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You can't trust the individual.
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No, you should give all of that money to an institution such as a college.
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And we actually believe the exact opposite.
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>> There are something like I think 4,500 universities in the United States, colleges and universities, and yet they all seem to have one point of view. It's pretty crazy.
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But what we're upset about is we actually think universities are stifling creativity. >> Pessimism is easy.
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It's the easiest thing in the world.
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I would love a world where like 10,000 people decide it's the cool thing to try to discover fusion or cure cancers.
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It's really about freeing people and liberating them to pursue those interests.
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>> Some ideas just can't wait. And why not start now?
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[Music] >> Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim Oanosy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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One of my problems when I have super interesting guests on is I spend like the first 12 to 25 minutes chatting with them about other things and then my producers ping me because I am a cat that they try to herd uh and tell me uh you know Jim you actually have to start recording the podcast now.
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My guests today are Michael Gibson and Danielle Stroman the co-founders of 1517 fund.
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You you know, Michael, your background kind of reads like a dossier for a thriller novel.
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Your father was in the intelligence service and died under questionable circumstances.
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You yourself were at University of Chicago and NYU for undergrad.
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You went on to get a PhD, or so you thought, from Oxford.
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Then you decided, "What the [ __ ] am I doing this for?
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I got to figure out how my dad died." Applied to the CIA. that didn't work out.
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Like >> I think that you and I are pretty similar in that like they would look at our applications and say absolutely not.
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>> But then you I love the way you put it.
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You decided, you know what, I'm going to be an unemployed writer in LA.
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You met Peter and we'll get to that in a bit.
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>> Danielle, you you also have a really fascinating background.
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you did a left turn out of college and decided, you know what, I'm just going to start a private tutoring company >> and homeschooling community found you very very interesting and then you guys came together >> to found the 1517 fund.
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So, let's start out like Michael, we are publishing or reissuing your book Paper Belt on Fire and 1517 actually is kind of like a jihad against the Paper Belt.
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Uh, and for those that don't know what that is, the Asella runs from Washington DC all the way up to Boston.
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That's the I'm sitting, by the way, in the center of the paper belt.
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and you guys are doing, you know, moving mountains and kind of saying, "Hey, that's all wrong. We got it all wrong."
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So, for people who don't know about 1517, just a little background of the philosophy and and why you felt compelled to uh found the the fund. >> Yeah, sure. Um, okay.
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Yeah, I'll speak my my >> version and you go. >> Yeah.
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I think uh yeah, I called my book Paper Belt on Fire because I thought the failure of universities was on par with some of the failures in other institutions across the last 50 years and and you can look at polls and and all of them speak to just how little people put trust in institutions because of of of their failures.
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This could be the financial crisis of 2008.
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It could be uh the the institutional response to co um just a lot of different ways the media has failed and so on.
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And I thought that was part and parcel with the way universities weren't living up to their stated purposes.
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So it's uh you know I don't know if it's interesting but like most criticisms of the universities nowadays focus on the politics that um especially among northern let's say liberal arts or Ivy League schools.
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League schools. they've just gone so far left that uh people are questioning whether these are uh woke uh madas let's say okay that is a criticism but that's not where we come from I think that is a problem but what we're upset about and what uh prompted us to work on the teal
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fellowship and what we're doing now is is we actually think universities are stifling creativity um and this is very antithetical to their state admissions on their website where they claim that they're uh you know teaching the leaders of tomorrow and um and so on. So with the teal
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So with the teal fellowship uh you know it was really that some ideas can't wait in that uh in fact the university was was holding these people back there all sorts of bottlenecks and then culturally I think also it was limiting people's imagination.
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So whether it was the grant to get people out of school or what we do now when we make investments in dropouts, it's really about freeing people and liberating them to to pursue those interests.
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Uh and and and don't believe the hype that these universities are going to help you.
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Yeah, I'll add to that a little bit because I think some of the sort of like mimemetic or philosophical underpinnings of our work um stems from my time working with homeschoolers and unschoolers and watching these people who were very childled and what they they did.
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And one of the phrases that comes up for me a lot is non-coercion.
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And so this isn't about forcing somebody to do something.
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This is about helping them to guide in what they want to do.
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And something that came up in our event that we had last week that um you know OSV participated in our Renaissance reimagined event for fellowship leaders was that I think there's been a meme put out there for a long time by institutions um you know larger nonprofits things like this is that you can't trust the individual.
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How dare you give money to an individual person?
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Don't give money to your family.
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No, you should give all of that money to an institution such as a college, such as a group that is supposedly going to enact on this mission.
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Uh, and we actually believe the exact opposite that giving to the individual has a very very powerful uh outcome.
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And in fact, yesterday we had a very powerful outcome happen where um you know we helped kickstart uh Dylan Field's career by giving him a teal fellowship grant when he was I don't know probably 19 at the time.
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He credits us with uh helping him to move to San Francisco and get bunk beds for him and Evan to start Figma.
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And yesterday, this is, you know, something like 13 years later, he's announcing that they filed for IPO.
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And all that started by by focusing on the individual and giving someone a shot.
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Uh, and I think there's also a lot of memes out there about young people having to wait.
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Like what Michael said, our theme is some ideas just can't wait. And why not start now?
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Why not like you know with 1517 we would do grants and investments and it's all about asking that question of like well yeah let's see what happens.
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Why not give someone you know money to see if they can build a deep tech company uh or something you know that could become uh yeah something that could just become massively influential in the world.
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I yeah there's one more thing I'd like to riff on based on what Danielle just said.
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I love the idea of this phrase, giving someone a shot, giving someone an opportunity, >> even though they're young, even though their resume isn't as full as a tenure faculty member.
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Because it it touches on this idea that our culture is almost too obsessed with the past >> in the form of okay, what credentials have you earned? What work have you done?
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Which recommendations do you have?
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If you look at the length of time it takes scientists to finally get a grant to do something nowadays, whether through the NIH or the NSF, it's like they might have to wait till they're 40 before they get their first shot at doing their own experiment.
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And I think that's cuz we're backward looking as a culture.
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We're always looking like, well, how do you know it's going to be good?
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Well, look at his resume.
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Whereas, I think with a 20-year-old, I love this idea of giving someone a shot.
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They may not deserve the money in full, but what we believe is that in the future, they can earn it.
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is like what they do in the intervening time in the future will retroactively uh make that dessert whole.
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It'll be like, "Yeah, we gave him a shot and he lived up to it."
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And I think we need to do that more as a society.
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I'm going to add one more piece to this, which is that you say that we're not backward-looking enough, but I would take that to extreme.
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That we're like we like one reason why I think radical life extension is interesting is because it would give us the ability to look really way further backwards like viscerally than we can now.
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And so I think people only really look backwards to like maybe their parents, maybe their grandparents' generation.
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And that's kind of viscerally what we can kind of hold in our tiny brains here.
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But if you look really far back, people didn't go to college and people were inventing and creating and writing and doing things in the arts >> without an institution stamping them.
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So I think in some sense we don't look backwards enough.
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We we only look to the recent past, which I think is a huge fault.
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>> Again, you're preaching to the choir here.
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We we agree almost entirely with everything you've just said.
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uh the idea that we look at it this way.
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A degree suggests competence. That's it. It suggests it.
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But then we also say but what kind of person has the ability to get into fill in the blank like Yale, Harvard, Stanford?
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Uh and are they molding them in such a way?
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Uh I think Michael you said something along the lines of what it takes to get accepted into an Ivy or Stanford or MIT uh gives you a certain type of person, right?
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And that certain type of person seems to be uniquely unqualified to be the founder of a startup.
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Elaborate on that for a bit. >> Yeah.
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So, uh, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I think it'll start to make clear this point is, so Peter Teal, our old boss at the at the Teal Fellowship, and he he's a big fan of this French literary theorist. >> Yeah.
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I'm a Gerardian enthusiast enthusiastic as well. So, yeah. >> Right.
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And so to boil down Gerard's theory of of social dynamics, you know, he he believes humans are motivated by envy and when we're we start to compete with each other over rival goods, um we start to become more and more alike.
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So it's like the more you compete, the more alike you become.
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And so what I think Peter saw was that in American society in particular is like this massive competition to compete for, you know, children and teenagers to impress a college admissions committee.
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That massive competition has now forced everyone to become more and more alike because they're competing on for those very few scarce spots uh those status position goods.
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And then the f further twist that maybe is Teal's ad is the more you become alike, the less unique you are, the less unique you are, the fewer new creative ideas you have.
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And so, uh, like you're describing is is as everyone is fighting to get into MIT and Harvard and so on.
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In some ways, it's it's incredible that they reach that level of achievement, but in doing so, they have shaped their character to be quite similar to the other people in in that mix.
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It's a certain type of person for sure, someone who's good at getting jobs done and taking tests.
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But then this was another curiosity that Danielle and I discovered over time, which is like people are obsessed with IQ and and smarts, but there's not a strong correlation.
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there's some kind of threshold effect where uh creativity is just some other faculty that is very different from IQ.
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There are so many high IQ people who are just conformist and do not invent new things or or you know write novels or poems or plays.
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And so the types of people who are creative are just yeah they're just different types of people from high IQ high achieving sorts.
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And I think our institutions are totally blind to that.
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Um, you know, the types of people that we found who became successful in the Teal Fellowship were not those uh, you know, achievement seeking hounds.
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They were a little weird in different ways.
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I mean, to go back to Dylan Field, uh, he uh, he he wouldn't even share his SAT scores with us.
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We asked for that originally and that was something we learned that yes, it did not matter uh, in the event like it did it that didn't have a lot of predictive value about, you know, how people were going to fare in the wild.
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So I I am that's what I mean when when I say universities are stifling creativity.
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I think it is that character deforming effect that that is most problematic. >> Yeah.
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>> I think that's a the huge effect.
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But I also think one thing that's stifling about that creative act is like the debt people go into for school because if you're a creative person and you come out of school like when I started my tutoring company um you know I had very little debt and a very low interest rate on which to pay it off.
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And so that meant that I could do something crazy like move from Boston to California with really no idea what I was doing and throw up some Craigslist ads before Craigslist was creepy and be like, "All right, I'm going to start this tutoring company and I'm going to try it out."
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And I didn't need to just go get a job somewhere because I I wasn't saddled with debt.
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So I could let my creativity flourish because I didn't have something weighing me down even after the indoctrination of school. >> Yeah. Really? >> Yeah.
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the uh yeah, I I I sort of uh am the old version of that kind of person.
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Like the only reason I have a degree at all is because my mother begged me to get one.
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>> Like I thought it was the biggest waste of time in like I would much I was much more interested in actually >> doing things, starting companies, that kind of stuff.
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And but back then in the dark ages man like and then of course it turned out for the best because in my highly regulated former profession of asset management you are required to have a BA to be an asset manager.
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So like I'm like oo lucky. Thank you mom.
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But my degree in economics was completely worthless in start.
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In fact, it probably put up some roadblocks that shouldn't have been there >> and and like I had to realize, oh, that's wrong. Oh, that's wrong, too.
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Oh my god, everything they taught me is wrong.
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And uh persevered that way.
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But then like there's a paradox, right?
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Because basically when you look at your success both with the fellows but your own 1517 alumni network it's kind of become a prestigious badge of honor >> in much the same way that it used to be I went to Stanford and it's now hey I got a 1517 grant >> and like to me that's a paradox that brings in kind of will store I've had on the podcast who wrote the status game and he's basically maintains that >> playing the status game is hardwired
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into our human uh human OS right >> and and his argument would be if you play the right kind of status game right like adding to the culture adding to civilization adding to you know all of that then you're that's
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great but you're still playing it like how do you guys do you guys have a plan for identifying when your own brand crosses from being kind of literally the signal that's to a stifling orthodoxy. >> Yeah, there's a couple things that come
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>> Yeah, there's a couple things that come to mind.
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One is when we were running the Teal Fellowship, we we were constantly reminding Teal Fellows like, "Hey, it's cool to be building and doing what you're doing out in the world.
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It's not cool to be a Teal fellow."
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Like, it's not like having a badge isn't the cool thing. It's what you're doing.
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Uh and we're we're often reminding people of things like that.
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Even this morning actually I run a group chat that's just for like wy makers and founders uh in San Francisco and uh it's not like it's not 1517 oriented.
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It's just really like anybody and someone in the group chat uh today was talking about being a grantee and then he messaged me privately and he's like hey is that okay?
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And I was like, "Listen, man.
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What's cool is that you're building and doing the thing you're doing, not the resources that you got from somebody to do it.
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So, like, let's keep the content to what you're doing and not the resources that you received."
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Um, and so it's something that that we sort of struggle with because, you know, like I mean, uh, the Teal Fellowship used to be called 20 under 20, right?
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And like even just like that whole thing of like oh and then there's 30 under 30 now and there 40 under 40 and like all these sort of status things like we know that we're a part of that and we rail against it.
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part of that and we rail against it. I think for my part I'd add that um as long as you're solving hard problems y I'm not worried about yeah >> uh status seeking because it's just going to be really hard to do things like invent fusion energy cure Alzheimer's and dementia like there are
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a lot of hard outstanding problems that we still have yet to solve as a as a society >> and and so where I think the mimemetic uh angle comes in is more like the me too stuff related to almost trivial software I think a consumer apps or you know just trying to be a founder uh rather than someone who is like using a company as a vehicle to solve a major problem. >> I I would I would love I would love a
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>> I I would I would love I would love a world where like 10,000 people decide it's the cool thing to try to discover fusion or cure cancer.
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>> That would be a great world.
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I mean that was like that was one of the uh driving forces when we decided to do the fellowships.
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It was kind of like you know in the past geniuses, creatives, innovators were all born, lived and died without knowing that they had all of those talents and skills, right?
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And now we have kind of a global colossus because we're interconnected and we can now find and more importantly fund those people.
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And I just kind of felt compelled to do that, right?
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Because >> the the idea, you know, when I was pitching originally to some more conservative friends, they're like, "So, basically, you're going to fund an island of misfit toys."
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And and I looked at him, I went, "Precisely." >> Yeah. Exactly. You're like, "Good. You get it." Yeah. Exactly. You got it.
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>> I think the thing about the Misfit Toys label though, which is interesting to me, is that genuiness is so important to what we do at 1517.
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And so when people come to us, you can it's like the status seeeking people, they just ooze it.
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You can tell who those people are right away.
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Um they're the name droppers.
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They're the ones flashing the fancy watch.
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They're the ones who >> they're Yeah, the oneuppers. Like all of that.
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And so the Misfit Toys uh label I think is great because those people can't help but be themselves, right?
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Those people are also easy to spot because it's like, "Wow, you are weird in all the right ways and other people probably >> don't even know what to do with you, but we're here for that."
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which is really cool because you guys also do character screens and like you've walked away from on paper technically stellar deals and after >> like half an hour of coffee with the founder you're like no way not going to not going to back this. I find that fascinating.
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And I read about, you know, some of the things you look for.
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You use the term the ATM founder, right?
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The guy who like ghosts you until it's time for money and they're all over they're all over your text and like >> it feels very parental.
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It's like coming to, you know, Daniellea and Michael, mom and dad, like need a 20 and you're like, wait, why do you only come to us when you need a 20? Like what's going on?
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And we have structures set up so that that's not the only time people come to us.
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So it's when people try to negate, you know, people love the game systems.
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It's part of, I think, what makes the human spirit the human spirit, but at the same time, like, you know, we're trying to build relationships on trust and goodwill and good work.
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Uh, and that looks a lot different than, hey, can I get a 20? So, >> yeah.
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The the other one that I that you guys have talked about, uh, you call it rich too early.
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I call it the lottery ticket syndrome.
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Um, I've I've had a lot of experience with people who get lottery ticket syndrome.
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How do you how do you how do you is that correctable?
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Like let's say you he he or she or makes it through all of your character uh filters and everything else, but then godamn it, they get funded at like a$und00 million valuation and suddenly their [ __ ] doesn't stink and their way is the only way. What?
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Do you guys have a way to deal with that if you're already in?
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>> Oh, I mean, we have a few things.
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I mean, we often we have a whole post that we've written called your cap will kill you.
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And uh and it's all about like, hey, listen, like that shiny number might feel really good in the moment, but you also have to grow into that.
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Like you then that's a heavy heavy lift.
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And also, we've seen this over time, you know, when people go through different accelerator programs and things like that, they get this like I'm better than other people thing going on.
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And at this point, we've become pretty good and pretty clear at just saying to people what we see.
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Hey, we've noticed like a little like like some of the humility is a little lacking right now and some of the gravitas is going to get you in trouble.
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I mean, I had a conversation with one of our founders last week, um, who I think was getting a little too venty over Twitter for the wrong reasons and things like that.
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And it was like, hey, listen, like we are on a mission like, and like a calling level mission here.
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And we meaning all of us together, and [ __ ] on people on Twitter isn't going to help you fulfill your mission.
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So, like, let's get you back in the right saddle so we can get back to work here and not in the like pounding one's chest blah blah blah and getting into the mimemetic [ __ ] that happens all the time. >> Yeah.
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One one that touches on a character trait that like in psychology sometimes >> it's described as this difference between external locus of control versus internal. Yeah.
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>> And when people start looking outward to blame the world for their struggles or challenges and failures, that's a huge negative signal for us as a as a fund.
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It it just the more people take sort of that extreme ownership position, the the more effective they are.
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It doesn't guarantee success, but it just seems to, >> you know, correlate with it strongly and it makes sense.
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But yeah, one of the ways people will turn out to the world and start blaming it is they'll start blaming the world of startups and VCs, it can take many different forms, you know, oh, look at this guy raising 10 million on dog walking app on the blockchain and he's got nothing and I'm working so hard down here and I get nothing.
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It's like you can't do that kind of those kinds of comparisons are are killer.
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Um, so yeah, we we try to pay attention on the margin.
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I think we can help people but sometimes I don't know it's like his character seems to be destiny in some ways which is why we want to try to avoid uh backing the the founders who who turn to the dark side but >> you know it is also still true that >> that uh like bad people can create good things.
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So we have or sometimes we're wrong like Danielle and I might disagree on that character assessment or there's someone out there right now we won't name names but you know he I think it was a billion dollar company I can't remember but when he pitched us to me he felt a little manipulative uh to Daniela to Daniela
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felt authentic this guy was crying in the office may I don't there's sometimes I feel like people might use tears as a way to >> sure to you know hijack your empathy or something Um, and so I don't know, you know, he's cruising, doing really well out there, but and we disagreed on it. Um, so it's hard to say. Yeah. So, it's Um, so it's hard to say. Yeah.
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So, it's like, and we make mistakes all the time.
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This game is is the power laws like, you know, only a handful of our companies are really going to do extraordinarily well.
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So, it's really humbling um to to see all the times that you're wrong. Sure. >> Yeah.
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The uh the what's spread into the bone will out the character question I think is a really legitimate one.
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My son has a friend who who also kind of sorts along what he calls prefall and postfall.
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>> And what he means by that is pretty obvious, right?
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Like the pre-fall haven't had the [ __ ] kicked out of them by the world, right?
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>> And like on Wall Street, that's a huge thing, right?
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And and on Wall Street, they're called dead players or live players.
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Well, and and essentially >> uh somebody who is postfall, that's who you want to do business with, right?
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Because the world has punched them in the face so many times >> uh that they're they're definitely postfall and the character traits that might be latent right in the prefall >> definitely definitely come out.
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So that leads to a question of like how do you guys deal with the maturation of a founder, right?
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So you you had fellows what that went kind of from teenage hackers to public company CEOs quickly and and what have you learned or unlearned about how to help like a 19year-old or a 20-year-old develop like really good executive judgment at kind of warp speed. >> That's interesting.
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You know, for me, this a lot of this goes back to learning from the homeschooling community and treating each of them individually, but also giving them very specific explicit feedback of saying like, "Hey," and it's not a judgment, just saying like, "Hey, here's what I've noticed in watching this maturation process happen."
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Um, you know, and being able to build those trusting relationships with people because if someone doesn't trust you, they're also not going to open up about what doesn't work.
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Uh, so being able to be a sounding board that's not going to be reactionary, that's going to hear them out fully, that you can have a real dialogue with and like a real Socratic dialogue with of like, gosh, wow, this interesting crazy thing happened.
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>> Tell me more about that.
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Tell me why do you think that happened or what what could happen in the future?
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What would you We love reflective questions at 1517.
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Hey, what would you like?
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We just onboarded our new group of flux scientists um you know who are working to commercialize their research and we had three of our our current uh like scienceoriented founders uh on a panel and we said hey like all of you are doing really really well right now.
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Some of you just started 18 months ago.
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Some of you who've been doing this for a few years even through a market downturn.
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tell us what you would have told that that youth from four years ago when we you first got started and and that kind of dialogue we think helps in building that relationship but also just giving them the space to have that reflective time because I think all of us have you know a hard time slowing down and and
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taking a look and saying gosh what is really happening here what is maturating >> I think we also look at in terms of predictive character traits really big one is curiosity paired with ambition So the people who are great at learning on their own, they're going to apply that skill to learning how to manage and how to grow into that CEO role. >> Uh we've seen that with, you know, we
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>> Uh we've seen that with, you know, we have different phrases for this.
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It could be acorn to oak or crawl before you walk and then before you run.
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But what's guiding that is some deep curiosity into okay, I need to learn these tools. Yeah.
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these tools. Yeah. There are other things too like do they surround themselves independently with mentors and good coaches uh good feedback mechanisms >> but in the end god we this reminds me we had a funny uh we called it the the
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summit at the time it's like a conference of of uh teal fellow uh applicants and people like them and um it was in Las Vegas what year was that >> 2014 I think >> okay 2014 we had Tony Shay uh giving a talk and then followed right
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after him was Peter Teal and Tony Shay gives a talk where he's talking he he says the number one thing that matters in the success of a company is the culture creating a strong culture uh and that starts with leadership and so on
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and so Tony Shay gives that talk immediately after Peter gets on stage and says culture doesn't matter at all the only thing that matters is success and and then he gives this at the time the example was Twitter. He's like,
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He's like, "Look at this company.
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They have the worst management. They have no leadership.
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And yet this product is is doing remarkably well.
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So I'm not so sure culture is everything."
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And and so I've seen both sides in working with our founders um where some of these young people an analogy we use is a like imagine a race a car race where it's no hard holds bar any kind of car can be entered into the race and there are some people who have like really good standard NASCAR F1 cars they're and they've got amazing drivers these guys have Harvard MBAs, the CEOs and so on.
31:04
But then our younger founders come along and they've got this car souped up with like five rocket engines.
31:10
This thing's going to hit into every wall imaginable and they're not great drivers, but the engine is just so powerful it doesn't matter.
31:18
It's like it just goes so far.
31:20
So, you know, we we we we do what we can to help people, but the I you know, I I don't I won't go so far as teal in in in that respect, but it it is true that like sometimes the competitive advantage, technological advantage can be so powerful that it that it makes up for a lot of like some of the shortcomings.
31:37
Well, and I'll I'll also add in the current day and age, I think what's really interesting is that I think one reason we're also seeing younger and younger people building in hard tech areas is that there are these role models that have come before them that are only in their 30s now who are like setting that example.
31:54
And so it's like the Palmer Lies of the world, the Vitalics of the world, you know, Dylan, like all these people, they've gotten to sort of watch build companies literally as they were 20 years old and do that throughout.
32:08
And so they see these actual real time examples.
32:10
And I think that is gonna I think that's going to get even deeper in the like young entrepreneurship culture of like hey I'm gonna try to model not necessarily off of I don't know Stephen W like that's what you know it's like okay we have these newer groups of people who are doing extraordinary work who they can similarly look up to now and model some of that behavior off.
32:36
I I do love that when we started the fellowship in 2010 2011 um I mean there was like one or two startup books on a on the bookstore shelf and now there are hundred there's just so much lore being passed down knowhow transferred from >> you know friends or just podcasts like this and it's just really incredible how much is out there that does go along line. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
33:00
the uh several things to to react to there.
33:03
Uh internally, our our little tagline at OSV is crawl, walk, run.
33:10
>> And so also mistakes are portals of discovery.
33:16
>> We literally want you to make mistakes.
33:19
We don't want you to make the same mistakes >> time after time, but we think that we we reframe them as, hey, these are the greatest learning opportunities that we're going to face and we got to look at them that way as opposed to uh, you know, the standard, oh, I made a mistake. No, great. What do we learn? Right. Right.
33:40
>> Um and and then the the other thing that really resonates with me is the idea that I think I think both the guy who gave the speech on culture and Peter are both right. And here's why.
33:56
>> We we believe that everything is downstream of culture.
33:59
If you look at our verticals, you will see that they are all designed to tell better stories.
34:08
a book publisher, a movie maker that focuses on documentaries.
34:12
Guess what kind of stories we want to tell?
34:14
We want to tell stories that are optimistic about the future, optimistic about the benefits that humanity can build in with innovation and all of these things.
34:27
We have been under a regime, I call it the World Economic Forum. I hate those guys.
34:35
Like literally, thank God that they are so tonedeaf with their propaganda campaigns because like it's 2030. You will own nothing.
34:43
You will eat the bugs and you will live in the pod and you'll be happy. [ __ ] you.
34:47
But the idea of this pervasive culture of negativism, of learned helplessness, of all of these things, it's been kind of at epidemic levels for the maybe the last 30 or 40 years.
35:02
And so we need better stories, better movies, better aspirations.
35:09
And like that is what we're trying to do with our various verticals.
35:14
>> And and you know, it's funny the reactions like Joe Weiszenthal of Bloom Bloomberg, he was on my podcast once and he was listening to me and he goes, >> "Are you an anarco capitalist man?" I'm like, "No, no.
35:26
How do you guys deal with the kind of people who are kind of drawn to what you're doing, but they still have that like they have their Harvard or Yale degree on the wall behind them and like they they still put a lot of meaning into that.
35:43
How do you flip that kind of thinking?
35:48
>> I don't know how much we work with those people. >> I think we flip that.
35:50
I think we flip that by making things about what people are do doing in the now and not what what piece of paper did they get or who stamped them or something like that.
36:03
Well, one of the things we hear when people come to our events is gosh, it's so refreshing nobody asked me where I go to school. You know what I mean?
36:08
So, we're trying to normalize that that you would just talk about what you're building and what you're doing and not who stamped you to do the thing that you're doing.
36:16
you're doing. Um, got Yeah, I what occurs to me on a couple themes you you were touching on there is uh this sense that people don't have agency to solve problems in the world that we meet young people and I guess they they're lost to the bore
36:34
because they'll tell us that uh climate change means doom for mankind and you know that maybe maybe nations could act to change the situation but no way a small group of individuals could ever make a And and so what I I I think to your point which I love is like we need examples out there. We need stories to
36:54
We need stories to show that this can be done.
36:56
Um and it's not just about we sometimes it's like a Mayan temple with these steps where maybe Elon Musk is at the top and okay he is Jordan. He's going to inspire.
37:08
>> But what we need are more people on that first and second step just a few steps away from the beginner that show the way. Relatable. Yeah.
37:15
Those can be really powerful.
37:18
And I was saying this last week is like we know what needs to be done. We need to cure cancer.
37:24
Apparently saying that statement is not enough.
37:25
We need to appeal to uh the nonrational part of man, the heart, the labyrinth of the heart.
37:31
It's like motivating people is just a really complicated thing.
37:34
And I think stories are just the most powerful way to do it.
37:38
Well, and I want to touch on that for a second because like Michael and I are children of the 80s and so we grew up with very tech positive movies and culture and it's interesting because I think it it was so easy cuz you know when you're swimming in the water you're in you don't you don't realize you're in it.
37:57
Uh and when we came up with our flex program to support scientists to like get started on R&D and then to commercialize their work you know we were thinking about what to name it.
38:05
We ended up, you know, we were originally going to name it the flux capacitor.
38:08
Now we just call it flux.
38:09
And of course, that's this is from Back to the Future. >> Sure.
38:13
>> And we had to like watch the movie again just to see like, hey, how does this hold up if we're going to name something after it?
38:18
And what was really shocking and amazing to me, it was like, oh wow, this is so 1517.
38:23
This is like a crazy mad scientist and a 17-year-old working together to change the trajectory of the world.
38:30
And like that's what we're so about.
38:32
And so to to what you guys are doing in bringing culture and film forward, I think that's really really important because it does have the like only in hindsight can I see what an absolutely profound effect it had on my current like present and future.
38:45
Um and so we're always making our team members watch. >> Love Ghostbusters.
38:51
You have these academic scientists drop out to start a company to solve this ghost problem. >> War games.
38:59
couple of teenagers like, "Hey, I think you guys might have a real genius." Exactly.
39:04
Like I I'm I predate you guys.
39:08
So I was growing I was growing from age 10 to 20 in the 1970s, >> which unfortunately really sucked as a decade, let's be honest.
39:20
>> And and but I was still a young guy in the 80s and remember every one of those movies, right?
39:27
and and they all had a very different theme.
39:30
And I just basically when when we started thinking about it, I'm like, where are all of those inspirational movies, right?
39:38
Where are the inspiration?
39:40
We just published uh this I don't have it here.
39:43
Uh a a book called White Mirror.
39:47
>> Uh take off on Black Mirror.
39:49
>> It's the change of Black Mirror, right?
39:50
Which is so >> And here's here's what's cool.
39:52
the the collector's edition which was on pre-order only 100 copies totally sold out in 48 hours. >> Oh man. Amazing.
40:03
>> Only place it was available was online.
40:05
>> Only place anyone was talking about it was was on social media, Twitter primarily.
40:10
And like I was I was like this is the coolest thing in the world that like >> it's priced pretty high, right?
40:16
Because you get a you get a graphic novel with it.
40:20
you get a drawing from the author who's also a trained artist, etc.
40:22
But I people and I talked to younger people and have you guys uh heard of Todd Rose and and his the work he's done in the book Collective Illusions? >> No.
40:36
Oh, I don't know that one.
40:37
>> Uh you guys I should intro you guys to him. He's really fascinating.
40:39
He he wrote a book called Collective Illusions and and it's really all about this kind of thing that thank God we're coming off of now.
40:49
But the forced conformity of thought especially among elite universities etc.
40:54
And and it's basically people's real uh beliefs verse their their stated beliefs.
41:05
>> There's never been a wider chasm especially among young people.
41:07
And they figured out his foundation or think tank figured out a way to do polling in a way that gets to revealed preferences and beliefs, not stated preferences and beliefs because essentially we become so kind of terrified to state what we actually think, right? >> Yeah.
41:31
>> That we just like we're living in an emperor's new clothes type environment.
41:36
But his way of polling shows the actual.
41:40
And what I love about it is like I'm an empiricist from way back, right?
41:42
I was a quant um and >> uh the data is incredibly predictable. >> Wow.
41:52
>> So, for example, like what was it 15 months before the election, his polling had Trump winning by basically a percentage point within the actual numbers.
42:04
And like you talk to anyone here in the paper belt and they would look at you like you're insane.
42:08
You like you're you kind of you're crazy man.
42:13
That's absolutely not gonna happen.
42:13
And yet from politics to our interest is less in politics and more in startups and that kind of stuff. Yeah.
42:23
>> Also incredible data there. So >> put it on.
42:28
One thing we've seen change over the last really four to five years I think that that's related to this is uh younger people uh rebelling against the stated attitudes and views of their of the establishment.
42:41
So, one person put it this way to me is like in the 1950s the conformist establishment was like, you know, these these men in gray flannel suits who had pocket protectors and boring views and the counterculture was the Bohemians and the Beats and so on.
42:59
But now that's flipped where the establishment is the hippies and so on.
43:04
And the uh counterculture now are these these and they're primarily young men and they they're in places like Elsa Gundo the Gundo where they are rebelling against that and having children is cool. >> Get it? I'm religious.
43:17
I have an American flag in my workshop.
43:19
I lift weights and yeah, having kids young is cool.
43:27
>> Such a strange pendulum swing, but it's I'm here for it.
43:29
I want to go back to what I really wanted to make a comment about sort of like film and culture and writing.
43:36
I think it's really lazy thinking when people go towards all the dystopian stuff because it's so much easier to write about something crumbling rather than saying, "Hey, the positive is like we're going to figure this out and here's some creative ideas on how to do that."
43:49
Like it's really hard to be a Neil Stevenson type.
43:51
Like you have to be creative and inventive in your writing and you have to go down really deep rabbit holes.
43:57
But just to say like, "Hey, it all ends and the star hits us and it's over." That's it's [ __ ] lazy. Yeah.
44:05
>> Like, you know, and so I feel like creative people need to stop wanting to make like a quick buck on a movie and instead go back to being like, "How do we become Spielberg?
44:14
How do we do something truly great?"
44:16
Because it takes imagination.
44:19
It takes creativity to do that. >> Yeah.
44:23
Totally could not agree more, right? Like pessimism is easy.
44:26
It's the easiest thing in the world. Like, right.
44:32
It's like, oh yeah, it's never going to work. >> Yeah.
44:35
Because of this and this and this and this.
44:38
>> It's that external locus of control in >> Totally agree. Totally agree.
44:42
>> I can't do anything because it's all these other people messed up. And >> exactly.
44:46
And and like the external verse, internal locus of control.
44:49
I I I wrote a series of letters to my kids when my son was born.
44:55
I was 24 when he was born >> and I decided, you know what?
44:58
I'm going to I'm going to do this long-term project and they're going to be letters to my kids.
45:03
And like literally that I just reread the first letter. That's the first letter.
45:09
>> What you will achieve is entirely inside you. It is not outside you.
45:12
And I'm a big fan of Lasu.
45:15
And so I threw a couple of Da Jing quotes in there as well.
45:20
>> Have you read Harry Brown's letter to his daughter? >> Yes. Yes. >> Yeah.
45:24
>> Yeah. So I I you know this is obviously reveals my libertarian roots but I love that letter and I read that letter probably in my early 20s and it was you know the letter basically states just remember nobody owes you anything >> and it's like that's going to help you live your life in this crazy world if
45:40
you keep reminding yourself that hey this thing happened and you didn't like it like okay well nobody owes you anything like and so what are you going to do from that place and so I love that you're writing letters to your infant children to read and you know they're They're more cognizant. >> Yeah. What we did was my wife's a >> Yeah.
45:55
What we did was my wife's a photographer and uh she she's the competent one between the two of us and she uh took the letters and and put them into a readable format because my handwriting uh you know I could have been a doctor.
46:12
Uh but but basically she did them all with photos from the time that the letter was written and then put them in a book which we gave them on their 25th first birthday. >> Oh that's amazing.
46:25
>> And and so it's uh but going back through them it's like it is fun for me because I'm like oh I've changed my mind on a lot of things.
46:34
on a lot of things. uh uh but uh some of the core things like internal versus external locus of control I have only deepened my belief in that right like learned helplessness is a toxic mind virus in my opinion >> really is
46:52
>> and it just kills people's initiative it kills like their life basically right like I just it drives me absolutely insane and I really agree with your idea like pessimism That is so easy so easy to be performative to say oh and and sound smart. It's the creative, innovative,
47:13
It's the creative, innovative, imaginative uh founders who are building the real future, >> right?
47:23
>> And like, but I definitely also believe like the Kennedy moment, I call it, right?
47:27
Kennedy when he made that speech, he knew that we didn't have any of the tools that it was going to take us to get to the moon.
47:37
>> But that that he he knew that intentionally, but wanted a moonshot.
47:42
And so that's why he gave that speech. And guess what?
47:44
People are all like, >> "We can do it.
47:48
We could actually do it, right?"
47:51
And so those kind of like reach for the stars and hit the moon, right?
47:57
Like if if if everyone is like, "Why would we why go into space at all?
48:00
It's a misuse of resources."
48:02
Like, "Oh, just shut the [ __ ] up." >> Yeah.
48:09
It speaks to the state of the culture where uh now when people use the term moonshot they're happy to use it but we have moonshots with no moons.
48:18
It's like everything is less than the moon.
48:19
It's like hey the moonshot is I don't know you know some small project to I don't know make a drug that treats something doesn't cure it. Who knows?
48:28
Well, we we had a founder who we have a an event each year called Sanarchy, which is a Christmas anarchy conference.
48:35
And uh we have people come and talk about both scientific and controversial ideas.
48:40
And one of our founders came and he talked about how um one thing that sort of made the moonshot the moonshot and got that got the US rallied around that was this idea of competition of like we're going to beat Russia.
48:52
We're going to make this happen.
48:54
like this is the space race and this young man was interesting.
48:59
He was I don't remember the title of his talk but it was something like like it was something something like why why >> why China should take the moon. >> That's right.
49:07
Why China should take the moon and it was like because it motivates Americans to do harder harder things and it's like that competition is actually really good and can feed into the soul of like what you want to bring forth.
49:20
So, I always thought that was like really interesting that I think it's some combination of like leadership uh you know and and putting out a vision that we can't even understand how we'd fulfill it, but also that competitive nature that we all get into of like I'm going to get you like it's going to happen. >> Yeah.
49:38
The the Tom Wolf book, The Right Stuff, is just so fantastic because it gets into some of the motivations behind these pilots and uh I think I I can't remember exactly.
49:49
I think it's something like a 23% chance of dying across 20 years as a pilot in the Navy.
49:54
And that's not counting combat deaths.
49:57
So, you know, Vietnam or whatever at that time.
50:02
Um, can you imagine any startup in Silicon Valley that advertised jobs that said you have a one in five chance of dying at some point due to the job?
50:09
And what's crazy about these pilots is they loved it.
50:14
It was like they were dying to be the best of the best getting into uh the test pilot schools and then becoming astronauts.
50:20
And so what motivates people to do that?
50:23
It is some larger mythop poetic story about our nation and uh in in competition with others.
50:29
in competition with others. I mean, that's just I I think it can be such a powerful >> Well, and it's funny because either our even one of our own companies, Marathon Fusion, is experiencing this and they're a a fusion infrastructure company and
50:42
they had put out internships at different schools and they weren't getting that many bites and I think one of the the professors had talked to the team and then when he messaged it to his class, he was like, "This is going to be the hardest, most brutal, like it's going to be insane. anein this
51:00
going to be insane. anein this internship and then all of a sudden all these people applied to it uh and and all the people that applied some of them they've ended up hiring as full-time hires this team thought like gosh we're going to have to hire PhDs for what
51:15
we're doing and all this stuff and no it turns out that hiring like the graduate student interns has like been a huge uh boon in their in their success uh all because this professor put out like this this internship is going to eat you alive and like they were like, "Oh, that's how you do it." >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
51:35
>> It's like the Shackleton ad for the people to join him on the trip.
51:37
He wasn't getting anywhere until he was like, "This is going to be impossible.
51:43
Most of you are going to die."
51:46
>> And then suddenly they they all came online.
51:49
>> The the point you were making uh both of you were making about an us versus them about the space race and all that.
51:54
I I have a thesis that actually that was much more of a unifier, the Cold War >> than people understand.
52:05
>> It was literally a super simple meme that it was us freedom, democracy, free minds, free markets verse totalitarianism, the Iron Curtain, the uh you know the secret police, etc.
52:23
real simple meme and people could align on that particular meme.
52:26
Like if you look back the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans on foreign policy during that period was like very little very very dimminimous.
52:38
And then when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviets fell not long thereafter, rather than being the end of history, it became the opening of this thought of a sort of we didn't have a unifying goal in the West anymore. >> Right. >> Right.
53:00
And and so I think that >> that's interesting.
53:04
So it's like in that telling the the the we didn't learn the lesson of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Exactly.
53:12
>> The story Yugoslavia after the wall falls suddenly you have the reassertion of identities based on religion or ethnicity in that region that led to really you know bad conflict.
53:23
Um and so maybe maybe the myth was that we were different but what really happened was you know we started to see the same thing identity politics uh all these conflicts in our culture nowadays could be traced back to that time.
53:38
I think that's pretty insightful. Yeah. >> Yeah.
53:42
And the the idea is the simplicity of the meme, right? Like St.
53:45
Paul meme'd Christianity into existence.
53:48
He was the ultimate marketing guy, man.
53:51
Like, >> yeah, >> you know, I I I've toyed with doing a Twitter thread on on it, but everyone at OSP is like, "We stop doing them as threads.
54:01
We start doing them in our Substack, dude."
54:07
But I I definitely think that like I I call it the great reshuffle and I started using that term in like 2015 like everything the the declining and collapsing um uh trust in in formal institutions etc.
54:22
There was a lot of rot that was pretty noticeable uh prior to like all of this kind of coming down at once.
54:32
But I definitely do think that lack of that simple like us versus them of the cold war, it was a simple unifying meme.
54:40
The minute that went away, you had it, you made it much easier in my opinion for this descent into the evolutionarily fit, maybe not a great idea, but very evolutionary fit of our tribe versus their tribe.
54:56
That's how you get that's how you get identity politics.
55:00
That's how and because it's so [ __ ] easy.
55:03
But I always like when I'm talking to one of those people, I'm like, "Well, you must really hate the blue-eyed tribe then, right?
55:10
Because I'm I'm a hazeleyed guy and I those blue-eyed people, they're the worst."
55:17
And they look at me like I'm insane.
55:17
I'm like, "This is kind of what you're doing with the rest of your identity politics."
55:24
I I definitely think though that we are at a moment, right?
55:29
And and I think that there are tons of green shoots like you guys like what we're doing at OSV.
55:33
I'm seeing more and more of that.
55:36
Are do you guys agree with that?
55:40
Are you seeing more people open to the message?
55:41
Like you were pillaried as the main guy, right?
55:46
When Peter launched the thing, you had Larry Sumner's Well, of course.
55:52
Of course, Larry Sumner's little bias there, >> but but you know, I I remember when I read his thing about how it was the biggest misuse of philanthropic funds in the world, and it reminded me of the the quote that it's very hard to get a guy to understand something where his paycheck depends on not understanding it. >> Absolutely.
56:15
>> But are you are you seeing more of that?
56:18
Like are there more are there more people joining the Rebel Alliance?
56:23
>> I think when it comes to the idea that college may not be the only path to a fulfilling successful career >> that's like becoming very normal.
56:30
>> That's pretty normal at this point.
56:32
>> The American gap year very normal now like it did not exist before like 15 years ago people thought the European gap year Americans never thought about a gap year.
56:41
Um, so yeah, on the on the higher education point, I think a lot has changed and then you add the politics to it that that has worsened and the price has gone up.
56:50
So I feel like that crisis is coming to a head on its own. Mhm.
56:56
>> Um, when it comes to like this deeper issue of agency and problem solving and uh just believing in a in a positive vision, I it's like the subset of people we work with sometimes I'm I'm like, "Oh man, I'm just have so much hope for the world."
57:12
Um, but then I talk to someone who's not operating in our world and they're deeply pessimistic.
57:19
Um, and and and they'll tell me, they'll say, I I my uh I had a girlfriend who was a ER doc in San Francisco, so she saw, you know, all these problem cases coming through the door every day, and we'd get in arguments because she'd say, "Look, I see homeless people coming in for their drugs every month, and you get to see some young person who says they're going to solve, you know, space flight, I don't know, travel to Mars, whatever."
57:43
You know, your your world is inspiring. My world is very good.
57:45
And so I I I feel like that conflict is very real and it's hard for me to get a finger on the pulse of where it's where it stands.
57:54
>> That's a really interesting point, right?
57:56
Like uh the the the old saw about the the happy person lives in a happy world.
58:02
The sad person lives in a sad world.
58:04
The angry person lives in an angry world. >> Context is important.
58:07
And I guess I think that that's a great example, right?
58:13
Like if I was in an ER uh facing that every day, that's got to affect your attitude. >> Right. >> Right.
58:22
And and so I that's really interesting. I >> Yeah.
58:26
She said the most accurate recent shows this uh TV show called The Pit. >> Yeah. We love that show. >> Yeah. And And Right.
58:33
You watch that show, you're like, "Oh my god, how do these people make it through this day?" >> It's absolutely true.
58:39
>> It's absolutely true. I mean that's like my wife and I watch we don't watch a lot of TV but my our kids were like you got to watch this show you got to watch this show >> and we thought it was great but it was >> but they do overcome challenges I must >> yeah I agree I agree but the the the
58:56
vibe if you will >> is a completely because I hadn't really put it in that's a really great framework to look at it through because that's kind of my day too my day is like I'm talking to people like you I'm talking to young guys who are going change the world and have these off-the-wall ideas. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no.
59:14
We're not going to use the cloud anymore.
59:16
We're going to store data in plants.
59:18
It's going to be the forest, not the plant.
59:20
You know, that's one of our fellows.
59:22
And then we've got other ones telling me how they're going to do building everything in silica and you're going to have your digital twin that you'll be able to do all the most heinous experiments on.
59:33
We I I joked uh we got Dr.
59:37
Manglay here, but just >> but the point is it's that's really true. It's really true.
59:45
Like >> the that's what I'm hearing every day, right?
59:51
And generally you >> How do you think like one way that we're working to solve that is like publishing books like White Mirror?
1:00:01
>> Keep coming back to that storytelling, right?
1:00:03
Is we got to get these stories out to the world. >> Yeah.
1:00:06
One of our fellows is a young guy out in San Francisco, Jason Carman, who just impressed the hell out of us. He he >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah.
1:00:15
So, speaking of uh the Spielberg, that was like the first thing he said to us when we gave when he was interviewing for the fellowship was, "I want to be Steelber.
1:00:26
I want to be just like Spielberg."
1:00:27
And he had a long history of we saw all the movies he made when he was 14.
1:00:32
And so >> he he's doing these really inspirational movies on deep tech, on hard science, all this other stuff.
1:00:40
And we just hired him through our infinite films uh division to helm uh a movie we're making on Bell Labs using the book The Idea Factory as our script.
1:00:52
And like he was just so into it.
1:00:56
He was like, "I cannot believe that I'm 20 whatever."
1:01:00
and you are letting me you're going to actually let me direct this movie and we're like you've already demonstrated your stuff.
1:01:10
So I definitely think the whole storytelling stuff is is part of it.
1:01:11
Um >> what do you think about the whole idea?
1:01:19
I just keep coming back to this because it worries me and because we're very similar in our outlook, what we're trying to make the message and everything.
1:01:27
How do we avoid in let's go back to Gerard, right?
1:01:33
um how do we avoid the sort of mimemetic pull to that creates its own monoculture, right?
1:01:40
Like >> sometimes when we're having a a a thing with our our fellows and our grantees, I'm noticing, right, a lot of them are dressing the same.
1:01:51
They're all using the same type of computer.
1:01:56
Like how do you avoid unintentionally, of course unintentionally, but creating like a monoculture of misfits, if you will.
1:02:09
>> You know, one thing that was really special about the early days of the Teal Fellowship is that it wasn't just startup oriented.
1:02:14
We had researchers, we had some people who were like sort of on more like the artist side of things.
1:02:19
Um, and it was nice because there was this diversity of thought throughout the group.
1:02:26
And what's interesting as we've, you know, been curating our culture with 1517 is that we've been working more with like makers and artists also.
1:02:34
We just had a party last week that, um, you know, was a launch of the new fund and we had a lot of our makers who were tech people come, but we also had our makers who are artists come.
1:02:43
who are artists come. And I think being able to have these groups where it's not like I'm an entrepreneur, I'm saving the world, get out of my way sort of thing and like remembering like hey this community is doing things in very different ways with different amounts of capital with different levels of support
1:03:00
and like keeping the voices really fresh in the room on like hey what's going on and what are your experiences is maybe a way that we can keep it from becoming this monoculture of like you know startups are the in the only thing you should do or something like that because we don't believe that to be true. >> Um you know and then just having your
1:03:19
>> Um you know and then just having your culture be something about a bigger meta thing that like startups for example. >> Yeah.
1:03:30
And then I think geography is important.
1:03:32
I think it's like the goalpicos islands Darwin sees all these different species because they were separated enough to to develop different attributes and likewise I think it is important for everything not to be Silicon Valley >> or you know I think Austin has to develop its culture the Gundo has its it's very different from Silicon Valley and I and I think that's really great.
1:03:59
Um, so we need some diversity in region that'll help incubate some things.
1:04:02
I always think of reae, it feels like reae could not be possible today because it's just like that was a created a sound created on this island in the Caribbean >> over some period of time and nowadays it feels like in the music industry there's nothing like that because everything is just all to the world at once.
1:04:22
There's no time for like a sound to develop in a region >> in a region.
1:04:28
I think I don't know maybe I'm just >> and sort of in like isolated in a way of like okay we're just really >> spinning on this thing >> right because nowadays I think if you did come up with an interesting sound you'd put it up on Soundcloud before you know it it's playing in clubs in Europe and the US and and so everything feels more and more homogeneous.
1:04:46
So I don't know how to create more Jamaicas for reggae.
1:04:50
It's like we need that cuz that you're right is like it comes back to that point the more like we are the more we'll think alike and uh the fewer different ideas we'll have. >> I love the reggae.
1:05:01
Of course I'm a huge reggae fan.
1:05:03
Like that's how I spent my my teenage years were very misspent.
1:05:06
Um and my I had a good friend who our later teen years he dubbed the dark ages.
1:05:17
uh because we were very very uh naughty, let's put it that way.
1:05:23
>> And but one of my summertime rituals was putting Bob Marley or Peter Tosh on the uh boom box and like literally just lying in the pool listening along and loving every moment of it.
1:05:35
Met my wife because of Peter Tosh like like Yeah.
1:05:41
Like literally we were at a party and they said you should go talk to Missy and I'm like why?
1:05:45
And they went, well, two things.
1:05:47
She went to George, I was at the school of foreign service at Georgetown at the time. >> Okay.
1:05:52
>> And she was like, she was at foreign service, but she also can't stop talking about Peter Tosh.
1:05:57
And we I'd just gone to a Peter Tosh concert.
1:05:59
And it was the Peter Tosh one that that got me really interested.
1:06:04
I'm like, you'd love Peter Tosh.
1:06:05
But then the first thing that she asked me about Georgetown, because I was still at Georgetown at the time, >> uh, was she looked at me and she goes, "Does it bother you when everybody asks you, "What does your daddy do?"
1:06:17
And I went, "Yeah, I like hate it." >> Yeah.
1:06:23
>> I ended up uh falling in love with her and finishing at the University of Minnesota because, as I mentioned earlier, like I didn't give a [ __ ] where I got the degree from.
1:06:30
I got the degree from. Um but uh yeah that's a really interesting >> there's something about I mean globalization is wonderful uh trade has brought a lot of benefits and lowered the cost of goods but there is some issue I think with uh the homogenizing of cultures and like >> you look at the music industry it just all you know I'm a cranky old man
1:06:51
talking about pop music but it just it feels all undifferentiated and it and it seems to me like it'd be really hard for a ray gay scene or even like the grunge scene in Seattle, like this last gasp of rock and roll was possible, I think, because those guys were so isolated up in Seattle in their basements under gray skies and in their flint shirts. So, I
1:07:11
So, I yeah, I don't know how a scene develops.
1:07:17
Um, that's open question that I think is kind of interesting.
1:07:19
Yeah, I have a good friend, Alex Denko, who I've uh had on the podcast numerous times and like we have an entire podcast devoted towards how to create a scenus. >> Okay. Right. How's that term? >> Yeah.
1:07:34
He he he was in a sca bang uh band.
1:07:39
>> And like literally he gave me a a master's class on on how to to do that.
1:07:45
But now I'm gonna I'm now god damn it, Michael.
1:07:49
I'm gonna go down this rabbit hole for the rest of the day because I think you're right. >> Well, yeah.
1:07:53
And then think about >> right about this.
1:07:56
>> There are something like I think 4500 universities in the United States, colleges and universities and yet they all seem to have one point of view. It's pretty crazy. >> Exactly.
1:08:06
>> And then you look inside who's teaching at those universities and it's just all incestuous.
1:08:10
These people get degrees from one school and then they work at another one and that person at the other school goes to the other one.
1:08:15
It's like I I don't know how we would do it because obviously people are free to work wherever but it would be kind of interesting to see more flavor and style >> associated with certain schools like a certain way of doing things.
1:08:30
You see this in science in the past where like the the revolution in quantum mechanics I think is stylistically in line with these crazy Germans and uh vianese people and Swiss in a way.
1:08:42
people and Swiss in a way. I don't know there it's hard like everyone wants to say physics is obviously about the you know reality and reality tells us whether we understand it or not but yet I still think there's even a style when it comes to science like the way you
1:08:57
interpret the world the equations you use I mean it's just so different and I think we need all these different uh research paths like there was a Italian science like there was an American way of doing science and I and now it just feels like it's all the same. It's
1:09:12
It's absolutely true and it's like I have been on the soap box forever about the fact that we need to be both Athens and Sparta.
1:09:21
We need to be both Apollo and Dian Isis.
1:09:25
>> We It's this this idea like like CP Snow's the two cultures.
1:09:29
I don't know whether you've read that book, but like I think you wrote that back in the 50s if I'm not mistaken.
1:09:34
And it's like the the the the the stark wall between the sciences and the arts was weird because for all of human history it wasn't that way at all, >> right?
1:09:48
Like >> the physicists who also love poetry and Buddhism and like all the crazy things.
1:09:57
I think what I think they got one thing right and that was the idea about diversity.
1:10:02
But the diversity you require is cognitive diversity. It's idea diversity. It's creative diversity.
1:10:08
And like one of the things that we did when we were setting up the fellowships was we wanted to make sure that it was not just startup right that we gave it to artists that we gave it to you know sculptors and thinkers and all that kind of stuff as well.
1:10:26
And I got to tell you, at the first or sorry, not the first, the second uh in-person meeting with the fellows on site here in Connecticut, we watched in real time as like a computer genius guy got a complete marketing plan for from Jimmy, by the way, Jimmy Sony.
1:10:49
Uh they talked for like two hours and >> amazing.
1:10:54
and he's like, I I learned that I had no idea how to present my ideas and Jimmy just helped me completely do that.
1:11:03
And so this overlap of thinking styles and everything else, >> we just think it's really bearing incredibly interesting fruit >> and and want to want to see more of it, not less.
1:11:17
Obviously, you know, I I I didn't get to I I was fascinated by the whole Luther Martin Luther uh idea of how you guys came up with your name 1517.
1:11:29
>> And I and I started wondering like which of his thesises would would be most appealing to you.
1:11:35
And I kind of went through them and I kind of thought here's the ones that I thought might appeal to you, but I want you to tell me that I'm wrong.
1:11:41
Uh the the priesthood of all believers, wizards without credentials, right?
1:11:46
The solar scriptura, learn by doing, right? Yeah.
1:11:52
>> The solid invest in potential.
1:11:57
>> He leveraged new media.
1:11:57
And man, you guys are really doing the same thing.
1:12:00
Am I getting it right or do you have other great >> It's been a while since I've read his his actual 95 thesis.
1:12:07
So, it should we should go back.
1:12:10
We should pick out our favorites.
1:12:11
That >> that'd be a fun experiment.
1:12:13
That'd be good write up, too. Good content. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:12:16
So, I I went back to them. They're pretty cool.
1:12:19
Um and they I what I liked so much about it was the revolt.
1:12:26
Well, basically the the printing press made his revolt a hell of a lot easier >> uh than he would have been.
1:12:32
But then I also try I one thing that I do is I take anything like that I really pretty deeply believe in and I we we we're building our own AI uh onrem uh AI because we think that the commercial AI is going to get nerfed >> and we don't want our AI to be nerfed anyway.
1:12:54
So, one of the things that I did got in the habit of doing it's multimodal um and multimodal as well is I I steelman every argument that I vehemently disagree with >> and then I also do a steelman on the opposite beliefs of what I vehemently agree with. >> Yep.
1:13:17
It's really interesting because like when I was going through your stuff, I steal me against you guys and in favor of you guys and because I so many of my own views are very sympotico with your own.
1:13:34
>> Um, and like one that came up that I thought was pretty interesting, let me go to that part.
1:13:38
um was the idea of the um credential ar credentiing arbitr arbing carb uh credentials.
1:13:52
One of the things they say is that a lot of these founders who might have a theal founder uh fellowship or a fellowship from you guys or for that matter a fellowship from us end up hiring PhDs >> when they when the work gets hard kind of showing hey like these PhDs get hired by the by the uh the founders that that don't have degrees and things like that and that one kind of I kind of was like that's an interesting point.
1:14:27
How do how does that hit you guys?
1:14:32
>> I think for me personally and I think Michael differs from me in this is that like I've always been about choice and education and to me choice means having many different choices to choose from and not just abolishing like if someone really wants to spend seven years of their life in grad school then that's what I want them to be doing.
1:14:47
I don't want them to be doing what we're doing at 151 17 because they thought it was cool or because they thought that was the thing to do or whatever.
1:14:54
Um so I I'm personally just into hey what is the right path for this particular person and maybe that's founding a company and maybe that's going through a PhD program and also thinking about the second and third order consequences of doing these things.
1:15:11
Uh I think that's really important.
1:15:13
Um but I don't think it's like oh well now I concede that the PhD is good because their founders are choosing PhDs.
1:15:21
I I concede that choice isn't good.
1:15:25
>> Yeah, I'm I I share your opinion. Michael, you you differ.
1:15:30
>> Yeah, I think um we just live in a world where the vast majority of people have to pursue those paths.
1:15:35
So if if they're going to do that thing, so it stands to reason that you know you're looking it's going to be hard to find people who have let's say PhD level knowledge in a field who you know haven't studied in a school.
1:15:51
I mean that's why we're out there hunting for these people.
1:15:53
Um but I think we're starting to see more and more that's changing.
1:15:57
Um, I think AI as a tutor, as a tool, we're already seeing its effects among young people where they get to the frontier in a field much quicker than they than in the past.
1:16:11
They're tackling hard problems and hardware and uh and materials and so on that in the past wasn't possible.
1:16:16
And I think this is due to that ability to get to the frontier.
1:16:20
So I I I think like sure it's like it feels like it's the old technology, but we're starting to see change.
1:16:28
And so my prediction in the future would be that we will see that level of knowledge and skill >> maybe authenticated in some other way.
1:16:38
>> Yeah, I I definitely agree with that.
1:16:40
Like I think Max Plank's one funeral at a time is actually happening right now.
1:16:46
I had an experience though that like really pissed me off.
1:16:49
uh early in my career um well not so early but I was pitching a university endowment on our way of investing right they I'd made what they call the finals and the committee was all PhDs in economics right >> and so the conversation was wonderful like literally I was really enjoying it because it was a deep dive in the weeds about like why you can't measure risk using a standard deviation of return.
1:17:19
I won't nerd out on you here. I won't go further.
1:17:24
But anyway, it was really a great conversation.
1:17:27
And then one of them looked at me and said, "Where did you get your PhD?"
1:17:29
And I'm like, >> I I literally kind of laughed and said, "I barely have a BA."
1:17:36
And like I pointed at my book, What Works on Wall Street. I said, "That's my PhD." >> Right.
1:17:43
And >> literally, >> man, did the temperature change in that room.
1:17:51
>> Like literally, it went from convivial and fun and like everyone were really enjoying to like silence.
1:17:58
They they just put up the the wall.
1:18:05
>> Needless to say, they did not hire me.
1:18:05
Y >> but but like I definitely think that that that attitude might be dying out. >> Do you guys agree?
1:18:18
>> It we could go field by field.
1:18:18
I think if we look at healthc care or uh I don't know some of the tougher sciences it seems like that's where prestige is still the most powerful.
1:18:28
I think what I would say overall because I saw this in the homeschooling world all the time that someone, you know, would be a homeschooler out in the world and they'd encounter a family that sent their kids to school and the people be like, "Oh, are your kids sick today?
1:18:45
Like, why aren't they in in in school?"
1:18:47
And they'd be like, "Oh, we're homeschoolers."
1:18:48
And other people would get so affronted because what what people tend to hear is when you do something different than them is they think the undertone is, "And I'm doing something better than you."
1:18:59
And it is absolutely not what is true that's happening.
1:19:03
So my hypothesis on what happened to you in that room is that those people were affronted with how could this person be as smart and as articulated us without having gone through the same gauntlet that just can't stand.
1:19:15
So therefore we will not hire someone who would make us feel like the emperor has no clothes because I went and did it this other way.
1:19:22
But my view on all these things is that like no one is implicitly saying because they make their own choice that their choice is better than someone else's choice.
1:19:31
It might be better for them, but they're not implying moralistic or ethical value necessarily to it.
1:19:38
And I think this problem is is way more pervasive of people hearing that someone else is doing something different than them and what they have to do is shame, attack, distance.
1:19:50
And I don't think that's going anywhere.
1:19:52
I think we're really bad as human beings at being able to go, "Wow, that is so cool that you're doing something different than me." Tell me more about that. We are terrible at that. >> Yeah.
1:20:03
Uh, you know, uh, I was talking to a guy who I think might be the closest version to somebody who might actually be enlightened.
1:20:11
I have kind of a rule of thumb that anyone who claims to be enlightened ain't.
1:20:17
>> And and he never makes a claim to be enlightened.
1:20:19
But he was talking about our mutual interest in Carl Jung.
1:20:21
And one one of the things that he's put the way he put it was really interesting to me.
1:20:28
It was like because we were talking about this like why do people get so pissed off by people who are like different than them.
1:20:37
And and and he says to me, >> "Well, here's a story that I want you to consider."
1:20:43
He goes, "There was a there was a psychologist uh dealing with a woman who'd come to see him and she had all these anger issues and you know um she would complain that you know my husband says that I'm dumb or my husband says that I'm lazy and and then the what he did was he said would you get angry at me if I said that you were an ugly horse?"
1:21:04
And like her reaction was that that's insane.
1:21:09
No, of course I wouldn't be angry if you called me an angry horse.
1:21:15
I would wonder a little bit about your sanity, but I wouldn't get mad.
1:21:17
And he goes, "That's now this is the psychiatrist talking to her.
1:21:23
That's because with every fiber of your being, you are you know that you are not a horse and that you are not ugly."
1:21:31
The reason you have the reaction that you have to those criticisms is that some part of you believes that about yourself. >> Yep.
1:21:44
>> Oh, that's very brilliant.
1:21:45
>> And and I'm like, wow. Okay.
1:21:45
That that like really And then you start thinking about, you know, like all the great maxim writers like what what annoys you the most in other people are qualities that you yourself having are trying to hide >> always.
1:22:09
>> So I think that >> you know maybe like a simple policy reform that could help on this question would be if there was an authenticating body that was independent of the universities that could that could say whether or not someone had the requisite level of knowledge.
1:22:27
>> I I think that that's a great idea.
1:22:30
We're looking for that's one of the ones that we actually have in our in our uh basket of of ways to to make things better because like the other thing that's happening right now is the citadel of science, right, is still devoted to un in my opinion unbelievably and unsupportably >> to materialism and like every scientific innovation that's happened over maybe the last 30 years, >> particularly in physics and quantum physics, right?
1:23:04
Like like negates the the very foundation of all these things that these people are still hanging their hat on.
1:23:11
And yet that loop, right, that we talked about earlier, >> you can't get a grant.
1:23:16
You can't get a grant if you're not >> uh praying in their church, right?
1:23:21
and and the whole idea of in quotes peer review is destroying innovative research, right?
1:23:29
Like one of the things that we're going to do when our AI is up and running in its full full and final well never final but close to final form is we're we're going to have it uh generate thousands upon thousands of null hypotheses >> because of the way things actually work.
1:23:52
No one's going to get a grant saying I think I'm gonna I think that after we approach this through the disciplined scientific method, we're going to get a null set, right?
1:24:01
And they're going to be like, uh, yeah, we're not giving you any money.
1:24:06
>> So, but learning via negativia is like profoundly good, >> right?
1:24:12
Sherlock Holmes, the Hounds of Baskerville, how did he know that they knew the intruder?
1:24:16
Because the dog didn't bark, >> right?
1:24:19
like the dog didn't bark means he knew who the intruder was and that's learning via negativia.
1:24:24
And so like we're just going to see if we can just have it generate >> thousands upon thousands of uh null hypotheses that we will autopublish to a publicly available data set. >> Yeah.
1:24:39
Well, >> think that that kind of stuff is cool.
1:24:42
>> One thing you said that I think is important that we see when we're thinking about Yeah.
1:24:45
character traits and founders and makers and so on is like there see like some people are creative and they're routinely unconventional and let's say they have tense beliefs in their set like those beliefs are going to have a constellation that is pretty wide and far.
1:25:03
So it's like we've met people who believe in UFOs, but they're not working in UFOs.
1:25:07
They're working on this and like and that's the idea that matters.
1:25:11
But the fact that they have this other crazy idea is like is part of that whole package.
1:25:15
package. And what I think is filtered out in the process we've been discussing whether it's getting accepted to undergrad or participating in grad school is like very much so that you know the materialist worldview uh basically some soft atheism or something
1:25:32
is is pretty much I'd say prevalent among academic scientists and that worries me not because I'm interested necessarily in the truth or falsity of other views but because I think it weeds out these thinkers who have just crazy ideas all over the place. Um, completely
1:25:46
Um, completely agree and I have I passionately believe that if you could infer all of my beliefs about anything, right?
1:25:57
About anything by hearing only one of my beliefs, then I am brain dead and I am >> completely >> like I am I am now sunk to just brain dead ideological adherence.
1:26:11
And I'm not telling you anything that you're gonna like back to Claude Shannon.
1:26:16
We were briefly talking about him before we started recording.
1:26:20
Like I I I think Shannon's kind of cool and one of the things that I love about him is that idea that information is what you don't expect, right?
1:26:30
And the wonderful analogy of a political speech contains zero information.
1:26:37
A poem can be loaded with information.
1:26:40
And I think the same is true of people and their beliefs and belief systems and all of those things.
1:26:47
And so I'm like I I'm far more interested in uh >> yeah we need a philosophy of surprise. >> We do. We really do. Like I I love that idea.
1:26:59
Maybe we could uh collaborate and come up with some kind of prize.
1:27:02
And >> that'll be my next book. >> And there you go. Well, okay.
1:27:05
I am my my nannies are texting me and telling me that it's time.
1:27:13
I I am the cat that it that they all have to try and heard usually because I am unemployable.
1:27:19
Um and they do their very best and sometimes I comply with them.
1:27:28
>> Uh so we are nearing our our time here.
1:27:31
Uh our final question is I I think a fun one and I'm you each get the same question so we're going to hear. Okay. >> Four cool things.
1:27:41
>> So, so we're going to make you empress and emperor of the world for one day.
1:27:47
>> We're You can't First off, you you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. You can't kill anyone.
1:27:53
But what you can do, >> what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone >> and you can say two things into it that are going to incept the entire population of the earth.
1:28:07
They're going to wake up whenever their next day begins.
1:28:11
They're going to wake up and they're going to say to whoever's there or to themselves, >> you know, unlike all the other times where I had these great ideas when I was waking up or in the shower, I'm going to actually act on both of these two things today and keep acting on them going forward.
1:28:30
So Danielle, I'm going to start with you.
1:28:33
What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?
1:28:35
I mean, the words that come to mind, and I'm hearing this is like if there if it's just a two-word phrase, it's make it. >> Oh, I like that.
1:28:45
>> Get out there and make it. >> No, I like that.
1:28:47
>> Yeah, >> that's very good. That's one, though.
1:28:49
Get out there and make it. You got another one. >> Oh, two ideas. >> I got two ideas. Two ideas.
1:29:00
>> I'd also add something about urgency, like today's the day. >> Tempest. >> Don't wait. Today's the day. Carp dam. I love both of them. Michael, what you got?
1:29:11
>> Yeah, mine relate to that.
1:29:11
I'll go with uh I feel like people don't realize that creativity is perishable >> that >> it has a shelf life and they wait too long or they take too much time.
1:29:23
And we really have to and this ties into what we do and the whole conversation and like getting people started earlier is like I think like athletics that people have a a prime in their lives and so I think we should take that seriously.
1:29:36
The second thing would be >> I'll go I'll go with uh IQ is not creativity >> and uh and I wish we had a a way to it's like it's surprising to me how little we understand where new ideas come from or new art and and all that. It's just so mysterious.
1:29:54
Um, and it's so clearly not just intelligence.
1:29:58
Uh, so yeah, >> I love both of your inceptions.
1:30:00
Uh, on the the creativity one, I I uh I don't know, maybe about a dozen years ago, I made the uh it it occurred to me that I was at best a co-creator.
1:30:24
And when I really adopted that as a belief, right, guess what happened?
1:30:31
>> Like the muses started singing to me in a way that they had never sung to me in the past, >> right?
1:30:37
>> And and like I think that when you this is my idea, you can't have it.
1:30:41
I'm not going to share it with you.
1:30:45
That isn't that is a philosophy of uh scarcity.
1:30:52
That is a philosophy of this is the the this idea can't grow other ideas, right?
1:30:59
And so when I really and I this is the way I refer to myself all the time like I'm at best a co-creator and like it really opens up the floodgates and and the muses start singing.
1:31:12
Maya Angelou has a great quote and I'm not going to be able to quote it quite right but it's something like creativity is the only resource that when you use it you get more of it. >> Yeah, I love it.
1:31:24
Uh Dorothy Parker uh who was a member of the Algangquin round table and a real witty woman was uh the cure for boredom is uh creativity.
1:31:33
There is no cure for creativity. Okay, >> man.
1:31:44
>> Thanks so much for joining me. All right. >> Thank you.