but life doesn't stop right like nobody cares that oh you're a startup founder or an artist or you're writing the book I had never been as vulnerable as a stter Founder in the past four years as I was now with my you know Dad dying and then passing great things are greater
than anybody nobody is great enough to do them I am at best a co- Creator a co- investigator every boss after 2 years of running a company with employees should be given a PhD and Social Psychology our generation is characterized by intellectual orphans one member of the
audience has a better idea than you and we believe that you benefit the most of all people present to find out most people when they're listening to other people they're really not listening and what they are doing is thinking about how they're going to respond the good
thing about conversations is it doesn't exist we create it every second of the way anyway so digas well hello everyone it's Jim oasy with yet another infinite loops and today I have one of my very favorite people as my guest Anna Gat who I mean like Anna I don't even I run out of
superlatives for you you are an entrepreneur you are a great thinker you are single-handedly trying to bring the idea that dominated the centuries of conversations and interactions the salon back into the internet age and you also are looking for the good internet which
I love disclosures uh oan Ventures is an investor in inter intellect also full disclosure and I is one of the members of the oceany uh Ventures advisory Council and we are very lucky to have her Ana welcome hi thank you so much for um for having me back I think I'm this
is my first return to infed Loops so I can attest to it being true to its name that's right here's well we we were talking before we started to record about the fact that unfortunately you just lost your dad um and uh you know I mentioned like losing my mom when I was very young and
trying to build a business uh and you you really it's one of those things that I learned at least and I want to get your view that I even though I thought I was ready for it I wasn't really ready for it and trying to do grieve my mother who I was incredibly
close to while really starting my first company in Earnest wow that was tough how about you well it's it's aong right um it came unexpectedly um and I don't think you're ever ready for it it's one of the great built-in rights of Passage in human life
um you know it's a not an if but a when kind of question um I remember the morning I woke up uh I think it was the 10th of March um and I saw this mess the the night before I started seeing that people were trying to send me messages on messenger people were sending me
message requests um and my my parents are public people and whenever this happens I know it's journalists so I remember going to bed it was Saturday uh a couple of weeks ago feeling a bit queasy about this like something is you know looming on the horizon um and I
slept terribly I had nightmares I I I woke you know um after four hours of sleep um and then I open my phone and I see this message from a friend and I knew exactly I think your buddy knows this is not a drill this is today and I remember I made myself coffee Pour Some Water opened the airline
website flight and then I called my friend to hear the details because you know it you know it's when it's the day um and you know it kind of parachutes you into a new territory that's your home from now on it's the new state stage of the game um and you have to you
know withstand it right in a way that is not self-destructive or harmful to other people um we run companies we build projects I think we build build a worlds um as a living um but life is doesn't stop right like nobody cares that oh you're a startup founder or an artist or
you're writing a book uh things just keep happening and and you have to find these balances to make it work um I like to say that in my 20s I didn't understand what was happening I kept you I read so much fiction I was trying to understand how people work because it
was completely confusing to me I had strong emotions and physical reactions about things but I didn't really understand the logic you know um and my 30s it felt like I I like to say that your 30s um are about seeing that the vase is about to fall but you can't catch it yet so you have this you know
premonition or or or or or you know preium uh uh feeling all the time but there you don't have the knowledge or the wisdom or the experience yet to really steer the world I think people who manage to do it are either extremely precautious or they do it by accident or it's a post hook uh you know
interpretation of their actions um and I turned 40 recently and told myself that my 40s are going to be about catching the vas and one way that I thought this was going to happen was through me always speaking the truth whenever it's possible in an active way so not just
not responding you know truthfully but also starting with truth even if it's uncomfortable because I inted that it's very very closely related to the ability to catch the bus you have to openly show that you want to catch it um and I you know I I've been an immigrant for over
10 years and a lot of it was very very difficult you know my family is not at all a Rose Garden kind of TV sitc family um and it's like the the the depths of Eastern European show business with everything you can imagine um and I you know as an immigrant I had this
recurring fear every morning I would wake up for the past decade that I would open my phone and somebody would tell me that my dad died like I saw this there's a there's a website um a News website in Hungary that's very um I'm Hungarian originally from bapes um I left a long time ago um
there's this website called index where I I I I visualized this headline that mot got got yur my dad has died um and and I remember I I flew home after six years I hadn't been home for a very long time um and you know I went to see my dad I got three days left with him so I
was the timing you know um was um was at least a little bit flexible uh for me um and I you know I I was there I was with him a couple of minutes before he he died um and then on the night um I you know I I I found out that uh after I had left um he had passed
away um and my friends took me out kind of full care love Community Support um you know levels of which are hard to imagine on a normal day um everybody you know came out uh for me and it was absolutely incredible um and I I look at my phone at a moment um uh that night
and I see the the headline it says mot g g has died announced his daughter I sat there and I thought that I had I had caught the vas yeah I love I love that catching the boss um I I my mom died pre social media pre internet uh 1989 but I had a very similar experience
I as I mentioned I'd started my first company of shi Capital Management and I had a very small office and was kind of beavering away there but I would always I have your book here I know this story tell everybody else but but I I like you uh we my mom's
death was not uh a surprise she had conquered lots of illnesses like lupus and and others uh but uh they'd really weakened her and so everyone in the family knew that she was going to die but I remember just staring at the phone and knowing like the call is coming yeah
and that that is such a I was 28 at the time and I was very close to her as well and so like that feeling was so alien to me when it first hit me like so I was young right as you point out like in your 20s like what do you know yeah you know but I did know that I did know that
I did know when the phone rang that last time it wasn't that she had died I was there when she died uh but it was come now yeah and and the other thing that you and you have to go right you have to I mean I I was once in in this apartment in London and the the apartment twice
removed from us on the floor caught fire and actually completely burned down and that was a similar moment when you know it's now and you know what you need to you know I went for my passport my my uh uh laptops my laptop cables a coat a bottle of water and you go to the street
and you there is something I was joking it's the Jewish thing like I know how to flee um but but I think everybody that you know you you know it's now and that this is not a drill and you also know what what I learned there when there was this fire and by the way nothing from
our house or our apartment um got in any way affected um like there there was a playground in front of the building so you always heard screams you know like children playing and there was this very interesting moment you know I was sick I had just taken um some doozy uh throat
medicine and I was watching some TV series on my bed um and you hear the screams screams screams all day it's completely fine it's life children happiness and that you know when it's not that scream you know like the animal is wise and you sit up and you're like
there is a fire or somebody got shot and now we need to ensure that everybody's safe um and I think this is how the body reacts when you get the call you just go totally uh we are actually working on a project with uh the scientist Rupert sheldrick uh to to test that because we
all experience it every human I've ever talked to has experienced the back of the hairs on the back of your neck standing up and just like you say some we we intuitively know something dramatic has changed yeah and we would how respond right it's like a personality test for me it's
determination like I'm going to solve this then I I I lose my you know I I I might chicken out later there there might be a more Nuance set of feelings later but my first thought is to face it yes and I don't normally you know live my normal life every day want to face
everything uh that would be metabolically incredibly expensive um but when you know you know right exactly and uh I unfortunately lost the sister when I was just 10 and uh that uh a psychologist later told me that that was the end of my youth yeah and like seeing
that was or it suddenly made sense right life can only was it Crick guard life could only be understood backwards but we must live it forwards yeah um and life is like life is like a a dinner party where you have to cook endless courses of food for your guest but at
some point the dinner is over and you never know in advance so all you can do is you know prepare and do your best with all the dishes entertain keep everybody happy and at some after one of the the courses um the curtains go down yeah but I I responded exactly like you
responded my my first impulse whenever anything bad happens is always okay how do I solve this and eldest child syndrome is how I call this I I have a I have a theory that there should be um an eldest child Retreat where we can go once a year um there are group chant exercises this is not your
responsibility um whenever you feel like you have to do something you have to do a shot um and generally it's all about relaxation yoga and you're not allowed you get electrocuted if you the thought passes your that I could do this Camp better if you think that you're kicked
out and I there's money in this because 's children have a lot of money Jim so you know we can we can go to a retreat there you go and and that's a great illustration of of you Anna you immediately we're talking about like I want to invest ex exactly but there these signs I remember
I was once having a conversation with sbon who's an investor in interance act a good friend of mine and we were talking about usdc and he said this sentence I remember like it works because I built it and I was like Hey by the chance do you have younger siblings tell me about your
family well have do it for it to work properly do you do you feel that that yeah let's chat a bit about let's keep going with that idea though because I yeah you are you are a font of incredibly good ideas and we were chatting uh remember about the fact that
kind of TED talks when when I was uh like in my early 40s I left uh beer Sterns uh and and reestablished my own independent asset management company and the president of my company o sh Asset Management his one goal was Jim we got to get you a TED Talk we got to get you
a Ted talk we got to get you a TED Talk and I'm like okay but yeah I was thinking about it and we were chatting about it back then like that was the Pinnacle the Pinnacle was wow you got a TED talk and then it's my opinion so this is just an opinion and I could be
wrong but Ted kind of wrecked their brand by extending it too far right so so Ted uh you know de Mo Ted um Greenwich concut and and yet you sparked on that and you were like wow there was those were really powerful we we should maybe try to recreate those you're doing
long form salons any thoughts about changing to you know kind of the the next uh Ted Empress it can be a bit tricky comparing Ted and Inter intellect because they come from very very different places um and respond to very different um ideas about culture um I
think that is extremely valuable and it serves a you know a layer of life and the generation or or multiple Generations extremely well um but it comes from a place from an understanding of the world that is characterized by tribes so say the tribe of neuroscientists is sending this smart G
or guy to this stage the San Franciscan innovators are sending this person the Harvard religious Scholars tribe is sending this person what IND came out of is that this world we think is God there are no such tribes anymore um the expiration has completely changed um
politically in terms of media Empires our generation is characterized by intellectual orphans people with no tribes whatsoever even if on paper on their CVS you would think oh this person belongs here or there if you zoom in you realize that's very complicated not at
all so you know clearcut um um as it used to be um and intellectual orphans have extremely different needs of companionship intellectual fun monetization um how flant or um hierarchical they want this conversations to be so Salon is a far less hierarchical way um to play with
ideas right T says ideas worse worse worse worse spreading um we say we don't know um that's let talk I you know that's so uh telling because what I love about the salons is that's exactly right they are conversations yeah they are not soliloquies right one of member of the
audience has a better idea than you and we believe that you benefit the most of all people present to find out yeah exactly and I wonder whether a format like uh inviting someone to give a Ed like little whatever 15 18 minute uh Soliloquy about something but then
immediately starting the conversation from that that might be fun what do you think I love it and actually so we tell intera post using our platform to go crazy right if you want to call it a talk you can give a talk some people give workshops some people do vocal
exercises some people sit around and read a book together for seven hours you know it's for as long as it fits um the the ethos of interance act which we discussed last time when I was in the podcast um be my guest um and I think that's that flexibility of trusting both
the audience and the host um to be adults and focus on the core values of gathering uh but other than that if you want to do a 10- minute Salon you can do that if you want to do a 4our per day salon for two weeks and charge people $5,000 you can do that like there's nothing on our platform
that stops you from doing it and we see a lot of for me the the more experimental hosts we have um the the The Wider it will become because people you know learn from each other's experience yeah and your ability to iterate and have that flexibility is always
something I admire let's yeah get to it let's get to the art of conversation that's another thing that I love about you uh you know most people don't really know how to have a conversation most people when they're listening to other people they're really not listening and
what they are doing is thinking about how they're going to respond and and that is not AC of listening to me and and you are such a incredible conversationalist what kind of what kind of tips would you give our listeners and viewers to become better at that art well thank you for saying
that I'm not sure everybody in my life would agree that I'm a good conversationalist um I tend to be very extreme either I have nothing to say to somebody or a lot there are there's no in win for me um I took uh the big five and it told me that I was exactly 50%
50 introverted extroverted so I have an Ambert an Ambert yeah am are completely in the middle um which might be you know needed for for for building something um like I'm building when we have a very very famous guest um we call these salons super salons because that's what
usually you uh when you join a salon that's how how you join your a special guest you are not the host you're not responsible for the venue or the zoom link or the logistics you just show up and be yourself and everyone's ready happy um so what we advise host to to do when
as they they handle this situation where the audience might be a little bit Star Struck and what you want is you want to lower everybody's stress in the room you know I like to say that as opposed to T talks um the teachers of old used to sit down with people Buddha Jesus Socrates
right one of the guests at the wedding um the host is hierarchical situation already you don't have to put this person on the stage you don't have to put light on him or her and everybody else is sitting in the darkness because the human animal knows who's guiding and
and keeping the peace at this conversation at this Gathering and will respect this person right so what you want is you want to Lo like close this data a little bit um nobody wants to really have a conversation Guided by A Perfect all knowing person you might
want to watch it on a video was you're cleaning your house in your sweatpants but you don't want to expose your not knowing to this person because it's not a it's not first of all you're not going to learn much if it's not to ways um it's just not a pleasant experience um so we try to close this
Delta and we always advise hosts to do a little bit of conversation with the guest then open for questions little bit of conversations open and Alternate because what I want to avoid is that somebody gets an amazing idea for a question minute two and then they sit
there for two hours constipated with this question unable to ask and not listening at all because you can't do two things at the same time so we try to ensure that there's a fluidity to it um a good thing about conversations um is it doesn't exist we create it every
second of the way um and so you want to you want to give space for creativity that you don't really know where it's going an interax Salon doesn't have a goal it's not an essay you're not you don't have to arrive at a point you start it and you don't really know where
it's going to go um and I think there is there's a lot of things to celebrate about that um and I I don't know if you read the dawn of everything by David gber and WRA um one of the I mean you read you read everything of course you've read it multiple times um I one
of one of the best pieces of information in this book is actually in the footnotes because footnotes are you know where the good things um are in a book um and so skipping them is a crime um that they cite a a piece of research where they say that the human mind can hold a thought for seven seconds but if
you're conversing about it infinitely exactly so you can have a you know marriage is a multi- deade conversation right and you never really forget what it's about so or a friendship right you keep you keep uh uh kind of chewing on the same mystery of
life together um and so I always like to have people uh in at least my salons and that's my choice to to to celebrate the not knowing where it's going n of it um and and allow people um that freedom and and to enjoy that freedom what have been some of the most um interesting to you
places where a salon where you thought it was going to go one way but because of the format it went a completely different way tell us about a couple tell us about a couple of those I oh my God I really really loved Kevin Kelly's super Salon we had two fantastic
um hosts Ashley Jang and Paul Miller whom you know so well um and we were so prepared we did so much groundwork and then Kevin came in and he was like no I don't want to talk about myself I'm here to learn from the audience and he that entire Salon is him interviewing people
about the wildest Things I mean it was amazing like World of Warcraft C and book everything that that he is so genuinely passionate about esel is similar esel came to our event and you know when you have a star you're kind of you know you're prepared for everything
anything can happen right you want the person to have an amazing experience and you don't really know who shows up right you have an idea from a fair social point of view having familiarize yourself with their work and then you will have sometimes a completely different experience when the person
actually shows up and that's completely fine and it's part from the territory and you have to have the intellectual humidity to to to work around it um but Esther shows up and she's a gazillion times more awesome than even in her public work which is already extremely
good so it's kind of unfair to for the rest of us um and and she was like that that throughout the entire event and it was super hot the the heating got messed up in the building um there were too many people we ran out of wine which is a huge you know hosting mistake from my
end or just really hardcore job from our community um to outdrink us um and Esther you know spent basically the seven hours she spent with us just talking to people every single person and I was like wow that's why she's as brell you can't fake the interest in people and and the unending
unsatiable curiosity that you have insatiable unable anyway heart insatiable would be American or Brit way of saying it curiosity about how people work and the downside of of this for me um and I just had a conversation about somebody um today that you can spot
fakers so well and if you really spend your time constantly diving into the intellectual you know richness of the world when somebody has a dark intention or is speaking you see it and it's sad and you cannot un say it and you can't do anything when other people like this
person or these ideas I first of all I don't think it's my place also to attack people but it's a very uncomfortable knowledge a piece of knowledge and maybe it's you know when you can catch the vases it's even Setter when you can't do it for some other reason
um can you should see my whatspp but that's all that's an interesting thought though uh because like one of the things that we seem exposed to uh much more because of social media because of all these various things going on are grifters and people who are fake and and it reminds
me of Peter ducker's uh Memoirs of a bystander which is if you haven't read it I highly recommend it because he just talks about the very interesting people in his life and kind of what he learned about from from them and and he worked for a time I think in the 1930s at a
merchant Banker in London and uh Ernest fredberg I think was the name of the founding partner and he was a he was just such a fascinating character but one of the things that he recounts in the Memoir Ducker is that all of the younger people wanted to invest in this
guy who had a scheme and like his scheme was oversubscribed by the city and London everybody was like a point of Pride to be able to which means nothing right it means nothing exactly anything signal yes exactly right what did Twain I think it was Twain When you find your
it might have been Twain or M when you find yourself on the side of the majority it's time to pause and reflect uh but anyway yeah I mean I don't know if you saw my tweet that I'm getting cancelled for now which is how much I hate norn Rush's book mating and I added
into my tweet that but everybody seems to like it so I must be right see that I love that exactly what I think I know I'm right I have a lot of false positives about people I never have a false negative and I should be running a Blog about it how I signal is you can tell I think from how much I
talk about certain people positively and how much I work with them how much I promote their work so that other people can get acquainted with it um and who I'm not talking about and you can make your own assumptions based on that do you think I don't know about them or do
you think I don't believe them I I love that and you're like me I always try to find things to rout four as opposed to against let me finish the story about drer though because because BL you because because it was really a great uh tell for me anyway bernus fredberg all
the young guys and want to invest in this thing he comes in interviews the guy and when the guy leaves he turns to the young guys and says we are absolutely not giving any money to that man he is a crook and they're like what what do you mean what do you mean he's a
crook he's like this is the everyone said this is incred and freedberg says he came here with an answer for every conceivable question I could have asked him and he said an honest man wouldn't have to do that an honest man would have told me I don't know a couple of times I
really thought about that for a long time like that's really an interesting tell what do you think I think the more you know the less confident you will be about some stuff because you understand statistics and the general chaos of things B I also think that there is an
inherently almost evil uh evil you know quality to reduction being stuck being backward being dark wanting less of things less progress less children less life less less light I it's very rarely you know leading to to any good place the other like flagging system I have and it's
very rarely really really wrong is is people who seem to have a fascination with mess hypnosis and who run about them who study them who who take pride in knowing about certain stuff u in that area um and not from a scientific you know economics way like if you're interested
in that from a game theoretical point of view be my guest right but people who have a kind of religious fascination with secular religious yes will at some point do it I think there is I think there's um there's a level of knowledge about power that will go in almost all cases from
theoretical to practical at least on the media level I think one of one of the the examples that I have in the name of truthfulness is probably Jordan Peterson right I mean he was such a fascinating speaker if you watch his old videos um you know on YouTube a youngian somebody
reminding me of my old professors a lot clearly a very very talented scholar of human nature but when you become a scholar of the most level of human nature will you will you be able to resist the temptation of trying it say you know it you know the recipe and I
give you a Twitter account what will you do with it um I I I do think it's not necessarily deterministic but if you kind of reverse engineer you you see the sign of this Fascination and so when I see you know if an engineer tweets about the power broker I will concede that he he's
probably a good capitalist um but if it's something more meav valan um you know if you read uh some of the classics and decide to just get very rich and then give a lot of money away for people um um I will have followup questions to ask um I will ask that if I gave that uh
mechanism you built to an evil person what would they do with it yeah that that that's one of the classic uh things when you're trying to decide on some social policy and where you're going to land on it yeah the question I always ask myself is what
would happen if this fell into the hands of my worst enemy or the the type of person that like you talk about Club of Rome the malthusians like and and you know there's there's this whole field in Psychology that studies the dark Triad personality and and which I'm a little
bit on the fence about but yes people study that I think are searching themselves let's put it that way but yeah well yeah that's Anthony deelo right you could choose anything you could choose any field why does this interest you so much is always my my question interin like you gave interin
an evil dictator and everybody would leave right it's not going to work it's built on Grace and and and friendship and the infinite game right if you're starting doing something harsh in ends or dark or or self-destructive even if it was masquerading as good people would just
feel uneasy and they don't come to inter intellect for feeling uneasy they come uh to feel complet that's a really interesting thought um and it reminds me of uh I've been banging on about this book since rereading it Hawkins power vers Force and and and and he maintains that he and
again it it's really interesting on a couple of levels so for example I think he picked the wrong word Power by that we we all have that label right and that's stuck in our and power isn't necessarily a POS word to many people and but he uses it in the sense
that for most of human History Society was ruled by force it was it was ruled by the end of the barrel of a gun yeah and and he was talking in the book about how he sees a new age coming and he wrote it a while back so very preent of him but from he he goes into the force
and he's basically this is an impoverished world view this is a view of scarcity this is a view of no no net gains right through Innovation through new discoveries Etc and you know it's a fixed pie mentality and they want to get their big portion of the pie so they're
going to force you and if they're armed they're really going to take a bigger portion of the pie but then he talks about power and by power he means influence he means giving people ideas to think about and what strikes in me as I was listening to you very Chinese
ancient Chinese way of thinking about power right ex exactly and very res it resonates very deeply with h Lau the da Jing and and but that that's a really great aspect of the salon if I if you did put like the worst dictator in the world everyone just go yeah see you I'm
out yeah we I mean we never really have EV dictators m in SL so I really intend to keep our moderation rules this way um but if we ever feel um that somebody has an alterior motive with their event I think people flag it and they will send a one star review like this
sucked and I just love that and the same goes for good right I I Define good as the comfortable temperature for the soul when it's good the to play and but it's bad youve hide it right um and sometimes we have a complete newcomer with zero audience zero influence and hosts you
know to build a community to play with ideas yeah of course he or she makes money that's a nice plus you want value to be generated if somebody is doing a good job and people love it and they will come back and they will raise this person on their metaphorical shoulders and you know
good content makes people a little bit selfish they want more of it right they will come back and they will be like hey we really like that cake you made last week and we are demanding that you make it this week as well and I I just I always wanted to build something that
interacts not in a B2B way with some you know overworked HR manager but directly with the audience um because they tell me if something sucks or if they want more of something um and you know it's not always comfortable for for um for our hosts um the same way as if you're a
suback writer and you write something that's not interesting or not well promoted people might not read it at numbers that you want it's it's kind of meritocratic and you have to put in the work um you have to find out what works and make more of it that's fascinating
because as you get better known and as the salons are better attended how do you avoid audience capture right because like if everyone giving you great feedback and you know it's these five themes these 10 themes whatever that people just seem to love and can't get
enough of there's always that worry for all of us because we're all running human OS right like oh I'm going to lead into those 10 themes and then we subconsciously just like nudge those other ones off the table and say yeah we're not doing those anymore so we see
for instance people running their own shows or their own series um that they experiment with other topics outside the series so say you run a series on I don't know religion or philosophy and then you will do one on toy making um and see what happens um or you say I'm running this biology
themed series of workshops but I'm going to do a super Salon with the city who has a book coming out or an Ethics documentary coming out on the side to see if if the audience would be interested in that room uh there's also a great power to Partnerships here um a
lot of people find a co-host to be able to deviate a little bit from um their most popular topics um but I very rarely have seen a host really stuck in one thing you might have somebody like you know the great Jason Crawford who's obviously a progress studies person um
but even his you know different the series The Super Salon the host training Workshop he did for us you know he he ex experiments um I think that people come to inter inct whether that's you know an offline event like the one that we will do on the 30th of April uh where you
know maybe a more political um uh thinker will come to really just talk about books and ideas and the mechanism of it um or a traditional Publishing House Executive will come because he or she wants to talk more about trade presses or um the technological future
of of book creation um or Anessa PR comes to us because she wants to have a philosophical conversation with philosophers that she doesn't always get to do um and so we do see that people come to inter intellect to celebrate their own diversity of thought um there are so many places
where you can remain in your Silo and just do the same thing on Road you know the entire content Machinery of algorithm driven internet um is forcing you to do that right I remember there was a moment in my career in maybe late 2018 when I I felt the algorithm almost
physically trying to force me to be this contrarian attacking Twitter kind of person the contrarian woman you know who debunks other people and I felt that you you know when I if I tried you know the the whole Machinery started working and then you make this decision do I want to
be that person is it worth it or do I want to do my own thing even if I stay smaller and then I think the ethical way is to stay smaller and Trust to process um but I can understand the Temptation that if you are a person who really immediately has to spread his or her
ideas to very wide audience you might say I'm just going to boost up my audience with whatever means first and then I will be good I think it's possible but you have to be very conscious of the process very careful and we do see some really beautiful work there I mean you have a
gigantic account right and what you do with it is sharing philosophy with people um showing these guys the way that you can actually entertain a lot of people with smart ideas um even if you I don't know if you grew your uh your um audience with some polarized content in
the past five years yeah for a guy who basically made his career on algorithmic investing I I uh you P it up were like okay enough of this I exactly I I I love to [ __ ] her out with the algorithm so I will and and I know how too which is really fun yeah I'm starting to develop
this kind of Blanca lighting you know very fil Noir half of my face in darkness and then the eyes blinging um maybe not not ideal for YouTube uh we'll see how it turns out you almost got me to do a a digression into CA bla because I love that movie do that I I was so
happy that Tyler Cowen recently wrote about it um I have a lot of thoughts about Casablanca uh we should do a podcast episode just about that we should invite titer yeah that would be great I th I was lucky because when I was growing up my dad was a real movie
buff and and just as VHS was coming out right uh I'm old because I was a teenager back when that was happening um my dad I'm like well like what movies should I watch that and he took the time to like create this massive list almost all of were in black and white
Casablanca was definitely there but All About Eve was there you know and like these were [ __ ] great movies and you know I I hate to just see them as memes or gifts now right uh so yeah I think maybe a a a podcast just about some of those great old movies would be great I
mean I used to be a screenwriter um and I did take the Robert mcke seminar at some point and his big examples throughout the three course seminar is cablanca so you actually have it on a screen behind him and you watch it through three um days frame by frame basically and you
analyze um and he uses it as a framing device basically pun pun um to to teach you about screenwriting because custm L is one of the kind of you know exemplary pure forms of the genre um and and whilst you're there you realize that this is a must it's extremely distilled simple and yet
it talks about the greatest problems of of of human life right and then you watch three four hours horrible Netflix nonsense and there's not a you know a flicker of of humanness in it that you can resonate to and you're like who are these people who have they met a human in
their life this is not what people do and and I and I don't I don't think it's councel culture actually I think councel culture had led to weird things like if you want to show people you know of scheming and [ __ ] around you have to have dragons in
it and it's it's a an advertising agent in the 60s and then you can show how people are um but I think that's maybe a little bit gone and now we have just to me seeming like filmmakers who are not who were not raised on the classic yeah you know yeah what and you should
if you haven't tried Doki you should not do film dramas I'm sorry that's my that's my entry fee like you can follow a conversation about brothers karmas off you can do a movie about a family yeah and yeah every every happy family is the same and every unhappy family is unique in their own
way right but might it might be the other way around right yeah absolutely happiness that has the secret that nobody knows yeah that's right I I I've got to be careful here because if I digress too much we're just gonna make this all about movies and this podcast
episode will come with like a super long table of content and then switch wherever you want okay like minute 40 we will talk about classical music and minute 41 Super Mario and minute 4 42 about Hitchcock choos your of Adventure yeah it's wow okay so Hitchcock like there's another guy right
like oh my God like I've seen I think I've seen every movie that I ever made him and and there's this dissonance in me because he was not a good guy he was like he he had a lot back to dark Triad right he he had a lot of the but what he got out of his actors was just like
amazing incredible and this also goes back to this idea of license and you know at the beginning uh of this conversation we were talking about you know people who think that they can contribute and how dare they you know and when people get stuck whether they are trying to write a a book or they are
trying to find investors might ask themselves you know who who do who do who do I think I am and and I think what makes you become this determined person facing difficulties that you and I both um confess to is a little bit being able to put aside this question Eric
Weinstein said this thing I know what I'm only quoting like IW people today which actually has nothing to do with my general um you know quotables um but he he he he was quing I think Francis Crick in an interview many many years ago um what would he say you know to people who
who think they are not big or important or smart enough to do great things um and and criek apparently in in in Weinstein's um uh quote said that great things are greater than anybody yeah nobody is great enough to do them that by default it doesn't matter like our
you know the deviation of human size is Tiny compared to this big thing it doesn't matter just do it somebody has to do it um and I think people who somehow have this delusion that they have licensed to do great things or at least to try they I don't think that I
mean unless you're a psychopath you you you are not necessarily driven by hubis you are driven by the weird and strange realization that anybody could do it it's going to be equally super difficult for everybody are you happy with living your life in a super difficult
way right and to me that's the being able to put aside is the same at like running a big event when you are running it it doesn't matter who you are like and and I'm not saying like this is not you know having low self-confidence or not having a strong enough sense of self it's you you
need to be able to put aside yourself for the task whatever that is whether that's listen listening to somebody building a big company running a big artistic project building a beautiful family you know know when to silence the inner quarrel uh to be able to get the
job done yeah I one thing that helped me a lot was realizing kind of early on that I am at best a co- Creator a co- uh investigator and that you know I also think that there's a big difference between having a when when people say oh that person has a big ego I think what
they really mean is that person has a fragile ego yeah fragile egos demand like I was reading about narcissists uh before we started and like like the the narcissistic person is basically look at me look at me and and to me that is much more a sign of a fragile
sense of self a fragile ego they're the ones demanding everyone pay pay attention to me pay attention to me I so SC that if I let anybody co-create with me I will lose myself or I will not seem as good huh yeah I mean first of all I think that everybody's a co-creator
right if you I agree I complely career there is a whole startup in the background right um and but the people who claim to be alone that's where you feel this you know why I think you and I discussed it I don't know if it was at the podcast last time we did um or or a
salon but I I love this quote about FDR that he was the true egoist he was never threatened by anybody and so he could hire the best people and win World War II exactly exactly in every photo FDR is with other people he's always in the com sometimes it's St you know so not always good but
you know he he had a he had a group and then he just took credit for everybody's ideas but there was there's something to being able to to both Mentor other people and ensure that there is a Next Generation and not die without having passed on not trying to live forever
yourself but be able to check out at some point and ensure that the next generation is all right that you have passed on your knowledge that you have supported enabled helped Aspire a large group of people um and to be able to you know hold your friends in the photo and
be like we built this together yeah people always know who's the Mastermind if you are a mastermind you don't have to say it exactly it's like the joke if you have Visionary in your profile you ate one did you this guy who is whining on Twitter that he can't date because he's
too thoughtful too ROM did did and that he has empath in your in his bio and I'm like this guy must be an evil genius you suddenly like you know um Mo mobilized all the 15 year olds Pro of Tik Tok probably um like get healthare it's like the re you know
would be like what's your biggest flow I work too hard always always yeah how honest this person is right you're owning up to this difficult truth about yourself I I I I just can't uh I I I have no work life balance and and I just will give everything to the company that's my greatest flaw here's my
sleeping bag I will sleep there no I love hiring people who have a life you know for themselves whether that's an artistic Life Family Life or comination thereof they will they will make uh they will prove the the adage that if you want something done give it to a busic
person one of my most productive uh team members at inter intellect is a young mom she sometimes has like one and a half hours to get something done because the baby is asleep and she gets it done like making me feel so unproductive like wow she yeah anyway so I'm sure you have much more experience
uh in that than myself but it's something that I I I keep realizing as being very true let's talk about that for a bit I mean you have been hiring new people uh because uh the company is doing well and expanding like what are you learning as you're doing it a lot I
think every um boss uh after two years of running a company with employees should be given a PHD in social psychology um I guarantee you we know way more about this than any scholar um a lot of startup um kind of fridge magnets are turning to be untrue uh one being this
one that hire for character train for skill I think is not true I think if you hire somebody who doesn't have the skill um his or her character will change and will show their less good sign um I think skill leads to Mor Excellence as well in a very aristotlean way you can
be you can feel useful and you can be proud of yourself you can be given responsibilities so that's very very important um I also recently have changed my mind a little bit about delegation um I think you know um investors will always say delegate delegate delegate um and
I'm finding that the it's not always true and maybe it's a more collaborative approach that we should be pushing delegate as in involve others in it but don't leave the room obviously you know I I had never been as vulnerable as a s founder in the past four years as I was now with my you
know Dad dying and then passing um and it was you know a bit of a revealing two weeks um period uh where you do find out what is not working in your organization but that was an extreme level of Delegation that you don't normally do this right you are not normally both
emotionally and intellectually unavailable for stretches of the day um so it's interesting I I think I've I'm becoming more and more cautious with a lot of the startup uh wisdoms um and I rather ask people like yourself people who have built companies for actual
practical wisdom uh which like in asal's work is so often that it depends yeah people the best is to delegate other people no yeah and and that's part that's part of your what your understanding about uh getting a better understanding of human
OS right because in the in the in the in the real world it's like the old joke the two Bankers sitting together right and and the one says to the other well we know it works in reality we just don't think it's going to work in theory I love this I I actually quote this I think you
tweeted this and I I just laugh my head off that's so good um I I a big believer in moral Excellence I think I generally um believe in in goodness and and that it overrides all other qualities at the end of the day um I think it's very easy to miss it or mistake it for something
else and the other way around as well um the the smartest most productive and most successful people at my company um who are making me also more successful smarter more efficient are extremely good people yeah and that also gets back to can't argue with it you know it's like
so I know it's like such an oldfashioned thing and you know we want to not think this way we want to think about like trauma and childhood and self-care and healing and no it's about the morality of this person there is such a thing yeah and um a as far as that goes I've
also found that like building the team is very delicate because to your point about delegation right yeah um I I I'm a Believer in delegation uh in terms of soliciting opinions about the way to do things so I'll give you an example I'm I'm a huge believer as anyone who listen
to this podcast is that like life is a complex adaptive system and in complex adaptive systems emergence comes from below not from above and yet we often try to manage so many things from top down yeah and and one of the things that I learned early on in the various
companies I started was I always wanted to push uh ideas and um uh actual decisions down to the people who were actually the greatest domain knowledge about it right so for an example um when when I started oasi asset management and another and i' started my first Asset Management which
was oasi Capital but one of the things that I'd learned between the two when I did oan capital I was kind of a tyrant honestly it was like no no no your Tyrant face you have to have your puberty as a boss you really do if I meet a boss who hasn't had hers yet I'm
like you are preg grade filter call me in 10 years I don't want to go through this with you good luck sometimes take my money poor current employees that you have po your family your friends this is going to be a rough it's the same as famous people right I mean people desire
to become famous and then they realize that nobody has ever been improved by Fame and whatever moment the code tayor Swift Fame finds you you will be stuck there forever unless you really make a conscious effort to to stop doing that and it's it's the same with you know
people If you experience somebody going through their political phase their their Fame real related phase or their Tyrant phase it's you know it's part of the evolution of personalities and you just good friend Waits it out yeah that's that's great advice I like tries
to stop you from being stuck there because you can be stuck in it right it can become a Perman say but there's nothing to do fail fast right fail fast right and uh one of the one of the things uh that laughing on the on a podcast but you know I'm Hungarian so I
have these insane gestures all the time and this just happens we all have aming our muscles because we just gesture all day I even gesture for myself when I went home alone that's a whole different thing but yeah and it's it's TR like I learn not to wear like jingling um uh
bracelets on podcast and not to like clap and do weird things with my hands U so but if I do please just J to stop I have that reminds me of a joke uh I have a very good friend who was born and raised in New York and when I moved here we were out together he's hysterically
funny and when I moved here he's like you Jim you know you you sound like all the [ __ ] newscasters and he go we we we talk we we talk with our hands here in New York and he's like but Jim one thing that most people don't realize is that if we put our hands on the table
we sound just like [Laughter] you oh my God that's so interesting yeah I think my my exence and and generally my my my my verbal expression can be a little bit like a zelic situation like I just pick up you know anybody's that I'm talking with because this is not my
mother tongue right so I don't have a default accent myself but the one thing I would never get rid of is the gestures and even when I had a more British accent because I I was in the middle of you know my sevene stint in London I was still gesturing like a crazy pass and
people could tell by looking at me that I'm probably not Posh you know probably you you you bring up zeling though which is a chameleon like thing and and I have a a friend who uh is Japanese and uh grew up in Japan Etc but then moved and was living in London and
elsewhere yeah and we were having a conversation and he said something really interesting to me and he said I I had said something you know like no we've got to do this this and this right like and and he just looks at me and he goes you know what Jim when I'm speaking and thinking in Japanese
I'm a lot like you yeah because different yeah you have you have different different personalities in different languages do you find that do you find that I used to think so now much less what I think happens is speaking a different language unlocks parts of your brain like English is a
very logical language you have to be extremely aware of what you're going to say and whether what kind of you know emotional tint uh or emphasis that thing might have which is not necessarily the case in Hungarian and definitely not the case in French um or German for as far
as I know so English I think makes you a little bit more logical um and I can see how I use Hungarian now that I'm more aware of where my sentences have to be going before I start speaking in German actually it's even more so if you think about how they put in many in many uh uh
types of of sentences the verb at the end of the sentence so when I was watching a rival where the aliens know where they're going in the future before they start speaking I was like that's just German what are you talking she don't have you heard drum fors you know
it's a very nice nice rivor um anyway so so I I I believe in that um but that sound I do think that there is a level of passion that can get lost in English unless you're very very good at expressing it because I find that in French I'm I'm far more um I'm far more
able to to show emotion fast actually it's a very emotive language it's very hard to create a very rational looking French sentence which you know you can tell by just like looking at their culture um or reading a book um in Hungarian I the Hungarian to me seems very
psychologically analytical so whatever you do you kind of make assumptions and go into the motivations of the other speaker um so I do feel a little bit more relaxed and more outward looking and extroverted in English and living my life basically in English um but when
you speak multiple languages you have all those you know parts of you the same way as when you play both the violin and the piano you will Express even if you're playing the same shet music you will Express different parts of yourself through these different instruments um
and neither is more true than the other right it's just a different way of going about it yeah we are publishing a book uh at infinite books later this year called White mirror and it's a collection of stories uh science fiction uh uh but not not dystopic science
fiction uh Science Fiction with with a with a with a little bit of uh a brighter look at the future but one of his stories is really interesting because it considers uh a uh physicist or a computer scientist who goes into the the deepest parts of a very remote jungle to learn a language that very few
people speak because he needs to learn it to think of a solution for the problem that he's working on and he can't he can't think of the solution in his native language which is English I can't count in English I can only count in Hungarian um and I read
this a French scientist called Sten laan who writes um about this and he wrote a book called uh the number SS in English it's called Uh because I noticed that English language doesn't penetrate the part of my brain where my my numeric skills are so if you ask me my phone
number in English I will have to visualize it and read it up okay can't go even where the numeric um memory um is um and the Sim goes a little bit for like physical formula and things like that but that where basically letters standing for numbers like if I want to say f equals m * a I
have to really slow down because I have to read up something that appears in my visual memory whereas in Hungarian I can just say everybody like kind of strong some deeper part um but then there are you know things where especially with when it comes like
planning I think it's English is much easier to plan with like it's much more like I can tell you how something is going to work whether that's my business plan or an event or the outline of a book like it's much closer to um kind of painting with words because it's this
isolating language right like you spit out this short you know Sy Sy is short but this short words right and they kind of form some kind of architecture um you know if you give me a an English non-fiction book even the most eloquent ones I will read it and I will immediately understand the structure and
see the notes from which the writer wrote them and this is why you know a lot of University assignments seem such so ludicrous to me because you basically give me a book to reproduce the notes that the writer wrote this from makes no sense but if you gave me a French or a
Hungarian book from an equally logical author um I would have a harder time seeing the kind of magic ey image in the background um that the English language allows me to say the the structure and you know that's the idea of Lost in Translation remember when we
were talking about the book that I love the Hungarian all the whiskey like this since then on if it's your face um with you really like it yeah uh so what are you most excited about right now uh uh in terms of uh your career and about anything honestly what what are you most excited about
right now and looking forward to I am very excited to be moving to the US very soon um and I've been in the last couple of months feeling the weight of the loneliness of not being there um I was always a little bit more balanced about it um enjoyed my more introverted life
in Europe and then I would go and get hypers Social in the US I'm very enthusiastic right now to develop a more holistic life there and spend more time there both downtime and uptime um I at some point in the next two years will write a book um called
intellectual orphans um I will pitch it to D to say I also run a company full time as a solo founder over 12 placey so there's also that little thing um and I'm very excited for where inter is right now um we have a new um website platform coming out very very shortly uh which will have
the structure of our current site but in a much better way um much you know better features and and more more economical um especially because our crft site is not ergonomical at all so the bar was really low um one of my favorite artists Julian P created the artwork and it's going to look really
pretty um and we also have a special um little product that we are prototyping on the side um that you know all about um and at some point I will uh tell the public um which will I hope enable a radically bigger amount of people to enjoy what itag does um and be
able to participate however actively they want in a given moment um I am very very excited and very it's very exhausting fulfilling but exhausting um and I think you know we were talking about the Practical wisdoms of leaders I think one is also being very honest
about it with your team um I always tell my team when it's going to be rough get your [ __ ] together guys it's going to be very enjoyable you will make best friends on this team while you're doing it uh afterwards we will go to a spot you know everybody in their own location
but right now this is war mode um and the way to do it is to enjoy every second of it yeah and the the uh project that you're uh alluding to is very very exciting and I can hardly wait till you start talking about that openly when you people like it you know we this is like
hey guys this is what we think you will like um and then you you know release it into the wild and and start learning um we don't know exactly yeah exactly when when when you were contemplating moving to the United States which which area Drew you the most intuitively just
knowing you I know the answer but I want you to share the I want want you to share the answer with our listeners viewers and for a very long time I thought I would have to go to Essa I thought that you know if you're a startup founder you have to be in ASA
and I have to get a Lululemon pair of pants and pagonia vest and a dog and a very large ccino and walk around and look smart um and then I realized like there are plenty of people already doing this oh I'm good um don't get me wrong I love California I don't think I ever
would want to live there um but I'm very happy for people who are having a great time there um and I wish them the best of luck um and I don't know I I Feel Like New York kind of this discovered me I was very resistant for a very long time um and I always thought like why would
why would a place that has everything culturally want inter intellect like we should take this to a village um but you know there's a reason why New York is New York and it's grey for good stuff and we have the good stuff so it seems to be a very fertile ground for for us
um I also really really deeply love DC um and try to go there as often as I can I mean the the beauty of that City the culture people the kind of conversations you can have there I'm going there in um late April as well um it's just you know if I ever you know want a calmer place I
I might probably go um um somewhere in Virginia is just that's my favorite landscape um that where I can imagine myself it's just so beautiful architectur in like the natural sense so New York to me is an idea not not just a city and I I love the illusion that made
yeah idea right and when people don't feel comfortable in a that's why I was I always felt so out of place in London and I think it's because I don't like the idea yeah and not I hate the idea it's not I don't like it like a polite way I hate that idea I don't want to be there
other than two days of a year that's great but some people love it you know I don't know it's a yeah New York I I knew uh when when I first came to New York I was eight years old uh and we were heading over to Ireland to live for a summer um and I uh this
1968 uh New York was kind of experiencing a rough patch then but uh I got up and put on my little white windbreaker and went for a three-hour exploration of New York not telling Mom and Dad of course song the boxer you are the boxer yeah so and so I I come back into the
hotel and there's cops everywhere I see my mom sitting on on one of the central couches weeping because she thinks I've been kidnapped I didn't tell her that I was doing this and and I run over to her and I don't remember this she I remember it I think I remember it because she
told me the story so many times but she said you come running over to me with this huge smile on your face and you said to me Mommy I love this city I'm going to live here I I feel the same I sleep so well in New York I I'm completely calm I have feel like I I don't have to run anywhere
I have arrived I have this feeling there but at the same time I feel so you know a little bit self-conscious like oh my God am I basic I like the song that everybody else likes I I like a special City but but yeah no but see New York can be very very uh uh
controversial in that sense it can be very divisive because I I always said to people who were I arrive to andur and I feel at home like I want to be special you know ex exactly I say to people though you either feed on New York's energy or it feeds on you yeah and like
if you're one of those people who feeds on New York's energy it's like yeah it's interesting because it's not true about London because London just feeds on you like there's no other alternative I always I have this um I have two task force cities that I always look at to
kind of determine whether it's a my kind of city or not why do I see happy people and by happy I mean socially happy people um and when I went to um uh New York for the first time I kept look I understood immediately that this is dirty loud a little bit inhumane too
big falling apart you you get all the the you know you get all that thing uh but do I look around with any random location and see a couple of happy people right you know with India at the craziest airports where you like sardines and you still see you know a husband taking the baby from the wife
and and holding her in New York in the craziest moment you will see two friends laughing a couple something you know something positive and the other thing is for me do people when they get rich stay yeah and in London when I started going I mean when I arrived to London I
was going through a very rough time uh personally and I you know I was very very you know down and out so I thought okay it sucks for me but just wait and then when I started going up I started noticing that first of all if in Brussels when I lived there during the
pandemic I for the 1,300 that I paid for my apartment there a month I had more space dry warm calm than a rich person in London nobody's ever physically comfortable in that City ever temperature Dam wise or having a place to sit down um and then I as I going up
I realized like the people who can afford they leave and then you like why am I'm busting my ass here like is the is the reward of London that you can leave that's a prison that sounds terrible um but then you go to Paris or you go to New York and you see like no what people
get successful they get a really good apartment you know unless they have like seven kids they were very likely for a very long time stick around um and so I look at happy people and I look at what people who can choose do find out a lot about city um just
looking at these two things yeah because because Instagram you don't even have to meet actual successful people in a new city anymore you just Google you know I don't Detroit or mtion like what do cute guy and then some feed will come up and show you how they live so it's good
yeah you can do it on the plane and and for uh for our London uh lovers out there I do like London uh but but you like it but you don't live there right people who like New York live in New York and people who like London don't live there touche touche sorry k
out of the country or something for saying this I'm sorry London it's not your fault it's dickens's fault because he told us all about you and now we can't un see it Dickens was like the Dickens was like one of the first rock stars though if you read about his life and he serialized his books
literally people would wait at the uh port for the ship coming from London in in New York because they they wanted to what happened to Little M I mean you can tell you can always tell from a novel When It Was Written in an era of serialization because in many many cases
the writer had no idea what would happen in the next chapter so it's much more interesting um and secondly there is always a kind of Click hanger uh one one contemporary book that reminds me reminded me strongly was um um had the Hunger Games trilogy because it's
written by a TV writer Susan colians and every chapter ends with a click hanger so I just didn't sleep for two days just it's like insanely like it's one of the most full of suspense books that that you can imagine sometimes realization is a little bit more you know wider term like
obviously the Harry Potter books were a series um anyway so we digress we that should be the title of this podcast episode we digress and you've just been given the title by Anna we [Laughter] digress well so I I I could definitely talk to you forever as we often do when we get
together but now I'm getting the hook from my nanny uh I keep my phone nearby and my nanny says [Laughter] Jim children keep you you get another shot at being Empress of the world remember you can't put anyone in a reeducation camp you can't kill anybody but what you can do is we're gonna give
you I know I know that's what other people say too it's like God damn it were going to be the two things I was going to do so we are going to give you a magic microphone and you are going to speak two things into it that will incept all eight billion people on the
planet the next day whenever their next day is they're going to wake up and they're going to think that the two things that you're incepting that they've had that idea on their own and this time they're gonna actually act on them what two things are you going to incept in the
world that's the outside world is more interesting than you are and you should spend the majority of your time exploring it um and making life beautiful for other people is more important than making it beautiful for yourself um and you should devote yourself to it and
hope that others will make yours beautiful too wow that's almost like the Golden Rule I love it well look learn the hard way but then really beautifully summarized right well yeah I mean but that's the thing right that's why uh that's why all of the uh great quotes and great ideas
they get compressed compressed compressed and you know you you still that wisdom exactly well I can hardly wait to see you at our Symposium that we are doing live we'll do the Bill Riley joke we'll do it live [ __ ] it we'll do it live live from New York it's set
afternoon 13th of April be there you you know I'm clipping that and putting it up on social media I'm so sad to be on this podcast two days before I go to the hairdresser can you do something with my hair yeah we'll have the we'll we'll have the AI working out for you just
like all right I have purple hair on this podcast and I look like a Simpson I will know that this was you I will know know until we release it amazing thank you so much than you all right I'll see you soon thank you so much have a lovely rest of the day bye bye for