Mark Daniel — How to Find a Kaleidoscopic Alien (EP.254)
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that

to avoid going in infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science,

linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I have a very special guest today, and I told him I wouldn't do this, and I'm going to lead with it.

My guest, Mark Daniel, the managing partner of Digital XYZ, which is a multi-stage metaverse investment company looking at accelerating computing, gaming, crypto, AI, immersive learning. Also a 2013 Thiel Fellow, which we'll talk about. But he told me something as we were chatting before recording, and that was, he thinks podcasts could potentially be dangerous...

which I can hardly wait to hear why. Mark, welcome. I ambushed you there. I started with the thing I promised I would. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Well, you know, I think that like, and this is somewhat, I guess, relevant to my story as well. What I've always been most passionate about is how culture and technology co-evolve, right? Culture being the set of stories that we live in. Technology, you know, kind of influences those stories and creates new ones more than anything else. And when you think about that kind of helix, that loop, I think that's the most powerful force in human history.

I think there's probably a kind of analysis paralysis that affects a lot of people. And I think that, you know, this probably started with Tim Ferriss, maybe 10, 15 years ago now, who I think produced so much great value for people. But then it went too far where people can't, you know, have a morning now because they're too worried about their morning routine. I think on a more kind of serious note, if you think about having voices in your head,

You have literally now invited voices into your head. If you think about kind of some of these kind of biblical ideas, and if you think about kind of this idea of Luciferian intellect, that the devil is beautiful, not ugly, and the way he might work inside of you is in ways that make you feel quite good. And then you think about the idea that for two or three hours a day, for the first time in human history,

You are listening to people telling you essentially how to live your life and how to spend your very scarce time. And you could spend years and years of your life just listening to people telling you how to live. Maybe that's not the best thing. And this is literally the first time in history because of headphones.

This is literally in the last 10, 15 years where two, three, four hours a day of just passive time, you're ingesting ideology around how to live your life. And I don't think that's necessarily good for people. There is so much of that, which I actually agree with, says the guy who hosts the podcast with more than 250 episodes. I think that I am...

very, very bearish on what we used to call listicles, prescriptions. This is how you must conduct yourself if you wish to be, you know, fill in the blank, right? If you want to make money, you've got to do these 10 things. Number seven will shock you. Like,

The more I would see those things about seven years ago, they got really popular around 2017, 2018. I just literally would break out in hives whenever. And in fact, I did a thread on Twitter saying, for fuck's sake, don't listen to me. Don't, you know, because one of the things that I see there is.

is you can have even two honest-minded parties, okay? Let's stipulate that the person making that list honestly actually thinks that he or she is helping people by doing so, okay? So no other agenda, they actually do believe that. Also, the person reading that list, same thing. Their agenda is, I want to level up. I want to do better. You know, I understand my weaknesses. I

That's a big assumption, but I really want to do it. Even then, I think you're right about the idea that ideas live rent-free in a lot of heads. And the classic interpretation, like schizophrenia, for example, I have a theory that schizophrenia is potentially filter failure.

And it's just that the brains of people who suffer from schizophrenia don't have the filters that the rest of us have. Right. Like I remember when I was doing kind of a deep dive on neuroscience, it was like the number of data points or visual auditory, whatever type of stimuli that hit us like every second is massive. Right.

And our brains filter it out to just the stuff that we think is very, very important. Without that filter, you squander your attention to your point. And so I guess my question to follow would be, I have an answer for your complaint. I read transcripts of podcasts that I'm interested in. Very different way of coming into your perception.

How about you? Do you think that I'm just doing a half measure there or elaborate? I think there's a few ideas here. I think that, and to be clear, I'm very pro ingestion of new information, but I think that maybe each person who creates content on the internet should be limited to like 10 posts.

Like, I don't believe that someone has more than like 10 things to say, right? Like you can't make 600 videos on working out, but that's what are kind of the business model the internet pushes you to do.

there's not 30 different bicep workouts that you need to record, right? There's probably like one, right? So I think like finding the very best thing and ingesting that one thing very carefully is incredibly productive. Anything that's derivative of that, I don't think is productive. My personal kind of information diet consists of reading things that are timeless, like very, very, very old. And then things that are very, very, very, very new. Uh,

And things are usually written from a position that's not particularly commercial. Right. So I'm much more interested in reading like an actual research paper and then trying to look through the 70 pages of citations and infer what I think about that versus the kind of blog post on the research paper. That makes sense.

It does. And I think that, you know, it's difficult for me because I'm, you know, like anything, I'm not deterministic. I'm much more probabilistic in the way I think about things. Right. And this idea that it's a yes, no, black, white, you know, zero, 100. I think most things live in the middle. Right. And the idea that I'm very, very bullish on is the

nature of what i call the human colossus which is first off the internet and then our ability to connect with others no matter where they are like we have a thing we call the great reshuffle at osb where we say all the old models are collapsing um and just people have habituated

their go-to playbooks. And right now we're at the part of the Great Reshuffle where they're just really beginning to notice these playbooks aren't working yet. And in fact, not only are they not working, they now almost appear like a joke. Like I always make fun of the World Economic Forum and Klaus, who I often say reminds me of even a campier version of Dr. Evil.

And like literally he doesn't know that. And so they're using these tone deaf campaigns on the Internet that they're spending a shit ton of money on. And really, they don't understand that all they're doing is feeding the meme makers and everything else.

So I definitely think, though, that on the one hand, the benefit of someone who is a true creative, right? And when I was a kid in the 80s, or I wasn't a kid, I was between age 20 and 30. But if you were a great writer or you had a great idea or you had any of that, there was just no way for you to literally get that out there to even a small audience, frankly. Right.

Because unless you were an academic and you had the avenue of writing a paper or a study or whatever, you had to go through a series of gatekeepers that were basically, in my view, there to reinforce the existing narrative and not like highlight.

the things that were brand new. It's one of the reasons why I love Robert Anton Wilson so much was I learned so much about that counterculture in when I was in single digits as a kid that literally figured out or tried to figure out ways to get those ideas out there. But, you know, it's like mimeographs. And if you weren't in San Francisco for the summer of love in 1967, man, you didn't know anything about it.

So is it a question, Mark, that you think that we've just let the pendulum go too far? Or are you more precise in your analysis of this? One of the super skills of the future, even of the present, is just going to be figuring out how to ignore the vast majority of things that are created. So I think for people who are

I think there's probably two things of modernity that are remarkably unique. One is that you have access to all the world's information in your pocket. Two is that you can kind of walk up to any major airport in the world and be anywhere else in the world in 24 hours. And neither one of those features would, you know, any king who's lived through human history have been able to conceive. Now, if those things are not kind of placed on top of the correct kind of value system,

they actually become corrosive, not productive, right? Because wanderlust, whether it's in love or location or in focus, ends up being usually quite corrosive. But if you understand how to ignore the vast majority of things, obviously the kind of permissionless nature of, you know, the internet is very, very advantageous. But I don't see it.

many people who kind of come up with that degree of focus. And I think that on the life advice stop, on the career advice stop, on anything that's advice driven, I think mostly the answer is simple and hard. And people want complex and easy. Podcasts are great for complex and easy, but the answers are usually simple and hard and you just have to kind of do the work.

So I don't know kind of where we'll land, but I think for the people who kind of have the right set of values, this is going to be a golden age for the next 20 or 30 years of them being able to create. And then I think there's going to be this really big stratification where you see more and more people who are continuously lost and kind of induce themselves into this almost mildly schizophrenic lifestyle. Yeah. And just let's drill down on that because I agree. And

The ability to ignore. I love that framing because that's right. In my opinion, I think that the ability to ignore almost everything.

Honestly, it's like I'm a big fan of Twitter because I honestly think that it could kind of grow into a global intelligence network. And it's had its ups and downs. And I was a big fan of that when Jack ran it. I didn't get all hysterical when Elon bought it. But one of the things that I do notice there is those spud up time cycles. You know, if you were an Orwell fan, the two minute hate, right? Like,

who's it today as my friend Alex Danko loves to point out who's it on Twitter and you just don't want to be it ever but you see these things have been sped up the flywheel happens so fast and then it's kind of like oh no no no we're doing the new new new new new thing today and that just destroys all of your intellectual calories right like thinking is hard

And you have to become a cognitive miser, in my opinion, especially with this onslaught of everything, you know, the new thing of the day. Most of it's worthless. But I want you to keep going with your, some of the answers are simple and straightforward. Give me a couple examples of what you mean. Like marriage, health, building a business, building a great portfolio, everything.

All of those things are quite simple and quite hard, right? Whenever I find myself trying to overcomplicate something, it's usually because I know what the answer is. I don't want to accept what the answer is because it's going to require me to sweat, right? It's always the guy who's out of shape who's asking about push-up variations in the gym.

Right. It's always the guy who can't do one push up. He's like, but do I put my hands here and then do I do like a jumping push up or do I do underhand? It's like, no, just like keep going until you can't anymore. Right. And I think that that tends to be correct in every every kind of stream of your life that's worth developing.

developing. Like you just have to do the simple hard thing 90% of the days each year, and then do it for like 10 years and then look up and see where you're at. And that tends to work out pretty well. That's really honestly the only thing that I've seen work out well. That's not luck driven.

We could not be more aligned on that advice. Like I, I, I, I love the Tao Te Ching. I've been reading it all my adult life. Finally began to understand it when I was in my mid fifties. I'm not terribly quick, but you just made a great point. Like the completion porn is really challenging also. Right. So it's like,

I think it's much better to watch the 10 greatest films 10 times than to watch 100 films once, you know. And again, like that's just not the way that our culture is set up today.

Yeah. And I wonder, honestly, whether our culture ever was set up that way. Right. Like, I'm sure you're familiar with some of the speculation about why we develop language. And I came across an academic paper that I thought was really funny, but they were serious. And it was we develop language to gossip.

Yeah, because, you know, we were living in hunter gatherer tribes and, you know, you want to fit in before you can stand out. And if you can't say fucking grog over there is a is a lie about he's not pulling his share of the work here.

you would only have a physical altercation that you could express that with. And that language allowed us to kind of go, just take the temperature of the room, right? With all of our other tribe mates. Hey, what do you think about grog over there? Right. So, so I definitely think it's kind of built into our human OS to enjoy diversions, so to speak. Absolutely. Yeah. But spiritual diversions would have been quite rare. And, and,

It's very recent. The explosion of choice that we have is very recent. And the explosion of media is even more recent, right? Like you didn't have a thousand with you were born a hundred years ago and you were fortunate enough to be literate, which globally would have been rare. You wouldn't have had a thousand books that you could have read. You sure as hell would not have had Instagram and TikTok and television, right? So your choices were much more constrained.

Indeed, they were. But I was going to demonstrate or illustrate with a different story your point. I can always tell whenever I put anything up online about the Dao Ming Qing, I have a universal rule. Anyone who comes back to me and says, which translation should I read? A, is not going to ever read it, seriously. And B, if they do read it, they're not going to understand it. Yeah, it's funny. So I think...

That has been a message of mine from our earlier conversations and why I wanted to have you on was like, I have a different context than you, right? I was born in 1960. You're much younger, but.

My context sort of saw that shift, right? From where you really wanted to get deep domain knowledge. And we were chatting before we began the recording about how this world kind of unfairly treats people like me well. And by that, I mean...

I have deep domain knowledge on asset management, specifically quantitative algorithmic investment management. The rest of my domain knowledge varies, but usually just enough to be dangerous, right? And so if you're facile and you can sort of talk about anything, this type of environment favors you. And if you're not, it doesn't.

Until it does, though, because that's what I want to ask you next. Like, you know, your company, Digital XYZ, essentially you're looking for diamonds in the rough, right? And I'm sure that a few of those, I'm going to ask for your definition of how you find that and what you call a diamond in the rough. But I'm sure that one of the things is they're doing something that the vast majority of people would neither take the time nor the effort to

to really become expert at. Am I in the right ballpark? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that, I think with the best founders that we meet, we always are looking for these people, you know, that we call kaleidoscopic aliens. They've had some bizarre set of life experiences of kind of showing them the fourth dimension.

And they also can kind of thrive in the most adverse and ambiguous environment, which is outer space. Right. And when you find these people, you often find them, you know, coupled to these highly irrational obsessions.

at a pre-commercial point in time. And then the cosmic pendulum is always swinging. And it looks like they've somehow picked the right thing that was very insightful and very premeditated, but it's actually just a result of the cosmic pendulum swinging. And they haven't moved at all. And they've been irrationally obsessed with this thing for six or seven or eight years. And then magic happens. And we're always looking for that. We're always looking for those types of earned insights. And

the thing that you said about kind of these cultural relevancy cycles being so compressed is incredibly astute because I think

when you look at really young founders are often now getting kind of robbed of their calligraphy years, right? So when you think about could jobs have done Apple without the calligraphy years, if from 16, you feel like you need to be X, Y, or Z, you know, you might not have the time to kind of putter around or feel like you have the time to putter around and explore your passions as much as maybe someone would have before there was kind of the startup culture or founder culture that became kind of

in vogue. So this is something we think about a lot. Yeah. Literally, the ideas that I ultimately put into practice with my companies, Oshawa C Capital and Oshawa C SR Management, literally were generated because I had the luxury and privilege of sitting alone in a room for basically three years

reading everything I could because I loved the stock market because it seemed to me to be this ultimate puzzle and kind of the Olympics of business. And because I did have all of these different interests, that's perfect for the stock market, right? But then as I was looking at it, I'm like, okay, so most of what people are saying is just pure horseshit. How can I get to first principles and how to approach it?

But that took me more than three years alone in a room reading physical things that I had to go to a library to get. And I wonder, and this is actually making me think about it for the first time in this connection. I just wonder, is that even possible with young people today? Because I was in my early 20s when I did that.

I think it's possible. It's just challenging, but because of the flattening of the world.

where everyone is discoverable, can we find 12 people a year where that is the case? Absolutely. And I think the best young founders today are better than ever before because they started being incredibly commercial and creative at a very young age. And they had these kind of weird... When you think about from my generation and before me, I was born in 94.

You would have a lemonade stand. You know, I grew up when I was eight or nine years old. I was selling Palm Pilots in my little neighborhood in Tennessee, like these stupid things, right? You have kids today where they're building whole worlds at 12 on Roblox. And it goes from being pre-commercial, let me build a cool universe for my friends,

to making millions of dollars by the time they're 16. I mean, we've invested in someone who's building essentially the LVMH of Roblox, and he just started as an incredible UGC, user-generated content creator on Roblox and Minecraft when he was 13, 14, is already making millions of dollars. Clearly, we're in the wrong business. But for the best kids, I mean, they're better than ever. But for how many people are able to break out of these algorithms? Very few.

Yeah, that is something that I have pondered a lot. You know, our very own CTO here at Prophecy Ventures is still not legal to drink.

And he started when he was, I think, single digits, taking apart phones, making them better, finding the spyware. And, you know, I would say to him, Misha, like, why'd you do that? And he goes, I just was so curious. And that speaks to your obsession. He was obsessed with trying to figure this out.

And so I definitely agree obsession. Like I was obsessed in terms of trying to find the answer. Misha was certainly obsessed. But I think you're absolutely right. Today, both men and women are starting a lot younger. And do you use that as kind of like a filter when you're trying to find these kaleidoscope aliens? Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, like when we were setting up our business, one of the things that we really spent a long time studying is just the history of iconic companies. And I think when you look at the history of iconic companies, maybe the most important takeaway is that they are overwhelmingly idiosyncratic. And if that's the case, whenever you get into really tight playbooks as a venture capitalist, you're in trouble.

Because there's going to be there's a very quick and easy counterfactual that if you actually know the history of iconic businesses that you could pull. Right. So I think that like it's amazing when we find someone who's able to contribute at that level from a very young age.

But there's just as many examples of people who've done something completely different. You know, there were complete failures at age 30 who then start an iconic business. And what we've seen is that even in these career paths, they tend to be extraordinarily nonlinear.

right? In wealth creation, they tend to be extraordinarily nonlinear. There's all these kind of yardsticks that end up not really mattering how successful you are at 20, 30, 40, 50, it doesn't really matter. And, you know, if you even take Buffett, you know, most of his financial success was created at an age where many of his kind of contemporaries would have

you know, clothes shop or retired, you know? So we don't really worry about how old someone is. We love it when we meet young people. I think the thing that is amazing about young people is that they're squarely on plan A of their life.

And the optimism of somebody who's on plan A is infectious. It's something that I'm always chasing, you know, but that optimism and that energy and that freedom to just focus on one thing is remarkable. But I would say that's probably the only thing that, you know, we look at uniquely with

young people. And then I think just they have this openness around what's possible, right? So there's a lot of, you know, calcifications that we have intellectually that we have to fight just because we're a little bit older, where, you know, a 15-year-old doesn't even see the lines that we see, right? They're much more fluid in the way that their mind can kind of dance. So I think that's the other kind of benefit of talking to a lot of young people.

Yeah. And one of the things that we're doing at my company is, you know what patterns are, right? Yeah. So that genius 20 year old who's our CTO, I've asked to build out AI agents that go searching for patterns. And I love your idea, by the way.

We're doing something very similar where we're taking every iconic company from the past and we're going all the way back, even including the South Sea Trading Company that Isaac Newton lost to Fortune then. It was iconic.

It was so iconic that can you even imagine what I often see the people slinging crypto or whatever online and just imagine the how incredible the furies to get in to the South Sea trading company would have been.

Absolutely. But like literally they do. It's like it's like the notion of the hero's journey. Right. Campbell's classic story. You know, when I first read about it and I read him, by the way, for all of our listeners and viewers, watch his video. Here's one. I'm going to contradict myself.

But thank you, Walt Whitman. Do I contradict myself? Of course I do. I contain multitudes. Don't read his books. They're pretty boring and dry as dust. Watch his interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS because he's really good in those. But when I was reading the first book, I'm like, wait a minute. So there's an underlying pattern to these stories that we all love. And

And then the minute you start seeing it, right, your reticular activating system gets activated and you just start seeing heroes journeys everywhere. But it's it is a fact. Like if you look at the stories that are the most popular that they and I know stories are very important to you because they create the culture in which we live. They're kind of the operating system of culture.

What you do find are underlying patterns or patterns, primitive patterns, that if you can unlock those and you're in that business, you're in the film producing business, which we are, you're in the book producing business, which we are, they can be very, very valuable. Do you concur with that or am I just a crazy old guy here?

No, absolutely. I mean, I think there's only a handful, you know, maybe a dozen stories that exist in all of human interaction and all of human life. And I think that it's very few people today who lack training of the head. And there's many who lack training of the heart. And sometimes the only way to kind of understand those half dozen to dozen stories is actually have life stories.

you know, in your life. And I always tell, you know, young people that I meet in Silicon Valley, do not delay life. No matter what you do, do not delay life because a lot of the things that you learn in life are going to help you build your vision and manifest your vision. So I completely agree with you. Studying those dozen stories, understanding them intimately, also, you know, earning that wisdom,

Anytime you haven't earned the wisdom that you kind of espouse, you have to be a little bit weary of where is it coming from and how well do you actually know it? All of those things I think are really important in business. Yeah, I agree. And that goes back to your earlier point about things being simple but not easy.

Yeah, like you're absolutely bang on about most things, right? Like you want to have a great life, pretty simple stuff, right? Get enough sleep, eat the right types of foods, exercise. I mean, nobody, everybody wants a hack. And yeah, there is the easiest hack in the world. Just anyone, do three of five things. And you know what? Your life's going to turn out pretty well.

And yet nobody is interested in that at all. And like successful investing, super easy, super easy. And yet super hard to get anyone to do it that way. Right. It's like the new, new thing yet again. Right. And I like this theme because I haven't thought about it enough. And so you've given me a really cool thing to really contemplate for a long time. Like on the one hand,

There is a huge universe of knowledge around a lot of things, investing, how to live a successful life, how to have a successful marriage, these things that are basically basic to us as humans. And yet, and yet, all of that gets ignored. All of that is like, oh, if it was that easy, everybody would do it. No fucking way. Actually, the opposite.

Like, oh, why would I ever do that? Like, that's too simple. And what are your thoughts? I mean, how do you solve for that? I mean, I think there's this, I don't know if it was Bezos or Bill Gates. There is this, it stuck with me. One of them was having a conversation with Warren Buffett. They're like, Warren, your strategy is so simple. Like, why doesn't it get competed away? Why doesn't everyone do this? And Warren says, because no one wants to get rich slowly.

And when I look at the first kind of decade of my career, all of my most successful contemporaries follow the exact same path where the long way was the short way. Now that 10 years have passed, like they just have kept doing the same thing. I think for me, it was what we're building with digital, you know, the means are the ends. And I think if you can find whatever in your life where you will feel like the means are the ends, you're very happy to get rich slowly because you just want to keep doing the same thing. Uh,

And then the timelines don't really matter. So that's how I kind of manage it in my own life. I just have a life that's full of things that I would keep doing forever. And I think if you can kind of get to that point, you have kind of won the great game. And if you don't get to that point where you're spending your life doing the things that you authentically love, no matter what other points of validation you have, you've lost the great game because that's the whole kind of point if you can get...

post just survival, which has been most of history is just trying to survive, you know? So that's how I kind of imagine my own life. And as do I, and I wonder, like, I'm interested, you have LPs, right? Yeah. So I don't have any LPs. Our venture arm is no LPs. I'm the only LP. And one of the things that I noticed was it really did give us a fairly large advantage

In that, like, we've made a bunch of investments that I would have never made if I had to try to justify them to an LP. How do you deal with that tension with your LPs? I think for us, it's actually been really productive because it creates when you're risking your own money, you know, there's maybe a certain amount of, you know, leniency that you have.

And the way that you follow your frameworks or strategies, when you are risking someone else's money, you really are connected to, I think there's this kind of very nonchalant attitude that a lot of asset managers have and investors have of like, oh, well, like,

you know, these people will give us cash and whatever. And if the returns are great, great. If they aren't, who cares? It'll be 10 years from now. We take we do not believe in that at all. I think that as people who've had to make our own money, when someone goes and trusts us with their capital, we take that extremely, extremely seriously. If you are working with, you know, a foundation or an endowment or any really connect to, well, where is this money coming from?

we take that really seriously. So I think about, you know, every single investment we make

having to go and walk someone through exactly why we're taking their very scarce resource that they've trusted us with and we're putting it into this opportunity. And I love having that accountability. I think it long-term will make me, you know, a much more rigorous and much more disciplined steward of capital. So I haven't bristled at that yet. But of course, there's times where we see something that's crazy and

Where like the, you know, just kind of creative fun side of me would love to be able to invest in it. And it's not to say that I wouldn't personally invest in it. But, you know, investments that we're doing out of our firm look, look at kind of specific way. And it's a way that, you know, our LPs are aligned in having us invest. And we respect that.

Yeah, I was inartful in the way I asked the question because what I actually meant was the reverse. With many, many LPs under that rubric of what's going on now, what's the hot thing now, how do you deal with their impatience, if you will, or are you lucky enough to have been able to select LPs that do not demonstrate any of those kind of hyperbolic discounting things?

Mostly the latter. I think we've been really thoughtful. You know, I was able to start our business with a great mentor. And one of the things that he kind of shared with me when we were getting set up is just like the same way that you're really thoughtful about the founders you partner with.

You need to be just as thoughtful about the LPs that you partner with. We really try to exclusively have LPs who are aligned with our vision and our values and can be really scalable and durable relationships as our firm and our business grows over the next few decades. And they can have some type of kind of strategic value also, right? They can really contribute to the conversation that's happening within our community.

And I think with those types of people, they're very aligned to, well, what are we building together over literally the next 50 years? I want this to be my last job. I'm 30. Hopefully I can do it decently while I'm playing 80. So it's never about this one investment or this one fund even. It's about, you know, what's the trajectory of the firm for 40 or 50 years? I think that's where the conversation tends to...

kind of sit at with many of our LPs. Of course, every three years, every four years, there's some craze technically that people get really excited about. And usually that excitement is warranted. But what we've seen going through this just a few times in my career is that if you could kind of hold back for maybe the first two years after it's on the cover of the New York Times, you'll

you'll be able to make much better investments because a lot of the first things, the most obvious ideas would have been tried. Maybe you would miss one or two iconic companies that were front runners. But there's many things where you're like, OK, I mean, crypto is a great example of this. You think about all the things that were tried in 20 and 21 and then stable coins, which no one was that excited about or very few people were excited about. Stable coins ended up being

the really durable use case that has really wrecked over the last two years, right? I think AI will see something similar and that will continue. So we love to follow, and I think this is where the discipline comes in. How can you tenaciously follow a technical boom

But that doesn't mean your capital should follow it. And being able to kind of separate the intellectual exercise of staying current technologically from the exercise of actually allocating capital against a trend are two very different things. Amen is all I can say. I totally agree with you. And, you know, one of the patterns that I have seen emerge is there is a very specific cycle

to new things coming on the scene and humans reacting to them. So much so that I say, you know, markets change millisecond by millisecond. Human behavior barely budges millennia by millennia. Your last sustainable edge is arbitraging human nature.

And then just to pick an example out of the air, at the turn of the 20th century, there were hundreds of car companies in America, hundreds.

Obviously, we know that went down too. I mean, how many do we actually have in the United States right now? But it shrank rapidly as all of the Cambrian-like explosion of new things. I mentioned the South Sea Trading Company. It's really fun to go back and look in the newspapers of the era because all of the permutations

that people were raising money on. It was all just bullshit, right? Like for a immensely profitable enterprise, which has not yet been discovered. People are pouring money into it. And what's interesting is not the grift on top. It's the way people respond to it, right? Like when the culture is awash in mania for, you know, fill in the blank, right?

Right. And it's changed dramatically throughout the years. Railroads, same mania that we have going on right now for AI. Same thing. Everything. Same. And they're like, no, railroads were completely. No, exactly the same. They know, you know,

Bonds of railroad companies, most of them failed, most of them fucked everything up. And then the few that did had a brief period of time where they did really, really super well and then got replaced. What are you seeing now that you're like, okay, I think the mania is subsiding. You mentioned crypto already. Anything else that's on your radar is like, okay, it's seeming to...

settle down a little bit. But here's where we really think there's going to be legs. Well, I think that we try to, we focus on, can we discover the most gifted people in the world? Can we credibly assess if what they're doing is going to be successful? Can we convince them to work with us? And then can we support them if we have convinced them to work with us? We find that that alone takes 25 hours a day.

Right. We're always behind on that job. If we then had a lot of time to think about what the world needs outside of that, we would likely just try to start the company ourselves, which we've done before and will do in the future. But we try to really avoid thinking thematically. There's this great chart that shows, you know, the last 20 years of venture capital.

What VCs think is going to be the hottest company, not once has turned into the most iconic company started that year. Not once. So we look at that chart every day, literally, and it's a reminder on why themes are so dangerous. Now, that's not to say that we don't have ideas. That's not to say that we don't have hunches of what might be more likely to succeed than other things. But we really spend most of our time trying to assess, does the founder

who's gonna have infinitely more contacts than we have, is the founder approaching this in the right way. I will say personally, what I'm really excited about is just how all these new technologies are going to combine.

Right. So there's a lot of, I think, kind of combinatorial possibilities that will happen in the next five or 10 years that we couldn't imagine. And that's going to create new technologies. It's going to create new product experiences. That's going to even create new business models that we might not be familiar with. So I'm really excited to be open minded about that. Yeah. And again, we are so simpatico. That's the way we look at the world. The combinatorial potential is the greatest I've ever seen in my lifetime.

And not only my lifetime, Matt. I mean, when you go back and you look at the history, I mean, it's overused. And so I try to use it less. But we literally are living at one of the coolest times in human history, in my opinion, because of the combination potential. For example, AI combined with virtual reality.

Is going to do, you know, the quarterback for the Washington football team. What do they call them now? The commanders, right? Yeah. Yeah. I, I can't remember the new name, but I was interested where I saw he, he does his training. He's a rookie. Yeah.

He does all of his training in VR with the help of AI as well. And I'm like, yes, like, here we go. This is very cool because this is showing in a medium that most people understand. That's another thing that I've

had to conclude like i'm not a sports guy at all either yeah like to me it's sports ball and i even developed an internal algorithm for how to deal with drivers when i was on the road a lot because the only thing they ever wanted to talk about was sports and so i'm like okay so i'm going to develop a way to do this i just found out tom brady retired so i'm way behind

Well, you're not behind me because my question would be, who's Tom Brady? Right. Exactly. But...

You do got to give in if you really want to communicate clearly with something that has a lot of mind share with a lot of people. And this is like that algorithm that I developed for talking with drivers, right? Taxi drivers, Uber drivers, et cetera. And it's like, I would get in the car and they would say, how you doing? Where are you from? And then I'm from New York. Oh, what do you think of the Yankees? And like,

I don't. I don't think about the Yankees. I don't know anything about the Yankees. But that was met with sullen silence or, in some cases, hostility. So what I would do then is just say, well, you know, it really depends on what team shows up on the field. And then the guy would go, oh, man, you are so right. And then it's a simple algorithm. Just feedback whatever he says to him.

Right. So you can roll for life. It really is. Right. I forever for like 25 years would not read how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie because it was such a fucking cheesy title that I was just like, I am not going to read that. I'm just not going to read that. And then I finally read it because so many people told me, you really got it. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Could have saved me a ton of time. But anyway, so feedback to them what they say.

Just in a slightly different format. And I'm not kidding you. I had one driver get out and take a selfie with me because I said, why? Why do you want to do that? And Mark, he said to me, I want to show people that I finally met somebody who truly understands sports. Amazing. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's so true. It's so true.

Yeah, because it's like when people come in, I get asked for my advice a lot. I do not know why, because it's probably horrible advice. But the fact that one of the things that I've noticed is that when people, many people, not all people, obviously, but when many people ask me for advice, what they're really asking me for is agreeing with them, right? Yes. They don't want advice. They want permission. Exactly. Very, very different things, right? Yeah.

And I don't know why I have suspicions, but I don't know why, but I am extremely...

If you try to categorize me socially or politically or anything like that, it's very hard to do because I have certain positions that people would call me a communist for. I have other positions that people would say, well, you're an anarcho. I actually got called an anarcho-capitalist by somebody once. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds good. Yeah.

Half anarcho-capitalist, half anarcho-capitalist. Whatever floats your boat. Right. But the idea is very straightforward that most of the time, like I was saying, the one thing that I do have that I'm maybe even kind of obsessed and pathological about is just I am extremely anti-authoritarian. And even if the authority is right,

I hate authoritarians. Of any side of the political spectrum, I just hate...

those types of people. And so to the point where I did stupid things, like when my first child was coming along, we talked about before we started recording, like I had finally convinced myself through looking into the literature and looking at the data and everything. This is 1985. So this is a different world. Nobody wore seatbelts back then. Right. And so going into the birth of my son,

In 1985, I finally convinced myself through the data that, yes, it really does make a difference for me to wear a seatbelt.

I was still living in Minnesota at the time. And then fucking Minnesota passed a mandatory seatbelt. You didn't want to do it. It wasn't that I just didn't want to do it. I didn't do it. I stopped wearing my seatbelt for like nine months. I tell my wife, just look at me. And she goes, you are fucking insane. You are the one who convinced me that I should do it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, look, I recognize that it's probably cost me more in life that it has helped me, but I just hate being told what to do. And maybe that's why, maybe that's like...

Some secondary and tertiary benefits that I haven't even thought about. Like, maybe that's why I hate those lists. Maybe that's why I hate the 10 things you've got to do for your morning routine. Number seven will shock you. I hate that shit. Let's do the opposite. Yeah. Like, wake up, have a cup of coffee, take a shower. You're like, I'm not doing any of that. Drinking bourbon, sitting in the back. Right.

And, you know, sometimes like literally I did that when you still had to go to a physical store and buy CDs of music. I love music, right? The only I'm not a huge country fan. I'm open to it. It's not that I just universally and blanketly say it's bad. It's just I haven't found my vibe there yet. But the way I got that way, I think, was I used to go to Tower Records and literally buy 50 CDs at random.

At random, just so that I could discover music. And now I think that that instinct, that maximization of the objective function has gone haywire. There are way too many things now. So now I'm focusing on the idea that if you are an incredible curator with good taste,

The world is your oyster in the next 10 to 20 years. Do you agree? Absolutely. I mean, this is like, you know, there's times where the ocean's created, in which case you need water bottles. Then when you have a bunch of water bottles, you need a new ocean, right? This is definitely the era of water bottles and curation. And I agree with you. But, you know, I...

There's a lot of curators out there. I think that even within the curated set, you might you run into the same thing. I'm really curious to ask you about your anti authoritarian thing. Like, how deeply do you hold that belief? Do you is there any belief that you have that you'd be willing to die for? Or is there any belief that you have where you'd be willing to have some type of real bodily harm?

Belief. I actually have to think about that. I would instantly die for my children, my grandchildren. I understand. When you asked the question, that's why I said belief. I always joke that I subscribe to the George S. Patton idea that let's let the other poor dumb bastards die on their hills. We're not going to do that.

So, God, you know, I think I would die for the belief that if you're going to try to make me live my life on my knees, I would rather be a free man than living as a slave. That one I'd probably die for. Yeah. And I'd probably die like if...

And it's so easy to play these mind games, right? Because you never know until that scary shit actually happens to you. And I've had enough scary shit in real world happen to me that I can make this somewhat credibly, but a huge pinch of salt that, and I think I would go if it was a trolley problem, right? And I had to die so that everyone else didn't have to live enslaved.

I think I'd die for that. That's the only one that I can actually think of that springs to mind. How about you? I don't know. I think it's an interesting question because when you think about the kind of most people answer some along these similar lines, which is like, no, there's nothing I would die for. Yet they, in a way, give up their life and their energy on very silly beliefs all day long.

Imagine you're in an era of very impassioned positions on hills that no one would actually die on. What a waste of life that is. And life's very short. So see that a lot. That's on the mind literally this week because we're recording this, you know, the day after the inauguration. And I have plenty of friends who are overjoyed. I have plenty of friends who are devastated. And I feel like for the last 10 years, I've been very overjoyed.

neutral, you know, for the most part. So anyways, that's a few, a few thoughts, but I don't think, I don't think there's, I don't know if there's anything I would voluntarily commit, you know, seppuku over right now at this point in my life, my kids, of course, but that's like a different, very different question. Like a pure system, you know, I'm not, I don't think I'm at that point in my life on anything where I'd be willing to throw myself off the bridge for it.

And I think the reason that I'm that way too is that I think probably most of my deepest held beliefs are wrong. And by that, I mean all of us. I'm not just saying Jim, I'm saying that if you and I could jump into a time machine and

and go back and we had already been able to identify, let's say, the 50 most enlightened, smartest, most knowledgeable, wise humans in the world from 500 years ago. And we went back to them and we interrogated them on their absolute beliefs. Only a madman is 100% sure. And I think that

Most of the things those people 500 years ago, the smartest, most switched on humans on the planet, most of what they believed was absolutely wrong. And so I'm a huge David Deutsch fan, as I think you know. And one of the ways that he really, I call it getting Deutsch killed, was he makes the very subtle and yet really profound argument that

The problem with static societies is they think they know everything already.

They think that they have the answer, right? So if you're going to use a metaphor, they're Sparta. They're not Athens, right? They are. This is the way you raise a warrior. This is the way you raise a woman, et cetera. And we do not deviate. You are punished for deviation, exiled or you're killed. And, and,

So for the most part, that isn't true at all. Like, Deutsch has this very clever way of getting it across. He's like, hey, what were the most brilliant physicists saying about quantum physics and the internet in 1900, the year 1900? And he's like, they weren't saying anything about it because neither one of them existed. And so I am always steeped very deeply in the idea that even as advanced as we are,

we probably don't know half a 1% about nothing. And that life is this continual generation builds upon generation. And yes, there is cultural evolution, in my opinion, cumulative cultural evolution. That is definitely a thing, right? But you've got to leave room for error correction. And how shitty would you feel saying yes,

I will be the one who hangs for this. And just as the rope drops, you see a thing on, you know, whatever, a screen that is like, that idea was completely wrong. Yeah. So what I think you're saying is like, because you do have this, or what I would ask you is how do you hold these, both these things simultaneously? Like you do have this belief that on your deepest held beliefs, millennia to millennia, people don't change. Life doesn't change.

But those are the very macro things in life. The micro things, you have a very high degree of kind of intellectual dexterity and a very high degree of acceptance that you're going to be disproven at some point. And I think I probably mirror that. I think that the things that are really going to make a difference on my deathbed have not changed over the course of human history.

And I spend most of my time trying to get those things right. And then the things that are the micro, one of my mentors gave me something I think about all the time, which is to not get in the thick of thin things. You have a high degree of dexterity on. Seems like a good model. Yeah, it's worked so well so far. Yeah. I'm like, I am always quite willing to...

I'm passionate about unlearning things. Absolutely. Me too. Because what happens is if you don't learn how to unlearn, you're just... What's the biggest thing you've unlearned in the last year? The biggest thing that I have unlearned in the last year is that... Wow.

You should have a podcast. Shame you're so opposed to him. Maybe we can do a co-host day sometime. We should. We should. Because that's a fucking great question. And I don't want to be glib and just say an easy thing. So let's come back to that. I'll give you mine if you want. What's that? I'll give you mine if you want. I would love it. There's my one tweet of the year, which was...

vices that look like virtues are more dangerous than vices that look like vices. Oh, I love that. It has really helped me a lot because I had all these vices that actually looked like virtues, but they weren't helping me. And I was like, well, my vices that look like vices were actually less corrosive than my vices that look like virtues because no one corrects the vices that look like virtues. They support them. Of course. Oh, I love that.

Listening to podcasts is a great example of this. Yes. So I'll be Howard Beale. For those who don't know who that is, that's the news anchor in a movie from, I think, 1970 or early 70s where he loses his mind. But actually what happens is he becomes safe.

And he's like, I'm bad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. Turn off the TV. Turn off it. It's ruining you. It's ruining your mind. And of course, he's entirely correct.

But then the way markets work, which I, which is, it just works on so many different levels. Like, of course they're all aghast and horrified when they see this. Oh, the poor man, you've got to get him help and all this. But then they done away who plays the kind of the new model network executive. She's like, did you notice the ratings for that show? Yeah. It's funny.

Have you seen that work? No, I haven't. Highly recommend it. If you could avoid, you know, it's obviously antiquated and dated because of when it was made, but oh my God, it's like, it's so nails this, you know, the, everyone is horrified by what he's doing. Then they're like, Oh, wait a minute. That's getting really right. Really great rating. And then of course it just builds from there.

He becomes the biggest star on TV and they add all of these things that are just pure bullshit and he just gets more and more popular. I won't spoil the ending. I love that. It's awesome. It is awesome. You know the other thing that I think all self-help people, advice people, podcast hosts, whatever, creators should have to do? I think there should be some type of life audit thing

That they have. That's on their profile. So you can see how well their life has gone. And by the way. This is nothing new. There's so many philosophers. Who lived a horrifically bad bleak life. And if you could just see. If you could see the man behind the name. You'd be like. Why would I ever take advice from you? You know what I mean. You live in a barn. With ghosts. And I think the same thing is true today.

Totally true, except I would push back on that. And I would push back because sometimes I always try to divorce the person from the idea. Yeah. Because I used to have this idea. I always joke about how I have a tweet prevention team to make sure that I can't get canceled. Because one idea that I had was I was going to take really, really great quotes from horrible people.

horrible people. I love that. And it started out with one I had from Goring. The L to the like of Er Edel. And he said, I can't even remember the quote now, but it was a really sensible quote. Kind of like, get a good night's sleep. That'd be a great coffee table, by the way.

We should make it a coffee table book and then we should also make it a children's book. It's advice from monsters. Good advice from bad monsters. I love it. Yeah. So that's actually, I'm going to write that down. We'd maybe do that. We should do that. We have a publishing company now. So I know the guy. Good advice from monsters. I love it.

But I mean, that title right there really illustrates my point. Like the, the, it's really easy. Again, we fall into these super easy, uh,

reactionary modes right like argument on homonym oldest book oldest trick in the book right you know you you you you hate well you mentioned the election yesterday like Trump personifies this right like

Lots of reasons. Very easy to hate that guy. And so rather than look at like, what are you saying or doing or enacting or anything? It's just, that's how you get these derangement syndromes. Right. And Elon has one jobs. Interestingly enough, this is interesting. I've now that I'm, I'm just thinking about this. Some of the most impactful people in history are,

have this syndrome right like jobs they said he had a reality distortion field i don't know if that's true maybe it's just that you found like what he was saying so either offensive feel to you right but not to him right i mean look there's a lot here there's a lot here it's a whole separate conversation like the like i think that the the

The war between good and evil is above all of us. And you don't know how fragile that line is for you. And for a lot of these monsters, first of all, we have to admit that they are highly productive people. Like it was not, they knew how to get stuff done. Right. Like we'll get BMW. Like they're, they're very efficient, you know, but yeah,

Where does that kind of exit? How different does the exit look on the highway of evil and good? And at what point does that happen? And how susceptible are you yourself to it? And you might be more susceptible than you think. You know, I've definitely found this like I think that we're all hanging on by a thread. And, you know, it's important to have empathy for people who clearly there's people who are remarkable agents of evil.

But there's a lot of people where the ball broke the wrong way and they fell. And I think that's a far greater number than the obvious kind of warlords of history. I think that that is an incredibly good thesis that should be explored. Because as I was listening to you, I was thinking about

You would ask me, like, what did I unlearn last year? And I have that running in the back of my head as I'm listening. And one thing that wasn't that I unlearned it, but when I was younger, I was a real proselytizer. Like, you know, my way of algorithmic investing using factors, right? When I was writing early books about that, the only other people writing about that were academics, right? Right.

And like it was brand new. And I was like I was almost like a southern preacher. Like this is the only way to salvation. And then, you know, heaven has lots of doors, I think. And as I grew older, one of the things that I really did understand better.

was the fragility of all humans, not just you and me. And you've got to understand that it is true about you as well, right? Yes.

And if you take those like big five tests, I score super low on empathy. Me too. I'm actually genetically predisposed to low empathy. As am I. Unfortunately. But when I saw it, I was like offended. And so we had taken these tests to see how the team dynamics and all that. Mostly bullshit, to be honest. I was in like the second half.

I think second bottom. I was too. No, why don't we like each other so much? Anyway, I got offended because there was a woman facilitating all these tests. Right. And I called her. I went like, what the fuck, man? Why do people come to me with all of their problems if I score so low on empathy? And she laughed that she goes, Jim,

The absolute best psychologists and psychiatrists score super low on empathy. And then I thought about it for a minute. I'm like, of course they do. Because we don't take it on to our own feeling self. No. That would be terrible.

Imagine if you were a psychiatrist and you're sitting there thinking, I completely understand why you did that. You'd be done. Because literally, you could not withstand that. I don't think. I'm going to use this. The next time someone throws my lack of empathy at me, I'm going to pull this out. Yeah, you got to. Because the minute she said that to me, I'm like, oh. That's why you love me.

Exactly. Because that makes just so much sense to me. And the other thing that I do believe, back to simple things, right? Oh, and this might be something that I've really unlearned. Yeah. I used to think that to be a really super good investor, you had to not only be internally dispassionate, you had to express dispassion publicly as well.

And I think I'm unlearning that because I think if you really want to ignite the imagination of others, you can't do it from a dispassionate, well, you might really want to consider that AI is the most human-friendly technology of today. And I have all these studies for why that is the case. Super lame, yeah. Super lame.

There's also, you know, there's the great saying that there's a lot of right pessimists and rich optimists in the venture capital business. It's certainly true. Imagine being a pessimistic venture capitalist, which I know a lot of. Yeah, exactly. Well, see, that's... Your life must be miserable. Yeah. I mean, like, that's also, like, we reoriented everything we do on the venture side because I found, like, the traditional side

I just was fucking bored and not interested at all. And so I started looking at what really got me excited. And I looked at all the investments it did, whether they worked or not. But what I found was what I loved was the pre-pre-pre-seat.

Yeah. Like with people say, are you out of your fucking mind giving money to that person? That's where all the fun is in my opinion. Yeah. When we think about making an investment, there's, there's this visceral feeling that is more powerful than all of our strategies and frameworks, which is that if I wasn't building our friend, would I go and beg the founder for a job? I love that. Hundreds of questions that are baked into that question.

And I have never had a counterfactual on that. So if the answer is no, I would not beg them for a job. The company, the investments never worked. If the answer is yes, there's all these things that could be problematic. The market's too small. You know, their co-founders leaving, whatever the fuck it is. But if I would go and beg them on my hands and knees for a job, they've always done well. I love that as a forcing function because you know what? It's transferable.

I have found, so for example, I'm writing a, I've had an idea for a fiction book since 1992 and it would be way too long to tell you the story. So we'll do that next time. Yeah. But, but one of the things that I started noticing is I would tell people about the idea and the only this one, cause you know me, I'm a, I yap and I will yap to anyone about anything that I'm fascinated in. And, and,

One of the things that I noticed is this story that I'm actually going to write this year, by the way. It's a beach read thriller, to be honest. But one thing distinguished it from everything else. Everyone I told about this idea, I've told some very famous movie directors about this idea. And each of them said, if you write that as a screenplay, I will sign the option today.

Amazing. Right? And then my friends who are writers, when I tell them about it and tell them I'm going to be experimenting with a writer's room, they are fighting tooth and nail to get into that writer's room. Got it. So, wow. What a great, like maybe we'll just, we'll say this will be the world's shortest podcast and we'll just put this little segment on.

because that is like i'm kidding we're gonna no no nice nice nice try mark we're putting the whole part 104 there's a lot yeah there's a lot and that's that's literally in every creative genre pharrell has something about this where he's like if you know you play someone your record and they pick up their phone right you don't have a hit record that's right extremely visceral yeah and you you know

And the point is, though, back to podcasts, and here's a challenge. Like, to me at least, none of this was planned, right? I mean, I do my homework, and I have basic information. I've talked to you in the past, and I know you and everything. But the conversation that we ended up having was not planned in any way. I think there's a ton of alpha in it.

Honestly, I'm going to use several. I mean, like what we just covered. Yeah. So that's a podcast you actually do want to listen to, right? It is. Yeah, it is. I mean, I'll listen to this one. I like your I like your podcast. I love Patrick's podcast. That one's very professional for me, which is great. I think he has probably the best just, you know,

pound for pound learn from the world's great investors podcasts probably today there's so there's a handful that i love but those are very they're very work oriented at this point you know i mean like i just take parent with with ideas but like the the the you know how to how do you shoulder press i'm i'm past that well you know there's a movie my dinner with andre and that's what i based this podcast format on have you ever seen it oh

It's an old movie. It was made in 1981. So I was 21 when I saw it. I just discovered it's the full movie is available. Oh, one of my favorite directors. No, no, no. This is Wallace Shawn. It's right. But the director, so you want to hear a story? Sure. Okay. So Louis mall, we, okay. So we started this community called cafe Saturn like eight years ago. And the basic idea was that the future would be genre lists and

And that people were very creatively isolated and they should meet people from other genres so they could create things in combination. I totally agree with that, by the way. So the reason it's called Cafe Saturn is we want to take, you know, cafe floor in the 60s in Paris and transport to the year 3000. And the story that instigated this was Louis Malle was an incredible French director. He's 24 years old.

He has shot this film called Elevator to the Gallows, which is one of my favorite films ever. And he directed this this My Dinner with Andre movie. And, you know, he is in this cafe in Paris and, you know, all the celebrities are there and Hemingway is in one table and, you know, Brigitte Bardot is another table and Miles Davis is there and Miles Davis.

Miles is like the coolest person to ever live and especially at that point in his life So Louie walks up and he's like miles miles miles like miles Davis is not something you walk up to Like you have to watch my film you have to score it, right? So he sees him there three days in Rome begs him and then finally miles is like fuck your kid like I'll come and do it like let me walk Let me watch it the greatest video I've ever seen

is Miles Davis is watching Elevator to the Gallows. And he has a cigarette and his trumpet. And he improvises and plays it live. And it becomes the greatest film soundtrack, I think, in the history of cinema. And Elevator to the Gallows is an amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing film. I mean, right? This was his first movie. I've never heard of that movie. I'm watching it, hopefully later today. You love it.

I love Miles Davis. So, but, but yeah, so, so this podcast was meant to be my dinner with Andre. It was meant to be, you're just eavesdropping on a really interesting conversation. Yeah. And to me, that was the, that was what I was trying to get done. Yeah. And, and like, again, this is maybe my anti-authority. I really hate being categorized.

And like, like stay in your lane and like, fuck you. I'm going to change lanes. I'm going to drive this way over all the fucking lanes. You're laneless. I am. And so like the, the idea of, of this was very much personified in that movie where

It's just like this wild conversation. As a matter of fact, before recording this, I was asking our AI to take me through all of the most interesting philosophical points in the movie. And then it came time to chat with you. This is far more interesting. But yeah, that kind of podcast that you can't categorize, right? You mentioned my son, Patrick. You know what's funny is the other thing that it illustrates is

is patrick did that just for shits and giggles yeah he was working for me at osam at the time he came into my office and was like hey would you mind if i like tried to do a podcast and i'm like why why would you ever do a podcast he's like just because i think it would be interesting and i think like i could learn things right and this was at the beginning of crypto right and so that that's what made him right his first series called ash power

where he was talking to all these guys who are super famous now who back then like nobody knew who they were and so they would they all said to patrick sure i'll talk to you about crypto someone someone interested in this yeah and so but but he was done purely i think experimentally and then he's like came in after doing i don't know i can't remember 12 episodes and he's like

hey, I'm going to keep doing this if that's cool with you. And I'm like, that's absolutely cool with me. And then telling me this about your podcast, get back to work. Exactly. And so like everyone else comes in like after they hear that, you know, and they're like, oh, he's letting him do it because he's his son. And I'm like, so a bunch of other people came in and said, hey, I want to experiment with podcasting too. And I'm like, knock yourself out.

And like, can you take a guess how many actually did podcasts? It's not like people think it's a very easy thing. It's not. And to do it consistently is incredibly hard. And to, um,

As a host to be able to essentially maintain a consistent energy and a consistent tone and a consistent presence week after week, month after month, year after year. It's very hard. Like people look at Joe Rogan and think he just sits there and talks to people all day and what a great job. No, not at all.

Totally. I totally agree with that. And my assistant, who I call my nanny, literally she knows what I'm doing better than I do. I tried to hire an au pair for myself when I was 23 and they're like, how old's your kid? I'm like, 23, it's me. Like, sir, this isn't what you think it is. I'm like, all right, whatever. So my nanny would always book me back to back to catch up on podcasts and things. And finally, I'm like, Ina,

do you not understand that this is a performance and that you need time both to prepare, but to also decompress from it? And she's like, oh, that's bullshit. I know you can do it. You're a gas bag. Just go on. I'm like, no, it doesn't work like that. You're not respecting the talent. She's like, who's the talent? She's like, you're me. You're the talent. I think not. Right. Just like Van Halen.

Well, you know, that's the other thing, man. Like if you would have said before he rose to prominence, right? Like Eddie Van Halen, man, you got to check this guy out. Most people would come back to you and we're like, come on, you can't be serious. And my nanny, I'm getting the hook. She knows that I go on and on. So she hooks me. She hooks me via text. This has been awesome. I'm going to have you back on.

Uh, you can't escape without the final question. Oh, okay. Here we go. The final question is we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone. You cannot put anyone in a reeducation camp. That's a nod to my anti-authoritarianism. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone and you could say two things into that microphone.

And the next morning, whenever the morning is for the 8 billion people on the planet, everyone on the planet is going to wake up and say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And I'm like, all the other times, I'm going to actually take action against both of these ideas. What are you going to incept in the world's population? I think I would try to incept, and I'll share kind of the story with you. I was 14 years.

In the backstories, I've always loved hotels. And in my next life, I'll definitely own hotels and operate hotels. But that's a money losing endeavor. So I need to make some more money first. I last 14, I had this realization that life is like

You're at this incredible six star hotel and the pools are amazing and the towels are perfect. And, you know, the restaurant is fantastic. Not only is it fantastic, but your childhood favorite snack just happens to be on the menu and your best friend is there and everything else. And you get back from breakfast and it's like 1030 a.m. And you get a phone call and they're like, Jim, do you have a car picking you up at noon? Like, what do you mean?

Like, do you have a car picking up at noon, you know, when you're checking out? You know, I just got here. I think that's what life is. And I would encourage people to...

take advantage of their full stay at the hotel and really wring the towel out and understand that they're living in the greatest era of human history by a very, very, very, very wide margin and to not kind of get trapped in these three-sided prisons, prisons with three walls that they trap themselves into and

And to just enjoy it and savor it because it's very brief. And that's the only thing that I would hope more people would feel or see if I was the emperor is just to wake up to the beauty of what they have. And, you know, hopefully they would do that. That's it. I love that. You know, it's really hard to come up with an escape plan if you don't know you're in a prison.

And so many people are in mental prisons of their own construction. And so I love that bit of advice. We should all live our life that way because you're right. The phone call for your car coming. Yeah.

Memento mori. Memento mori. The snacks in the mini bar. Do it all. I love it. I love it. This has been absolutely a delight for me. I'm going to definitely have you back on because this is kind of the essence of what I'm going for with this podcast. Thank you.