it to Zach it is that now you're to relief packages and to stimulus checks, like now I was going to be like a campy relief package that stimulus to X. I mean that like that also for the with this we just said,
Set like a very very firm precedent and the stimulus checks of the most popular things. We're doing one of our early digital guys Andrew Frawley in the campaign said he was with us from day one and he was saying that is asking if we had survivorship bias from the campaign the sense that when you survived a car crash, I'm crazy and like with no odds to stick to live through it you believe you're invincible and we keep having these massive successes that are like completely improbable.
And there's this one hand that's I guess because we're Invincible or because we can do anything and that's not true. I but I made it feels somewhat like like everything we're touching is having success and it's because I think we've tapped into a movement. You know, you are powered. This movement is power. This podcast is powered by amazing people who all see what's happening and you are the vessel for them and frankly in my opinion and I believe it's a fact fiercely loyal to
them like you will you'll make tough decisions, but you are fighting for them. I know that guy living is I'm like we should do this, you know, people don't want that we got do you know I see that a lot with you but I it's just fun to watch kind of the outrageous winds. We've been able to have even though in frankly and he's dark times, you know, so that does excite me and hopefully excites you to Andrew. This is still very early stage for this movement that we're building its body because
Very red for president and you know, we had a measure of success and there was part of me that was like, well, you know, we have to transfer the energy very quickly into like an ongoing organization and movement in the form of humanity forward and I did not expect us to have this kind of impact is quickly really so that's a thrill. Of course, you know, we're in the midst of an historic catastrophe and our government should be doing much much more.
So I think we're plugging into as you said just what people see is the right thing, you know, like the cases were making and that's one of the things that really surprised me about the institutional nature of it. All. Is that like when I said hey Nancy Pelosi should probably take that deal or version of it and then people like attack me for it. And so it was like who are you to like, you know question this person's judgment. I was really really shocked that there were so few people that raise our hand and were like, hey people need help Winter's coming.
Like this is a lot of money like that. Let's do this thing. It was you know as crickets for the most part of you know, that was very odd and and the fact that people were you know attacking me for it. I was like use your judgment sometimes offers get worse not better like the amount of political leverage you have right now is as high as it's ever going to be like, why would you think that it's going to go up from 1.8 trillion not down. It's like like
You know and so like that there's this real institutionalization. This is why our movement has so much power Zach is that there are a number of people who actually see it and then evaluate and be like, okay, you know that makes sense to me and we have institutions that are putting forward a lot of things that only make sense if you are embedded in like whatever weird landscape it is like like stimulus check some people make common sense to everyone in the country, you know three-quarters of Americans afford the only place
It makes less sense. As soon as you get to Capitol Hill then all of a sudden it's like oh, you know, like what we should really be like looking at other things, you know, or the media narratives. It's like you can see something happening and only in the media. Would that make sense? Like wait, wait, wait, like in many ways like we're like the layer of people who are like calling out stuff that we can all see and fight for
And my campaign was about you know, people versus the machines and people thought of that as like robots AI which kind of was technology though. I don't hate that stuff. I mean I'm kind of into it, but but it's really as another set of machines really it's like this institutional Machinery where shit that makes no sense makes sense and vice versa when I really hope is like look, I think there's a lot of people that we love the Savior complex
where we put your hope in.
Trump you put your hope in
Bernie put your hope in by then you put your hope in danger. Yang, right the person and I understand that I felt that in some ways. I feel about Josh Allen. The Buffalo pills are things like that. But the reality is what really saves you is and will save us is is more than Andrew. It's it's the rationality and Common Sense were trying it's the ideas in logic behind what will actually help us and you're not going to be perfect. I'm not going to be perfect right like that. You'll never be
and everybody but you can rationally try to solve a lot of these problems that are messy and complicated and put it some sane human being in charge of a lot of these things. Like that's what I hope we can convey like love or hate you me the movement. We the intentionality and logic behind to the solutions were presenting should help a
lot of people and
cut through the noise because there's such a lack of that in politics you agree with that. Oh, well, I certainly agree that the
Fact that you know hanging everyone's hopes on like singular leaders is not optimal for a movement, you know, I and the movement will coalesce around new leaders in different ways. Like trumpism is going to outlive Trump, you know, no matter what and that there's a massive appetite for the principles we stand for that is manifesting in different ways. I agree with those things certainly also agree with my own fault.
Ability and definitely your fallibility the bar here. Like I'm just trying to keep up man kidding kidding. I mean, you know, it's like but we're only human in like it's like I will say I don't feel that much.
You know artifice. I mean, I feel like most people know what you and I are about and you know what we screw up the bill. Yeah that that bad I'm trying but they casually portion really everyone who has touched this movement everyone who supported my presidential campaign. You should really hold your head up high today because everything we did to try and mainstream these ideas and make it so that we could influence policy paid off for tens of millions of Americans for real.
This winter I could not be prouder. I cannot be happier. I hope you're proud happy too. And I hope this reinforces the importance of what we've done and continue to do like I actually feel more energized and invigorated and frankly able to influence real life things that I did certainly the day. We suspended my presidential campaign and that's a wonderful feeling because you know you run for president.
Resident you don't win like what next and I'm a hundred percent certain that we have grown in influence and reach and impact Leaps and Bounds since then I am so freaking proud of that. So thank you. Yang Yang. Thank you Zach. Thank you to the team at Humanity forward. So proud of you all. Yeah, we just got to keep going but this is this is something we should relish and celebrate. Amen. Well that lets go to our guests.
And I don't think it better that what an episode. What a what a moment for us. We got a lot of work to do but I'm a big believer in celebrating the wind, you know, and this was looks like a win, you know, such a win high point of my professional life. So coming up next fascinating conversation with world-class investor Visionary futurist shamala piteå. He's become famous more recently because he was on CNBC and then folks were asking and what to do about
These companies and industries and he was like who cares about the companies and industries we have like systems for that. You know, they have to go through like recap or a reorg or bankruptcy. It's fine just take care of the people, you know, just like send the money to the folks who work at those companies and then like, you know, like our corporate systems and processes and then people like but what about the investors and he's like who cares like it'll you know, like like well, we'll be fired like why are you trying to recap these companies and like preserve the Investor's instead of the people that work in them so that
CNBC clip when viral and you know got him a lot of Praise rightfully so because it really like that that was a dose of Common Sense and the fact that he said it on CNBC. Everyone was so like shocked and appalled it was so coming up next my convo with Jamal polyp Atia.
It is my pleasure to welcome the Yang speaks. I've been looking forward to this conversation for months months. Shamala Bhatia Thomas. How are
you Andrew? What's going on man?
Now, how do how do we introduce this man? It's like one of the most Innovative investors in the universe, but more than that. He's like an iconoclast a speaker of Truth someone who goes and like shakes the trees. I you first hit. I feel like at least my Consciousness and the consciousness of a lot of folks and I know
This was an it was kind of fraud is when you express your reservations about everything that went down with Facebook and you were like man. I'm not sure if we if we were like the pure good we kind of hoped to be but you've done so much since then.
Yeah, it was that was 2016. And that was the first time I think people outside of tech knew who I was people inside of tech. I've known me for a while but and then and then I guess it was just this February or March during the middle of the the beginning of the pandemic where there was another sound bite that kind of got broadly distributed. And here I am was talking to you. I made it
you made it. So was the sound bite of the beginning of the shutdown when you were like, hey like who cares about the corporate?
Structure the cap table of like the airlines are other companies when I just like bail out the people we have systems to handle what goes on with the company's balance sheet. Is that the sound bite you're talking
about? Yeah. Exactly. I was just I was completely shocked that, you know, you would reward these, you know, basically idiotic CEOs and boards with hundreds of billions of dollars when average everyday normal people were completely getting turned upside down. It made no
sense.
Yes, it did not make any sense and thank you for speaking up. There were a lot of folks that did pass that clip to me in the Yang Yang and everyone was like judge Ahmad speaking said slyke it is like, you know, one of the only people who would go on someplace like CNBC and talk
sense. Well, I think I mean at some point, you know, look you're if you're fed by the system, which those guys are you have to basically trumpet conventional wisdom. And if you have a little you know, if you can be emancipated you can kind of tell the truth most people want to tell the truth they but I just think they find it hard and
Fortunately for better or worse I can tell
the truth.
Yeah, you are one of the biggest truth tellers in the investment world for sure and the tech world. Yeah, maybe in American Life at this point. So when Evelyn and I saw your 2016 sound bite that went viral. My wife Evelyn was like we have to find out more about him. And so then we looked up your bio and saw that you know, you grew up the child of immigrants in Canada. Not an affluent circumstances kind of went through a lot and then you wound up.
Finding your way first to finance and then to attack and then became part of the like these various rocket ships, but there's like a humility to you and your background where it's like despite all of your success. It felt like you had Inlet like the bullshit creep too much into your in your might was like was this sense that both emmalin and I got,
you know, did the the most important of the ten Crack Commandments from the jury is bi G is never get high on your own Supply. And so I've tried
A I've tried to live that out. Like the reality is that I had a lot of skills that my parents gave me, but they also burdened me with some enormous insecurities and it kind of kept me checked. So I think in Balance, you know, I never got to ahead of myself. I was kind of always trying to fight to figure out who I was and that that helped a lot to be honest.
well, I too grew up the son of immigrants but you know in my case my dad was a physicist and engineer so I you know was a circumstance or my brother and I were kind of expected to get good grades in the rest of it, which was like a different backdrop the part of your background that I find like, you know, most fascinating I want to dig into is so you had a lot of business success and then you started a firm called social capital and Social Capital did stuff that was like a dream because you probably know if my
A national campaign. I'm a capitalist. I think capitalism is a very positive force and you know human life, but I also think that there are these massive problems that capitalism isn't really directed at in Earnest. Like if you have certain types of problems that a market driven company can address then Venture capitalists will throw money at them and the thing that fascinated me about you and Social Capital as you are trying to apply.
Why those resources to problems that were longer term that were bigger there were more social. You know, I think you were one of the only investors that was really pursuing health care and education and I used to joke that Healthcare was where good ideas go to die because I worked in healthcare tech for four years lot of people don't know this about me but like the early 2000s. I worked at a company that tried to manage patient pre-surgical data digitally and it was such a freaking disaster like you go in there and
Hospitals like you're like oh my whiz-bang product it should work. And so I feel like because of the regulatory about backdrop and a bunch of other things like some investors shied away from it. So I love the fact that you actually tried to take the mechanics of venture capital to the biggest human problems.
when when I was when I left Facebook I left because I was working on a project that was a pretty technical person a product and Engineering person and you know, my team was responsible for building up Facebook to hundreds of millions and then billions of users send along the way I was building a phone and to compete against Android and Apple and when push come to shove Mark and I just couldn't get a line Don, you know me getting the amount of money that I wanted and so I left and I remember I
Sort of on my way to take a vacation right before I started social capital and I got on the phone with Peter teal and I said Peter do you want to invest with me? And you know, I had made Peter a lot of money at Facebook. And so he said absolutely how much you're going to invest in yourself and what's crazy was up until that point. Nobody had asked me that and I said, I don't know, you know, like 5 10 15 20 million bucks. He goes not enough. He's like you need to be at least 30 percent of the money and at the time it was like a 300 million dollar fund or something. And so I did it and
the most important thing and with that I got from that was control and I didn't realize how important control would become because when I chose to invest in some of these areas and push came to shove there was a lot of investor capitulation because these folks are paid to basically get money back into their institutions and endowments and family offices that they work on behalf of and this is when I really started to see the problem, which is that you have these enormous parts of society that are broken. We're free markets and capitalism could fix them. Yeah.
then the money comes from essentially rich people and the problem is helping rich people stay rich is a pretty sad use of one's time quite honestly at the end of the day A and B, their appetite to take risk is de minimis because they like staying rich and so you start to have all of these systemic market failures and this is a lot of why people point to capitalism as perverted or not working, but it's because we
have we have moved away from what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to allow humans to make money by serving other human serving and that's the whole point and instead we've refactored it into humans Market manipulating and you know trading in esoteric instruments or you know, gerrymandering the financial markets and all of that is just so utterly wasteful and sad and so, you know Social Capital started initially with myself and a bunch of other folks as money.
And then it migrated to largely just being my own so that I could take on the task in a small way of working in these market failures and trying to fix them without having returned pressure. And then as it turns out you end up making more money anyways, and so I think we've struck on a formula. I think it's one that's kind of like pretty bold and hopeful and now the goal is to just do it at a scale. That's hopefully one or two orders of magnitude bigger than the way in which we're doing it now.
Well, I would love to dig into what you found Works in that space But I also completely agree that there are a lot of financial actors do their job is just to generate a certain return on investment in a certain time period and it's really influence the way companies get built where you show up. I have friends who took big slugs of VC money and then the pressures on them to grow to the Moon just
skyrocketed now, I mean, I've said this before but to your point
The Federal Reserve has sort of unfortunately been derelict in their Duty. They now work in this weird contorted way with treasury to print an introduced enormous amounts of money into the system what that's done is financialized every part of our economy. And the problem is there are certain things that should never have been financialized flying a rocket should not be financialized right finding a cure to cancer should not be financialized figuring out some great compellingly pin.
Ai and machine learning should not be financialized but we have and so what that means are Venture capitalists no longer are technologists. They are Financial arbitrageurs private Equity folks aren't business Builders. They are expense managers On and On Down the Line, you know hedge fund folks aren't Market strategist. They are Market timers, you put all of that together and basically what happens is the Economy whipsaws based on the whims of a few folks a few Rich folks who have the ability to
You know swing large amounts of money and then again these things that should be fixed through technology and Innovation don't get fixed. And so this is this is sort of like the the problem at hand when when you hear young people screaming from the mountaintops of capitalism is dead. I think what they're really saying is we have not seen nor do we see enough of examples of people that are solving these things in a way that they're proud of and that's because too many people spend their time shuffling paper and just moving money
around to the young people who think that capitalism
Ism is not working there right based upon the last number of years and decades because at this point you have the winner-take-all economy that's kind of compounding on itself. And then there are a lot of folks who can make a lot of money not solving really the biggest problems that are growing more serious all the time, especially now with the coronavirus and that's why I really can't wait to hear what you found.
So I get that you say look guys we're going to tackle real problems like health care and education that are thorny and human and difficult and might not have the same kind of trajectory as like the the business or consumer facing Tech that we're used to and then I get that your investors. I like wait a minute. I didn't sign on for this stuff necessarily, but you know, come on Jamal do you get like pick all these winners and like easier spaces and then eventually you're like, hey guys, like that's not really
about so I'm curious how many other folks
have the same mindset you do where it's like look I made a lot of money. I want to handle I want to tackle a really important problems that aren't as Market friendly or timeframe friendly as the stuff we customarily invest in.
There's a handful of folks. I think that the the the sort of the grandfather of the space the person who's really pioneered this path is a guy by the name of the node khosla. Yeah. He's a he's an incredible entrepreneur and his firm.
The ventures I think has done huge amounts to help the world in climate change and sustainability in agriculture. He's an example. I think that there are other organizations actually now that are more institutional that focus on Innovation Lux capital is an example based in New York. So there are some by and large the incentives aren't to do that. The incentives are that you can get paid a lot of money to just basically, you know, put money into things that are obvious mark up those companies.
Raise another fund and rinse and repeat because that pays you a great yearly compensation and at that point, you know, that's you kind of have to ask yourself. Why would I even bother trying to solve cancer? You know like this is crazy. It's just going to take too long too much money. I may look stupid. I may get fired and so, you know people's own simplified incentives kick in and Innovation stops.
Yeah. It's much easier to try and jam yourself into Air B&B or pre IPO or something and then like turn around.
Like hey, like I'm a genius investor. I
had my annual meeting today. And what would so funny is I remember this is for my historic Venture funds, you know and look I put a billion three or four into the ground and you know, I told these guys look guys you're going to make somewhere between five and six billion dollars. So congratulations, it's all great. And one of my ex-partners texted me. He said, you know, these are the same guys who just got so agitated when you did a 3D, you know rocket printing company, which is now the
And most valuable space business after SpaceX that's private, you know where we did this satellite business. That's also a multibillion-dollar business where we did an AI chip company that's helping to, you know, do a lot of interesting things in science. You were just not rewarded and again, I go back to this Peter teal discussion. If Peter had enforced me or hadn't put pure pressure on me to put so much money and I would have never made those Investments. Now the way that I think about it is look, you know, I have a
Pretty like crazy track record and just kind of making money which is kind of okay. It's nothing that I'm particularly proud of but I want to use it. And so the way I think about it is, you know, we have an organization where if you put money in a ton of money comes out we've done it for ten years. It's and it's like 35% of year return. So when you put you know, 5 or 10 billion dollars into a system like that every year you're spitting out two or three or four billion of cash, but then I can take that Andrew and I can pump.
It into climate change and I can pump it into education and you know, because it's all of our own Capital all of my own capital. I don't have to answer to anybody except the employees and the founders and the market right? And so, you know, for example, there was a really incredible Innovation that came out a few weeks ago from Google called Alpha fold. Now, what is that? They're using machines to guess the structure of proteins and you may think what does that have to do with me? Well as it turns out that is the
Building block to eradicate and solve an enormous swath of diseases. And so we have reduced an incredible problem of human health to one of compute power and to one of distribution now that's where I could easily pour a billion dollars of capital spend the next 10 years and say guys, let's take you know, crawl walk run approach and let's just have 20 or 30 really important diseases that we can you know, basically put out a business and I don't have to answer to anybody except
the scientists that work on the projects and then the market and the people suffering from those diseases will say each month faster or hey, it doesn't work or hey, it looks like it's working. And so I find myself for the first time very happy actually like, you know reasonably content because we have this, you know, it's kind of like being a country Andrew I think in like, you know, like your Saudi Arabia and one day you wake up and it's like there's oil underneath your feet. And all you have to do is just suck it out and then when you sell it in the market you have money except in our
We have a plan with what to do with the money, you know, we have these areas that we just think need to get fixed for Humanity just to thrive
that's incredible that you've gotten that kind of visibility into some of the thorniest problems. And you feel like you can make Headway and solving them. I spent a number of years running a nonprofit that was trying to help young entrepreneurs in different markets around the country primarily in the Midwest and the South I would interact with billionaires and then I would say hey support
my nonprofit or support this thing I'm doing and if they were into it, they would make a move. But even if you are a billionaire, you don't move in increments of like, you know, 25 30 million, like if they were wanted to be really supportive of my organization. I might get one or two million and then I would be you know, frankly I have to be like, well that's freaking awesome because you know two million dollars is like nothing to sneeze at but but there was a sense I had that on Hmong these billionaires. I knew like they were looking at trying to solve particular.
Our problems and they didn't think they had the resources and you're like, wow, I'm like a with a billionaire in like they don't think they have it. So I'm curious what your mindset has been when you look at some of like the biggest problems humanity is facing and the scope of the problem relative to the resources that are being applied to solve that problem.
I really haven't met a problem that is really one of capital and I think that I have more than enough resources to solve all the problems that we're trying to solve.
L've except one critical one, which is human capital.
And I think that's the that's the most important thing to take away, which is that it's not that for example, like let's just say that you and I said, hey, let's go and get every single home in America to be carbon neutral. Okay. That's a great goal. Right? How would we do it? Well, I can tell you I can tell you what the answer is and the answer is actually not too complicated which is every house has a roof every roof can support residential solar all of that solar energy can get basically stored.
On site in an extremely safe and predictable battery and then you can give the homeowner or the apartment dweller an app that allows you to know exactly how much energy those solar cells on the roof has has generated and then you can use it to power the home or the apartment and whatever's left you can put back into the grid. So how do you solve it as it turns out? It's not one of capital because you can get hundreds of billions of dollars of project Finance to do that.
Because people spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying the bonds of utilities every single day in the marketplace. The really complicated part is can you get 15 or 20 Engineers to build the right app that allows you to basically understand how energy is managed and recirculated. Can you get the right, you know battery scientists and chemists to build the right battery storage technology. Can you string those batteries together across the neighborhood? So what I found and I could be totally wrong but what I found is that most of these
These Solutions are ones of human capital and that it doesn't take tens or hundreds of billions of dollars people find ways of spending that much money, but that's just a lot of poor planning. Now, if eventually enter you and I were to find a solution but I would say is it probably would cost 50 million to figure out then you and I would say, let's go to a small town like Palo Alto or you know, some place and say let's deploy that there and figure it out and then let's go to a city like Austin.
Miami and say hey guys, here's what we found. Let's go roll it out through all of Miami and then we would go Nationwide and along the way the capital markets are actually very liquid and would give you all that money non-dilutive lie, so it's not that I intend to never work with the capital markets. I just think that in that early phase the the single hardest thing to find is actually the people and at the end of the day these Solutions can be found for hundreds of millions of dollars. This is why I always sort of get trapped in
You know people people have approached me constantly and it's like hey, what's your philanthropic strategy or charitable strategy? And I and I say to be honest with you. I think that all of these problems that I'm looking at will be solved with technology oriented Solutions. The ones that I am the most sympathetic to climate change sustainability agriculture health education, and so, you know, eventually will I you know
Find a way to give all the money away sure, but right now, you know, I think it's important to recycle it back into for-profit businesses because this is how I solve the human capital problem. The single biggest thing that America has right now going against it is that we have four or five companies Facebook Apple Amazon Microsoft Google that sucks up the enormity and the overwhelming majority of all talented technical human capital because if you are
A smart young kid, you know a guy or girl graduating from a college and you know how to code or you know, how you know how to do something unique. How do you turn around to your family and say I'm going to go on work at the startup for 80 grand a year or this nonprofit or something else versus going and getting paid a million dollars a year. And at one of these big companies, it's really impossible. Right? I mean, I don't know your situation, but when I graduated that was the biggest Sword of Damocles over my neck was the student debt that I had.
So but when they go there what products are they working on? This is unfettered free agent is imagine that you had a professional sports League where there was no salary cap. What would you do you would go and hire and you would sign every single grade player stick them on the bench.
You be guaranteed to win a championship, you'd be a monopolistic championship winner or year in Europe.
You're saying that they get paid to do nothing because what you say the beds that's what I thought
of yeah. No. No, that's that's that's that's is that is the exact explicit strategy? Absolutely. So so this is why I think again, we have to find market-driven Solutions. We have to find a way to use technology to build successful for-profit companies because we have to convince all these people that are frankly withering and dying.
Divine at these companies that they should be working at these young Dynamic businesses. You know, this is the forward bleeding edge like if you think about what happened in 1969, right? The Apollo project was the Pinnacle of innovation in America, but what did you really have in a moment? But you had was an extremely diverse ecosystem where you had a public-private partnership you had the government that was basically an enormous balance sheet plus a lot of regulatory freedom and the ability to explore
Which then saw the germination of hundreds of companies and an ecosystem trying to get America into space and men to the moon and then back now we have the exact opposite. We have the federal government. That isn't exactly sure what its posture should be they work with an incredibly dated set of laws from antitrust otherwise section 230 and otherwise and then we have a handful of companies that are effectively monopolies that understand that their balance sheet is a tool that they're
Heat is equivalent to most other governments in the world, except maybe the United States right? If you if you put the GDP of countries on a list and then put the market cap of these big companies together.
These five companies are probably top 50 countries. Sure, right and so and so you can greenmail people you can basically work on all kinds of nonsense from you no nonsense and random stuff and as a result Innovation slows down progress slows down as a result wage growth slows down as a result people's frustrations grow and then they point to capitalism except really again. What it is is a bunch of financialization.
One side and greenmail and hostage-taking on the other that have basically trapped a whole cohort of young people and working on the things that really matter
to Martha. I spent a number of years trying to counteract this. I don't know how much you know about my work with Venture for America. So what we did was we recruited enterprising young people some of them technical some of them not to work at early stage growth companies in Detroit New Orleans, Baltimore, Cleveland, Birmingham and another half dozen.
Cities around the country that are not New York San Francisco with the thought process being exactly what you described which is look right now if you're a whiz kid out of a lot of places Banks and consulting firms and tech companies will waive money at you and then you will go there and you will do something that's not super socially productive. And so wouldn't you rather start a business in a place or help a business grow in a place that could use the talent could use the energy you could use the help I spent
Six and a half years running a nonprofit that did this and is done this for at this point hundreds, maybe thousands of young people and I saw the market forces you're describing and action where if you're really bright kid out of pain and you go to a start-up in New Orleans and then you see your friends getting paid six figures if it's a bank maybe more if it's you know certain certain Tech firms and you look up you're like, oh my gosh, like what's going on? Am I missing out because I'm here in New Orleans working for, you know a certain amount of money. It's a very difficult.
Landscape, you know Venture for America had a degree of of success, but also I realized the enormity of the
problem. There was a tweet during the middle of the pandemic where some guy was like, he was an employee at Google and then pretended to quit and got a job at Facebook and then was being paid by both and because they're working with like I'm holding do you think this is an absolute fucking joke and meanwhile, you know,
The Earth is burning to the ground, you know, you know, we can't we can't even figure out how to like do anything except distribute burritos by cars to people. I mean, it's kind of crazy.
I want to dig into the example you just used about for example trying to make people's homes zero emission and I was a judge at a of a clean tech competition recently and the winner was this very simple product that was essentially a film you put over windows that make them retain heat and energy better. And one of the wonderful things about this product was that you don't need to be that high skilled installed on Windows. I mean, it's essentially a window treatment so
To me the problem is that like what percentage of American homes right now have this with this Enviro friendly window treatment, you know virtually zero and if you were to go to folks right now and say hey, would you like this window treatment if it will pay for itself within 18 months like including installation? Most Americans would say sure but right now there's not like there's not a mechanism to drive widespread adoption like of that product.
That's like to me a very simple straightforward example. Now the the the solar panels that could help make the houses zero-emission. Let's say would be like an order of magnitude more difficult than this window treatment. I'm describing. So the problem right now to me is that like there are market failures and the talent level which I agree is really really hurting us in a massive way turning is culturally economically like innovation.
And then there are inefficiencies in the market where you can see opportunities where folks should be installing these window treatment or or solar panels and it could be that maybe the solar panels aren't ready for prime time and you need to innovate to try and get them to a point where you know, they're more cost-effective. This window treatment is definitely cost effective. Now, you know, it's like a again like the simplest thing in the world, but they're just a start-up they've got not that much money and so they're looking around for ways to try and
Get folks excited about their product, you know, like a stablish some kind of brand and track record and I feel like there are a host of companies that are like that that window treatment company where they've got something they've got something they've got something real it would make a positive impact. It doesn't get widespread adoption. They they're not made of money to make it happen and the value golf for someone isn't so vast that and I'll use myself as an example. Like I judge this cleantech competition. I
I love that product. I was like that should win and then did I turn around and like get those you know, the window treatment done in my own home like, you know, like I have not yet and I apologize but that but that's like the example is like, you know, I was like staring right at it and it would save me money eventually but like it wasn't enough to compel me to act again. This may be says something negative about me and I'm sorry audience. I didn't do this. So so that to me is like is an example of like kind of the
Bombs that we're facing where even if you have something that could help right now our Market is not properly rewarding adoption and it would reward adoption of some other things that probably aren't going to be as positive.
Yeah, we are we are in this really important moment in time where folks will have to make some really important decisions about what their priorities are. Look I think that one of the things that you did and this is going to be and I've you know had a reasonably good track record of not necessarily being contrarian but generally getting it right. So I'm just going to put something out there which is that, you know, there was a lot of talk in the Democratic presidential nomination process.
About the progressive left and there is this interesting thing which is that you were this kind of like weird character that kind of just emerged which was like smart and like normal and plain-spoken and like all these sort of like other smart normal plain-spoken people were like, yeah, I like math. I like, you know things that make sense. I like sentences when he says something and and I think that
There is something that's happening which is hard to appreciate which is that you know progressivism I think is a doomed experiment. It's the first initial reaction of an extremely frustrated class of people, but I think what it gets replaced with is pragmatism and I think what's interesting at the most indelible thing about the 2020 election process will be that you probably created
you showed product-market fit for pragmatism and I think that Joe Biden took advantage of pragmatism and he monetized it and I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of because that's that happens a lot in technology products that wins, you know, some guy innovates and the other guy monetizes and kind of closes the deal but it is the winning strategy and back to this sort of like film company why I think this is important is that there are all kinds of technologies that right now are not
What managed pragmatically now I don't know about this thing. But if this thing is wrapped in some dude with a hipster beard and hem pants, he can go fuck himself because it's not going to work right he needs to be pragmatic. It's like what the hell do these films cost? How do I get them to the house? How does somebody come and install them? How do you give me an app that shows me how much money I'm saving? How do I make sure I don't look like an idiot for doing it, especially if the film is ugly if he can pragmatically figure it out and separate all the emotional, you know hand-wringing around.
Climate change that company will win and I think that we are going to get faced with a whole Suite of decisions like that over the next five or ten years as consumers that we can make at the political level at the product level at the technology level. Do you want pragmatism in a world where you decide? Yes, we'll have a lot of solutions and a world where you want to wrap yourself around a flag of you know, identity politics and all this other bullshit. Then we're just going to stay where we are.
Well to me the
You with that the their window treatment company, you know, it's related to what happened with solar and what happened with electric cars and other things I think at some point the government the public sector has to say, you know, what we really want solar energy to grow even though right now it's not cost competitive with with fossil fuels are going to help make it happen. Like I feel like something like that has to happen with a window treatment where it's like, you know, what like we can't get customers to get that excited about this just yet.
Because they're just kind of shrugging and likely, you know, letting heat Escape through their windows, but we want to create jobs because they were over 10 million Americans who are out of jobs and we think it would be great for homes to have this one over like so this is the this is what compelled me to eventually run for president. I certainly appreciate your characterizing me as like the out of nowhere plain-spoken like said stocking figure that makes you very happy and this is what I'm trying to connect with you on or figure out where we
It's like at some point I said okay of like the biggest hairiest problems you're going to need the public sector to get it shipped together or we're fucked was like eventually where I landed and then and then the public sector is not exactly like a paragon of like efficiency or rationality or the rest of it, but I just did not see a way for us to solve some of the biggest hairiest problems without the public sector saying, you know what I think it might be a good idea to get this window treatment guys.
I'll give you two examples.
Samples where the public markets or sorry the public sector is actually getting their shit together. So the first is in climate change and the single biggest Boon to climate change is the fact that we have all of these really complicated politics in America foreign policy related to the Middle East and to Russia and the most important thing that I think is happening is the following dots are being connected the faster that America
Basically puts the need to burn fossil fuels out of business the faster that Saudi Arabia all of the Middle East and all of Russia will have to monetize their oil because if the future price is zero, then you're going to pull all of the oil out of the Earth today to try to get whatever you can for it. Even if it's a dollar a dollar today is worth better more than zero tomorrow and in that a couple of things happen the Middle East actually has one
Edible asset going for it in a world of climate change that is sunlight. It has an enormous amount of sunlight. In fact, you know, you may not know this maybe you do but you know the country that is the single most advantaged country in a world of photovoltaics. And in a world of solar is Armenia is that will allow us to basically completely refactor geopolitics. So
You know the Middle East will be okay. There's going to be less fundamentalism. There's no because there's just going to be no money to fund it. So it doesn't matter who you are, but you'll be like, hey guys. I want to raise my Series be for Isis and people are like, no, you know who we did the seed round. It didn't kind of work. We did the series a we hate it we're done and then the countries that it really really, you know puts me on the eight ball is Russia because they don't necessarily have the mechanisms to move off of fossil fuels. So for example, like you know, how
Our foreign policy posture will actually drive climate adoption More Than People realize but in that what I think will happen is like basically Russia gets put into a corner even more that they are now the Middle East then becomes an element where imagine they have all of this sunlight. The biggest thing that we haven't yet figured out Andrew in technology in climate technology is how to actually take the Sun and use it to heat water and create Steam.
Aim at above 1500 degree Centigrade. Now, you may say well what the fuck what are you talking about? That is the most basic building block of any single Factory because the minute and right now the only way that we get steamed to be super super hot and took you know use it to melt steel and make aluminum and stampa, you know, whatever crap we buy from China. It takes a furnace and it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuels if all of a sudden you figure out how to use the sunlight what America can do again with our foreign policy as we can fund.
Entire Factory build out all throughout the Middle East and you know who it hurts China now think of the two countries we've been told for the in every Administration who is literally an enormous pain in our ass China and Russia and climate change basically nullifies both of them. And on top of that you have this enormous demographic bubble in China where you know in the next 50 years, they're going to have half as many people because everybody's basically dying in the birth rate is negative. So we're set up in a place where like the Biden Administration can basically do
The death blow and I'm from a foreign policy perspective because we don't need to you know, hack China or Russia. We don't need to invade folks. We don't need to arm, you know countries against them. None of that needs to happen. All we need to do is become carbon neutral because the minute that we do that then I think you know, what you have is Russia in a really precarious position financially and the Middle East that probably becomes the next manufacturing mecca for the world which then puts Chinese GDP Superior.
40 in massive risk. So these are all these sort of interconnected things that I try to think about a lot but this is why I'm spending so much time in climate change because not only will you create great products while the are be more breathable will kids be able to study easier, you know, will the sea stop Marino sea level stopped Rising but you fix all the geopolitical shit that we've been in for the last 20 years.
One thing I love talking to folks like you about is what you see coming down the pike because your job is essentially to both tell and build the future. So of the things that you were seeing that you're excited about what it sounds like you're very optimistic that we'll be able to
Advanced cures for various diseases mean like that that would obviously be incredibly good news for millions of Americans and a lot of other folks. It sounds like you're optimistic about moving towards being zero emission or carbon neutral in the days to come. So like what are you seeing that you are super pumped about? I also want to call out something that you're doing when I saw that you're trying to train investment managers in a way that it sounds a validly pro-social.
You're just like hey, let's like find a way to train Folks at scale that's outside of like the traditional bounds. You don't need to go get some expensive degree in the rest of it. You're going to it's not it sounded to me like you're going to find people with like unconventional backgrounds. So I you know want to congratulate you on that. So what are you seeing that or doing that you are excited about right now that will help someone to visualize what the future could be like in the next number of
years the way that I would put it is I think that if I had to be somewhat cynical
About my career trajectory the first 25 years has been you know by all measures successful but success has come by husbanding information, right? I had a knowledge Edge and we didn't necessarily share that knowledge widely. You know, I knew things that other people didn't know I think for the next fifty years of my career. What I would like to do is break down those barriers and share all the knowledge that I've accumulated like Google makes all the information available.
Let your fingertips but information and knowledge as you know, and or two totally different things, but I want to share my knowledge. And so I'll give you three areas that I think are going to get revolutionized and I would love to be a part of it. The pandemic has really shown to me that our education infrastructure is totally broken.
I have kids so so watching them struggle with online school has been miserable, you know, and and we all talk about online schools and I'm like, I like school better than
Nothing, but not great. It's I went looking for data points on how kids are learning and the data points. I've found where that that online learning is 30 to 70% as effective as in-person school. So I just wanted to throw that that data point in there before you continue.
Well notice that your point like I think what the pandemic did was behaviourally showed that kids can adapt and actually at least learn something in a remote.
Environment and that they can learn where you know, they are essentially virtual. Okay. I think the reason why that's important. Is that a whole bunch of services have also cropped up that allow you to find the best grade 5 math teacher the best grade 6 algebra teacher the best grade 7 history teacher the the best grade 11 Drama teacher and I think in the 21st century, especially in America it stands to reason that we should be
be able to give these incredible teachers. We should pay them like athletes. They should get paid more like LeBron and Jonas, you know, Steph Curry. These guys should be making 30 40 50 million bucks a year and they should be teaching All-American grade 5 grade 6 grade 7 grade materials and when you're in school, you should be consuming this video content with Incredible local teachers that help supplement and reinforce what these Best in Class folks teach us, you know, that's just like a thing where it's like
Let's make sure again we even the starting lines right that we're not husbanding knowledge that. It's not the kid that's in fucking Larchmont that gets a better occasion than the kid in the Bronx. That's not fair. Right? Because that kid in the Bronx could be the next Steve Jobs and we're not going to get a chance to find out because that kids teacher is just not as good as it kids teachers and rye and Larchmont and you know Greenwich, Connecticut, and so this is something technology can fix we can even the
Starting line not even the finish line. But even the starting line that seemed to me that seems to me like a really reasonable and Humane and good thing to do. So, that's something I'd occasionally that I see coming down the pike in financial technology and fintech one of the most important things that we can do. One of the most important things that I can do is make the knowledge I know about how to make money widely consumable trained many other people in the lessons that I've learned so
so that they can make money for normal ordinary folks and this is a very simple way to close the inequality Gap Buffett has a saying which is that the way you make money is not timing the market its time in the market. And so, you know my emerging managers program. I had a thousand people apply. I'm going to teach thousands and thousands of people what I know. I'm not saying that what I know is special and will always be unique but
Right. Now what I know is how to make billions and billions of dollars a year. And so let them make billions and billions of dollars for other people that would be amazing. And then a third example is that you know, I've been working with the team. These are folks that I partnered with out of Google in a start-up that's been building a chip for human learning and machine learning. And again, this is important because I think we are bumping up against the
Laws of physics and I think that we're almost at a position to bend these laws of physics in a way where we can create so much Computing resources available and If you combine that with some of these things that I spoke about earlier, like what Google is doing with protein simulations, we're going to solve all human disease and you know, it's not going to cost that much money five billion 10 billion dollars like not a big deal, you know, I confronted sukuk funded Gates could fund it who cares and so one of us.
Do it. And so I think those are three examples of areas that I'm pretty addicted to be on climate change. I would say climate is my first one to be completely honest with your Android. It's kind of become an
obsessive sure. It drives everything else. I mean heck bless you live in California and literally like the countryside is Ablaze.
You have no idea like in September the sky was orange and it looked like it was out of a movie where like aliens were invading. I've never felt more insecure since I moved to the
United States, I mean I had my next most moment of insecurity was when you know Trump won the election. I thought that was going to get kicked out and sent to some internment camp. I really did and then the second most insecure moment I ever had was looking at the forest fires in California when I was here.
No, I mean you were obviously focused on climate change. Well before the sky turned orange, but the sky turning orange. I'm sure made you feel like you were making the right choices like that. Goodness. I'm working on this that there was
Got a piece of it too. I was trying to figure out what you could do to try and prevent the forest fires and it turns out that we properly manage something like 2% of the nation's Forest the forest that was burning in California as a national forest. Like the state of California doesn't even really have jurisdiction over it. And so I looked at the u.s. Forest service is budget and the u.s. Forest service is budget probably shocking to no one here has not changed that much in the last number of years. Even as you can tell the forest has been drying and turning.
Into more of a Tinderbox because you know, I looked at what was going on in California and I thought this is tragic and terrible and it would be incredibly destructive for any form of confidence
trees are an incredible carbon sink as you know, if you look across the world the United States is probably the third or fourth best place to grow trees, you know, the Amazon being the best and then Indonesia Columbia, there's there's a handful of places that are incredible and within the United States. It's actually North Carolina, Mississippi that Corridor which is the best
Just look at vegetation and whatnot. So we got really interested to your point. I got interested in this too. And I was like, what could we do in reforestation? And so we started a project where you know, we're buying I can't remember the exact number. So this is going to sound a little aloof but ten thousand or a hundred thousand acres and we have these drones that map the burnt down forest. Yeah, the Thrones have guns and yes, it shoots saplings into the ground. And so it's kind of like a whole Star Wars thing.
Thing where like these drones just you know, come up over the hill and then they run over all this land
and just start drinking planting trees from the sky. Like I've seen this stuff and it was like the coolest thing in the world. So I'm going to run this by you to mop because I was again I was trying to figure out okay, how can you help with this Forest management? The obvious thing to do would be to like higher tens of thousands of Park Rangers to burn off, you know the brush and actually try and manage the forest in like a sense.
Away, there are some politics around that but at this point, I feel like it's obvious. But then I was imagining just like you had the drones fly over and just freaking start like planting trees by the thousands and these acres of land like I was trying to imagine. Okay. Could you have a set of drones that are hovering over this Forest along with heat sensors and then whenever like a fire started going up then the drones actually can like pick up on it being like hey guys, FYI. There's a brush fire.
Fire and sector, you know like H
for Henry. It's a great fucking idea. This is what I mean, like look there's there's and here by the way you can I just say the other thing the other thing is that we bastardized entrepreneurship in America where people think that starting a company needs to mean you become a you nocenti billionaire. Otherwise you failed and that's just not true. Okay, you don't want to be as dysfunctional as it takes to make that much money. Just let me just tell you being up close and personal to it. What I will tell you. Is that there.
Enormous respect that you should have for yourself and even building a company where you can have eight nine ten employees. All of them can have families and homes and you know support your community and you send your kids to college and you have some savings that's amazing too. So so you should go and somebody should go and start this business that does that, you know, heat-sensing with drones cells that service back to local state and federal authorities makes a couple million dollars a year in their company has 15 or 20 people.
Void everybody can make a very good living wage that is success.
I could I could not agree more, you know, one of the things that breaks my heart right now is all of the small business owners are going bust because their business is drawing up because of the pandemic and if you have even a restaurant or bar food truck, I mean you're employing like four or five people or in some cases a restaurants would be dozens hundreds of people like that is success. I agree with you and I ran a small private company myself had nowhere near the level of commercial success.
As you know URL as some of the people, you know, but I felt very very proud
under this be honest more people look up to you then look up to those folks and the reason again is because there's a humanity and an authenticity in just trying to do good by people and look you can get really Cutthroat and all of a sudden make all the money quote unquote. It's not a path to happiness.
You know and I've learned the hard way because I've fallen for this trap many times. There's been a bunch of times at the fork in the road where I've said. Okay, it's not enough and it's like what the fuck do you mean? It's not enough. It is enough. It's all enough. It's like now the real solution to your happiness is about being fulfilled and all of these other things that don't come from making money and it comes from employing people and knowing that they have good lives and you know, I I've started to explore for example a different program to try to instigate
And change in student debt. It's called income sharing agreements right where you pay people to go to college or to a trade school and you get a share of their income above a certain threshold, right? And then they pay you back and then they're never in debt and you know, you kind of if it works at the scale of a billion dollars. It does kind of really put student lending on its heels. But what is that that's an effort to sort of like say yeah. Could you make a ton more money doing something else possibly, but will this make
You know millions of people's lives meaningfully better. Even if you basically break even and then some yeah, that's better. So I think it's good to have examples of folks like you basically reminding people that like this this kind of like crazy obsession with wealth that we have in America is really not what it was ever and he was not what it was all about.
You know, your mom up like there's a regular joke around my family and the Yang Yang that I would get described as a
Are periodically and we had a good laugh because my wife would be like, well, it's news to me because our words like living like a pretty normal life. And you know, I think that your experience is really fascinating on this level 2 because you know, you reached a level of business success that most people can only only dream of but I have friends who also like struggle with I mean the heck the most like the most glaring example from a recent history is
The tragic story of Tony hsieh who I'm sure you knew because you know, they're like our circles are not that big. Did you know Tony
I knew him sort of arms arms length. I've met him three or four times, but I didn't really know him that
well.
So Tony, obviously, I mean world famous entrepreneur worth hundreds of millions of dollars and had a void that you know, it was difficult to fill and then when the coronavirus shut down your ability to socialize in various ways, then like tragedy followed thereafter mean that the human condition is inescapable. It's Universal. It's everywhere. I certainly feel very fortunate that I went down a path where I was trying to do good stuff and help people and my wife is a rock star.
On this so like I ran a private company it gets bought for like a little bit of money 2009 and then I go kind of wholesome do Guri nonprofit guy with the thought process being like look I made it on money so I can like work for essentially for free for like a period of and I timed it for myself. I said I can work and not just not worry about money for five years and at the end of that like hopefully I will have done something positive with this nonprofit and then have it then six and a half years later. I was like, okay two problems. I was trying to tackle are so much bigger than anything.
I could have imagined like the only thing I can think of that would actually give me a real chance at solving. The problem was run for president, which was also by the way, I can automatically highly impractical but then thanks a like folks who actually started to support me and believe in me, but you know, the campaign worked out at a particular level and now I literally like I wake up and just trying to find ways to help people and like do positive things and it's really exciting.
And like it goes back to what you were talking about before where you have these five megacorp still just freaking, you know, drop six and seven figures on young people and say like, you know, your highest uses hanging out here in the mothership
and intellectual Le bottom ization of America
my turn of phrase for it. Jamaat back when I was young and this is not a knock. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I was a corporate attorney for five months and it was a fine firm and they were very good to me, but
I said at the time that this place is like a temple to the squandering of human potential because it had like a lot of really bright people but we were handling the my new Shea of corporate transaction documents and I was like this cannot be the highest use of this group of people because you know, there's some very very talented people on these walls and then I made the decision to go to start a business which flopped and then like I had some real real struggles in my 20s because I was making
less money than everyone I knew like, you know, I'd have all these bad dates because like I would go out and like, you know, I'd be self-conscious about money or like, you know buying like, you know, like, you know, like a certain type of meal or like taking someone to a certain sort of place so I went through like a real
Journey that way that ended up making it so that my standards for myself materially were like just not that high and I also got lucky I married a woman who's like, you know cool with her husband not maximizing my economic opportunities at every turn but the thing that you know, I tried to do with Venture for America that thing I'm still sort of pushing on it is really trying to unlock folks from
The the paths that are Market will kind of drive them towards and and one thing I think excite so many people about you is that people can sense that you're driven by something bigger than maximizing your bank account.
Yeah. I am I'm driven by really trying to figure out who I am and just to have more happy days than unhappy days. And I know that sounds so stupid and tried and like some people can say well, yeah.
You're in a position to do that and it's like no I learned that I was chasing other people's definitions of success for so long and that's what was making me so unhappy and so that's why things were never enough because it was somebody else's definition of what should have made you happy. And so I got it but I wasn't happy. Yeah. I mean, I was happy for a second or whatever, you know, get a job get a promotion buy a car buy a better car buy a house and now my life is really really simple like I'm
And I look forward to like, you know, and as a result, I've my ego has gotten a lot less and so like, you know a simple example, I do Pilates. That's awesome. I do Pilates, but now why you know when my 20s and 30s, I was I gotta go work out of our working out and I was in constant fucking pain, and then I realized it just doesn't matter what I look like it matters how I feel and pilates twice a week makes me go to sleep Andrew and wake up, and I don't know if you
This in your 40s, but it makes me wake up pain-free. Wow, it makes me so happy like more than anything else in the world when I wake up and my back isn't feeling like it's ratchet and my knees and whatever. I'm really happy. I can start the day with less with less, you know, kind of like mental stress, right? That's a really simple thing. And so I've learned over time that I've built pretty basically and you know spending time with my
Kids and all of these things are just not things that I knew how to think about because other people's definitions were caught up in a lot of superficiality and that's where we all lose our way. And so, you know if I can work on projects that are inspiring that's pretty cool if I can make decisions, that's cool. I also just want to be able to say things even if they're not cool to some folks because that's another thing that I think really prevents people from being happy right now. I I do think that there's just everybody
So pent up there ready to judge the ready to cancel folks. They're ready to just kind of like wipe them off as and the ready to be judgmental and again another key feature of pragmatism. I think is you know, that everybody's got something useful to do and to say and you find a way of just for giving, you know, the bursts that people may regret in their youth or otherwise, for example, you know, I had this thing last week where I've been saying pretty
Vociferous Lee we are headed for a biological Patriot Act in America a patriot act in America. We There It Is inconceivable that if you're working at a company or if you're part of a union or if you're going to get on a plane that you're not going to want to have some Assurance about the people around you having been vaccinated like that ship in my opinion is fucking sailed and so like all the anti-vaxxers will have to have a market clearing price to pay for a choice of not vaccinating themselves.
Because now that we have these kinds of communicable diseases, this is the beginning not the end of Airborne diseases, like coronavirus covid-19 will will be followed by covid 20 and covid 21 and covid 22 and covid 35 and these will be pernicious diseases. And so there will be a mandate to vaccinate and I know that that pisses off a lot of people but so be it and I put this out on Twitter and I said maybe folks I get vaccinated should wear a pin or a mask and people equated it to the Holocaust.
And I was like, holy shit that is stupor judgmental and really really like wow that is that is an intense reaction. So there's no way to have a debate, you know, you can't have a conversation about these things and what I try to tell people like well if you don't want a mask guess what the government's going to mandate a nap and are you going to be happier or sadder when now all of a sudden there's a central repository that China and Russia are trying to hack that has all of our vaccination histories
online. I've got a quick question on this point if I
Vaccinated and you're not vaccinated like that's your problem. Not mine. Right like as long as I'm vaccinated at least I'm gonna get your head up because like because my plan is to get vaccinated, you know, very publicly and then at that point if someone around me does not get vaccinated like they're in trouble, but I'm not in trouble as my understanding. I don't know if that's right. I'm just asking a question. Hypothetically because like I feel like the folks who are going to suffer.
Suffer from non-compliance are the people who don't get vaccinated.
I think it's TBD. And the reason I say TBD is I think that we need to see you know typical vaccines the the you know, phase 3 testing protocols take years, you know, we've accelerated things and we've truncated the entire process Phase 1 to phase 3 and 9 months and so, you know, we have early efficacy data. We have early transmission data we have early
that's true if it's 95% and then everyone around you is like non-vaccinated and contagious then it could like at 5%
The problem that's true.
What if the half-life of this thing is nine months or 18 months. What if you need to get vaccinated three or four times? What if only 35% of the population get vaccinated even at 95% efficacy you still have an are not greater than one and so you have a disease that's causing a tremendous burden that could be shutting down businesses and economies. And I don't know that's right. So my point my point in all of this and bring up this example is just back to the other thing which is like I think part of being happy is being able to say things and not being attacked.
It and not being judged and up being cancelled and being able to find a pragmatic way of talking about ideas.
One of the principles that I want to stand for is Grace and forgiveness that forgiveness even because a lot of this it's not even wrong. It's more like Grace and understanding or Grayson humanity and one of the things I know as a like now a public figure if you were to take a minute of my worst moments, I would seem like a raging asshole like no doubt about it.
And so, you know, like we're holding everyone to a standard that like none of us could satisfy if you took us at our worst and there are times when someone just gets videotaped at their worst, like, you know in public like they they're like, you know a total dick head to someone in public and then like their their life gets ruined, you know, and obviously like, you know, I prefer that maybe they hadn't done whatever the heck they did. But but again if someone had a camera on me and my were 60 seconds like I would seem like a terrible human
Ian and I just think that's true of every single one of us and if you're going to have a discussion, it's one of the reasons why and I think people know this about me it's like I sit down and have conversations with people that you know, like I disagree with on like various things political or otherwise and I just think it's ridiculous that like somehow I'm supposed to be like mindful of the fact that someone might disagree with me on some level. It's like it like it would be surprising if they didn't disagree with me on some
Well, I guess we're both different human beings. Anyway, just wanted to Echo what you're suggesting. I think that we
all are trying our best. And yes, I think it's when we forget that that we just act like raging dip shits, but we are all honesty trying our best everyday men and if you keep it in mind, it's amazing, you know how much empathy you can have for other people. I don't think that that was a particular skill of mine. I had a real chip on my shoulder, which was like I had a tough life, so
So, you know F this F that F the other person this person had a cushy life. This person was rich the spirit, you know, and I just realized know we're all trying our best and you know, that's really helped me a lot. It's not to say that people give that back to me but he's like it give it to other people.
Well, I hope you receive more of it sh'mon and you know Pilates so many people swear by it like it's
Like it makes your connective tissue like stronger and healthier in a way. I feel like everyone would benefit from because we're about the same age. I'm 45 your 44 and there is like an adaptation that occurs like around this age where like the shit you did when you were a young man, like just does not work as well.
I can drink once or twice a week. Now, you know what? I mean? Like if I if I get even buzzed I don't sleep. Well I wake up the next day. I feel like complete shit. It's just not what it was like 20s and 30s and I could rage wake up go and do whatever, you know, it's just
It's not it's just not what it is. And it's so I have to reframe my expectations and find what really makes me happy.
Yes and find new ways to be excited and fulfilled because I like diminishing returns to some of the things that we did when we were younger and then you kind of find the new things with expanding returns certainly for me kids are a big part of that, you know, like and there are times when I'm playing with my kids where frankly like work Creeps in and I'm like, oh shit. I need to get back to this person. But then I'm just like, you know, if I can't enjoy this time with my
Is I'm sunk you know so that Mike you have to say to yourself. Like this is the purpose, you know, like like, you know, I don't like I shouldn't be like, you know trying to abbreviate this time. I should be trying to elongate it the
two best memories of the last month that I have were one when we all decided me and my kids have four kids that we wanted to watch tenant and we pre-ordered it and do it always seemed
at yet.
Well, yeah, so I so it
At least two days ago, so I know this because we would check it. Is it released yet? Is it released yet? And I mean and so we've been building this thing up now 10, it could be the worst fucking movie alive. It won't matter because we are also packed up my butt myself my partner my kids and then the second is we watched enough. You've never watched it. I would tell your audience to do it too. We all on a Saturday binge-watched never have I ever which is a Netflix comedy that's been that's executive produced by Mindy Kaling from the office it is so
Can brilliant and these are the two moments of the pandemic that I remember the most over the last two months jumping screaming laughing. Anyways, small things can make a big difference in people's lives that allows you to find more empathy for others. I think
okay, never have I ever done for me and my audience the question is like have you seen tenant and it is an awesome.
No, we're watching it tomorrow night. And this is the problem my kids, you know in the middle of the pandemic like they're only social interaction is through
Roblox or you know Fortnight because they can talk to their friends in a non School setting and so, you know, I give them the choice. I'm like you can have, you know, 60 Minutes of game time or a two-hour movie like will take the game time and then like it but then I'm like, but then you got to read and do the dishes and like plow the driveway there like that's fine. So we negotiated Thursday, so I get to watch it tomorrow with them so I can't wait.
Well, well, I hope it's awesome. Congratulations to you.
For the work you're doing to help build a future that's habitable and healthy and everything else you're doing 2 mod. There are not many people like you who are trying to solve human problems that are not being frankly rewarded by the market at the same Pace or level and so I was excited to sit down with you. I'm excited to see what you do next. I'm excited to see the future you help us get through appreciate the heck out of your time.
You're a real inspiration and I'll tell you why.
Also just growing up as an immigrant person to see somebody who kind of takes the world stage the way you did just personally for me. I'm sure you've heard that a lot from folks but it's inspiring to see somebody just go for it. And I just want to thank you because it gives my kid my children are have South Asian half asian, and so, you know, there's a context for a like, you know, my kids see, you know, an older version of themselves on a debate stage.
Really fucking amazing. So I just want to say thanks for inspiring a lot of people including myself
really appreciated all the best to your kids. Tell them. I'll do better next time. It's getting thanks Andrew.
