In this episode of The Judgment Call Podcast Peter Bordes and I talk about:

• What drove Peter to become a serial entrepreneur?
• What is the archetype of an entrepreneur composed of?
• Is the current path to success for many startups broken? Is the ‘old boys network’ still in charge of the IP pipeline?
• What impact does the ‘death if the industrial age’ have on the tech industry?
• How does Peter’s investment process work?
• Peter’s plan to incorporate a body of knowledge for successful entrepreneurship and building a business (the four pillars).
• Has Silicon Valley already moved into the cloud and left the local area?
• How will education work in the future? How will we motivate people to learn? How will we choose topics? What value does mentorship have?
• Are startup accelerators like YCombinator a good way for startups to grow?
• What role religion plays in entrepreneurship?
• How travel to other regions influenced Peter and what adventures he lived through.
• What is ‘positive PTSD’?
• How we have all been swept up by this person-to-person proganada (in order to sell more).
• Will we have an AI that prospects us from Big Tech propaganda soon?
• What will be the outcome the media upheaval?
• Will there be a singularity of knowledge accumulation soon?
• Do we live in a simulation? Will we simulate our own minds soon?

Peter Bordes is a serial entrepreneur, executive, investor, mentor and advisor. He currently runs Trajectory Capital,  TruVest and MainBloq.

You can reach Peter on Linkedin.

 

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet, risk takers, travelers, adventurers, investors, entrepreneurs, or simply mind partners. To find all the episodes of this show, please go to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or go to JudgmentCallPodcast.com for more resources, including how to become a guest, how to advertise, and to see all the lectures, podcasts, and books I would like to you, would like you to listen to or read. Please also go to our website at JudgmentCallPodcast.com. Like this show? Please consider leaving a review on iTunes or like us and subscribe to us on YouTube that will make it easier for other users like you to find us there on. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is also my business. What we do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the best travel deals for you as they happen. We do that in economy, premium economy, business, and first class, and we screen 450,000 new airfare deals every day just for you and present the best based on your preferences. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% of their airfare deals. In case you didn’t know, Americans and Europeans can already travel to more than 80 different countries again, South America, in Africa, and in Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium for free, go to mightytravels.com slash mtp. That’s too much for you to type, just type in mtp4u.com, mtp4u.com to start your 30 day free trial. I’m very happy today to have Peter Borders here with me and Peter is a serial entrepreneur, executive investor, mentor, and advisor for a lot of companies. He currently runs to Jack the Recapital, his VC business, as well as TruWest and MainBlock, and hopefully he’s going to tell us more about those. Welcome to the Judgment Call podcast, Peter. It’s great to have you. Great to be here, Torsten. Thank you. I’m looking forward to our conversation. Absolutely. Same here. This show is about risk takers and people who risk their life, their reputation, their money on a somewhat contrarian idea that they had. When I went through your LinkedIn profile with also the things you told me in our last conversation, we definitely shared this never ending curiosity, this ADD for something else that comes around. It might be more exciting than the old thing and there’s always something else to explore. I definitely have that. I wonder, what was the first time you discovered that? When did you go towards this trajectory where you felt like I really see myself as a serial entrepreneur or see as someone who keeps exploring, goes into this curiosity driven life in Korea that you’ve been going so far? When did you first feel that? How do you get started? That’s what you’re thinking about that question because I was thinking about how Ford goes back and I’ve been an entrepreneur ever since I was very young. I had a commercial fishing business in the summers that I did. I’ve just always asked a lot of questions and never really taken things for what you see is what you get. I think the biggest inflection point for me in my career and really starting to have that understanding of my curiosity was in my junior year at college, when I ended up doing an internship for, my big love of my life has always been digital media, digital media advertising and then soon anything digital transformation driven. When I did that internship, it really opened my eyes up, blew my brains apart in the way I was thinking about things because I learned, I basically, I went to my father who was an entrepreneur and I said, well, how was your experience and I said, I don’t know. I want to stay in school and he’s the classic. You go here and then you go here and then you’re going to go to grad school. That old career path trajectory and I just flushed three quarters of my entire education down the toilet. I learned so much and not only did I learn so much, I learned that there’s a huge disparity between what I’m getting out of my education and who I am and what I’m really interested in because the education is teaching you discipline and focus. It opened my eyes up to this incredible infinite realm of possibility that I think about that’s out there and that was really the inflection point that started it all for me. Was that a conscious decision for you or that just came along and kind of the facts presented themselves? Do you feel like you made this to yourself or kind of you were drawn towards this way and there was not so much you could do about it? I think it’s something that I innately have always had inside me. It’s just part of my DNA, but it was an inflection point that really opened my eyes up and my conscious self that like, oh my God, look at this world and especially because there’s an interesting second part to that. Then I ended up moving to Europe, working for two years. My father was like, what are you doing? I was like, I need to do this. I need to go explore. I came back from that and then that even further accelerated because I came back and all my friends who I love the pieces, I grew up in New York City and then Princeton, New Jersey. Basically, I looked at them and we lived in such an insular bubble and even the way when I came back, I’ve always been a person who’s always asked a lot of questions, why, why, why, why? Why is that like that or always had this kind of more intuitive aspect of me, which of course is something that in the generation I grew up with, guys weren’t intuitive, but I always I guess it’s probably one of my big loves for the water and fishing, this kind of sixth sense connected to being able to see and understand things before my wife is like, you see stuff in the water. I don’t even know what’s there. It’s also, I think, a reflection of this as well, but when I came back from that as experience overseas and looking at, you go to Princeton Day School and in school, they say, oh, you’re going to do this. You’re going to take the SATs. It’s going to determine the rest of your career and your college and then you go to there and then you’re going to go to grad school and then you’re going to get, go work in investment banking and then you’re going to go get married and you’re going to have 2.2 kids and 3.2 BMWs and then you’re going to move to Greenwich, Connecticut and you’re going to be happy. That’s not so bad. Yeah. Well, I looked at it and I said, I don’t think that’s what I want. That’s like, there’s this incredible world of things that were happening and then the internet started to happen and that was the end. So to answer your question, I think it’s a bit of, there are things that we’re predisposed to. There are incidents or moments that happen in our lives that open those possibilities of what we’re kind of innately having us and those moments open my kind of conscious being up to like, this is who I am. This is what I’m interested in and it’s just kind of become a way of life. Like you, I’m just perpetually curious. There’s always got to be a better way. There always has to be something new and especially when the world started to get, to become driven by technology, which is the infinite realm of possibility. I went to my father who was an entrepreneur, is a great example of that. He was in the radio and cable TV business and I started this and he was going to put himself through Yale. Son, when I was your age, I bicycle barefoot through 12 feet of snow delivering newspapers to put myself through college, you know, like kind of one of those fathers and then he was on his way to be a sociology professor in grad school at Columbia and his best friend said, Hey, I just inherited $50,000. Let’s go buy a radio station and my dad said, get a, I have nothing to do with that. Talked him into it and then had this incredible career, which is a big kind of foundation for me as an entrepreneur and what he built. But interestingly enough, when this started to happen for me and the idea of digital transformation and technology, transforming, I was working in our family company, you know, looking at leading the digital side of taking broadcast radio and moving it into the digital realm. And I went and it was, it was incredibly frustrating. Another lesson, you know, about being relentless, but also knowing when, when is enough, like I’ve beat my head against the wall. I better stop beating my head against the wall or I’m going to bleed to death. And I remember speaking with him about it. I said, Dad, you got to take this seriously. You know, just like you had the foresight to see that AM radio was mono and he was buying up FM radio licenses like, you know, and cable licenses for $250. And there wasn’t even a way to listen to it. You had the foresight to see that that was stereo. Now, this is the next natural progression and extension. You know, it’s XM, it’s pushing and pulling and metrics. And now we’ve got our local audiences are national and global, you know, because ultimately in the radio business or content company, radio is going to become one of those mechanisms to be able to reach them. And I guess that’s probably one of the third inflection point that really pushed me, catapulted me into, you know, how I got where I am today because after deciding that that wasn’t going to happen. I was leading and founded an investment bank that I ran for 12 years and the boom, boom days of the internet helped found a bunch of companies and really started to get, you know, knee deep in that first big wave of digital transformation. That was that was really kind of probably the third catalyst that really pushed my trajectory into, you know, the way that I think in like its world today, like, you know, like we’ve talked about before. Yeah. I think this is something we all share, this curiosity gets us started. But I feel, I don’t know if this was true for you, but to an extent, there is this cross pollination, you come from one industry and you have a certain set of learnings. They could be, you know, very hard or things that went easy in another industry, you come to another industry and feel like, well, I can just apply this. So it’s not rocket science necessarily to say most people in Silicon Valley, they go there to steal ideas or that they’ve already sold and they raise money on it and then they bring it to the rest of the population. That’s kind of the adoption cycle that they start. It’s not necessarily that they come with a big innovation that they came up with. Like MP3 is probably a good example for this, which was invented in Germany, but popularized mostly in the US and then invented the file sharing. So what I’m trying to say is entrepreneurs are often drawn to a new project because it’s easy. Customers kind of keep calling you and they are interested in it and it’s not just, obviously we all want to make money, but it’s also this, you can get closer to fulfill your potential and they all don’t really know where our potential is. We don’t really know what we’re supposed to do in life without purposes. Other people seem to have a better idea of that when they look at us, but why, for instance, had I trouble with this figuring this out, even through the reflection talking to other people. What I felt is as an entrepreneur, it kind of makes life easier, to be honest. It’s really emotionally a big toll, but it gets you to try out a lot of stuff and sooner later you find something you’re really good at. And that’s determined mostly by you, obviously also by a lot of luck, right? We all went and lived through the internet bubble where everything was suddenly going up and it was a huge whole market, but it gives you a lot of wiggle room to find something you’re really good at. Did you feel that was a big advantage for you too, or you thought that would have been easier to do? It didn’t fit me, but it would have been easier a traditional career. I think I would struggle in any form of a traditional career, knowing myself to that point. I’ve learned to kind of, I don’t want to say bucket people, but there are people who think more one dimensionally, two dimensionally, or three dimensionally, and the people who just like to go work at Time Warner, I’ve got a great job, here’s my career path, this is where I’m going, there are the others then who can do that, but have the ability to have some form of kind of entrepreneurial aspect to innovate within that. And then to me, there’s the next iteration of that, which we talked about in our original discussion, about the people who are able, I think being a true entrepreneur is someone who can understand that there are literally patterns around us everywhere, and has that kind of intuitive, curious sense to be able to question that and see them, and then be able to identify the patterns, understand them, and then act on them. And I really find those are kind of the pillars of a great entrepreneur. So whether you’re trying many different things until you find that or not, I think it goes back to that interesting question that you are asking about like, is it innately something that we’re born with, or do you learn, or do you kind of have that gene, are you predisposed to it? Because certainly, when I started my path, everything that I learned in school had absolutely nothing to do with what I was doing, so much so that when I was building one of my companies we’re going in three years, we went from over a million in sales to 70 million, going at a hyper trajectory, we were just trying to learn and figuring out real time, but there was no playbook, there was nothing in school, there was no education, there was no mentoring, networks didn’t exist today, and you’re literally working in real time trying to figure things out. And I think most of the people who are more predisposed to that one or two dimensional, I don’t mean that in any kind of derogatory sense, it’s just the way that we function and our brains function, as humans and understanding what happiness is to us, they can’t operate in that kind of environment, and one, and then two, they’re just not curious, they just want to have that stable consistency, they are not going to run through walls, as you know, in entrepreneurialism, the best thing you can do is fail, most people think failure is failure, it’s probably one of the, I love failure, it’s only what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. It is the Silicon Valley mantra now, right, to fail quickly, and it used to be, by that they mean 18 months, and I think by now it means three months, and it’s probably going to be two weeks, very soon, right, you, with these scalable platforms where you deploy things, where you have a global audience instantly, so you very quickly realize if this is a success or not, and I fully agree with you, failing gives you a lot of lessons, you kind of don’t want to fail in the sense of they are not, right, or in the sense of you raise two billion dollars, and then you’re like, like, creepy, creepy, the TV subscription service that was primarily to be run on cell phones, and people realize, oh, well, we also want to watch it on the TV, and never really took off stiff competition from Hulu and Netflix, so I feel like you want to fail, but you want to fail in the sense of that’s limited as a wall around it, you don’t want to fail super public, that’s kind of embarrassing, even in Silicon Valley still. Yeah, and then to your point about risk taking, that’s a whole nother kind of layer when I think about the stack of entrepreneurialism and the startup world and the ability to say there’s got to be a better way, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove that and to be able to take those calculated kind of as best as you can risks in improving whether it works or not, and then once you get traction, then there’s so many other different things that need to be able to happen, I found that the, actually, I’m going to write a book one day about this called Founder Syndrome of the Little Napoleon Syndrome, what makes good companies great, and how do you go from a startup and an idea to starting up to building a scalable organization and miss all those failure points that people have when their ego becomes your biggest detractor, or the things that we don’t learn, even in a little bit, a lot of the, a couple of guys I mentored that went through Y Combinator and one of the TEAL programs, and I kept asking, I said, so tell me about your experience there, heads down, heads down, talk to your customer, you know, build, build, build MVP, get the demo day and get as much money, and I said, okay, and then what? So what if it works, do you, how do you get from three guys and money from demo day to day, building a company with 300 people in five offices globally? Do, does anyone talk to you about how to do that? Absolutely not. I was like, well, that’s a huge, like, that’s very, very significant value. You build it and they will come. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of the idea. You build some network infrastructure, some tool, and then you hope for the best, some bigger company will buy you. I think that’s, that’s been working well for a lot of issues. So that’s kind of what they’re looking for. And I listened to a talk from Brian Chesky, the founder, one of the cofounders of Airbnb. You can see it immediately that, that he has something that takes you beyond just build it. Like he came out of Y Combinator as well, but he was one of the rare success stories at that scale. They have a lot of success stories, but not a lot of huge ideas. And what you can see immediately, just talking to him for like, like listening to him for like 15 minutes is how much of a ego and how much of a quick, let’s do this, this, and this, with a, with a, you know, good mix of extroversion and introversion that he brings to the table. And you can see that’s different than most people, developers who are part of Y Combinator. So I found him probably the exception and it has, had to be proven right to put or did prove right. The question is, can others replicate that success? And I think I want to get your opinion on this because I feel I’m, I made up my mind already. The current environment where we see a lot of startups don’t go anywhere. They have trouble scaling to evaluation, half a billion dollar or a billion dollars. And then we have the investments by division fund. And often those are minimal rounds, a hundred, 200 million dollars per investment, often up to a billion dollars or, or beyond that. And then just division fund vehicles seem to go IPO. Everyone else seemed to have trouble to get to that stage, get to the valuation that makes you of interest to, to public markets and to investment banks who can get you public. I feel like there was something broken for the last 10 years. I don’t know if it’s changing now. Maybe Bitcoin is going to change that or crowdfunding is going to change that. But I feel there’s a real disconnect between what most of the entrepreneurs actually want, which is a meritocracy. So everyone has access to the same resources and we decide our fate by talking to customers, by talking to investors in a pretty level playing field. And I feel this wasn’t true for the last 10 years. It was more like the old boys connections who made the IPOs and the big payouts for most entrepreneurs as well as investors work. How do you see that? I, you know, it’s, it’s, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s still that way, even though with crowdfunding and things, I mean, there are some success stories, but it’s still that old boys network. And I think that’s going to be very tough, tough to democratize, you know, and outside of, you know, companies really learning to not become so dependent on raising large amounts of capital, but really more focusing on operating, you know, exceptional operations and how you can build a business and get it to being, you know, hear all those stories about law. I built this in the garage and I only raised a million dollars and I, you know, got it to EBIT, to EBIT prof, you know, profitability. And then I grew it from there. I think the problem in doing that is again, there’s not a lot of education or let alone even a software kind of platform that helps you move through those different stages and cycles to be able to operate efficiently. Everybody’s just trying to go, you know, go quickly and go fast. And then of course you get stuck in that there’s so much seed money and then you get stuck in that choke point of the A round because how do I get into that club? How do I stand out? And I think that kind of human sociological aspect is going to be one of the last things that really changes. I mean, I do believe it’s possible. I mean, we’re certainly seeing it, you know, I think about the world that business cycles that my father lived in, they were massive and methodically, you know, long cycles. He was, you know, protected by the FCC. I know I’ve got all my radio stations in Philadelphia. I’ve got minimal competition. And what I was interesting was as digital transformation started to happen and I started seeing that cycles around him speed up and also that controls FCC broadcast radius getting broken apart and becoming fragmented, you know, some interesting learnings were for me watching how he dealt with that. If you think about the trajectory like you were talking about today that companies go through, I mean, it’s absolutely remarkable, you know, comparatively just even 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. And I actually wonder at one time when we’re going to see what I think of as the right angle business model where someone will build a product, launch it, you know, and sell it three months later for $2 billion, because, you know, now we can go to one to one to many globally so rapidly versus the way that I think that the traditional, you know, broadcast business or even think about how records were distributed before MP3s, right, you had to go to market to market and get every radio station to start to play your record was very you know, lengthy rollout, you know, whereas now you can go one to many almost instantaneously. And those are the businesses. And those are the kind of cycles that are going to start to change that because you’re not going to need to raise the kind of capital that you’ll need to be able to get that hockey stick trajectory, which works for some, but in others like, you know, when you hear that we work stores and things like that, it’s, you know, it’s kind of a broken, I think of a broken long term model. Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of attention for the, the actual unicorns are that the ones that are in the IPO pipeline that usually get that kind of investment and then sooner later go IPO and then, you know, Airbnb just got a hundred billion dollar market coverage is ginormous, it’s bigger than many hotel chains. Maybe they deserve it. So I think Airbnb is one of my favorites in this recent crop, but there’s a lot of hypey, not sustainable business models from my point of view that go IPO, get a lot of attention, get great valuations, but there’s a lot of companies in between that nobody has heard of that should deserve way more attention of great business models, great profit margins, very low capital raising. And in between something went wrong and then you live through the dotcom boom, me too. What we had, these companies go from an idea to a billion dollars within a few weeks and without, without any real business, just as a shot at a future market, and that was certainly the other extreme in this. And do you think the next 20 years will look more like what we’ve just seen or there will be something that’s more democratic because I think there’s a lot of tools, but there’s not a lot of massive options, not a lot of trust from the public in these pre IPO companies, because how do I measure them? What valuation will they get that everyone is just looking for, okay, where’s the next hype going to be and they just want to surf that wave and they know these companies really don’t matter and they’re kind of crap. That’s kind of my gut feeling, even though there’s some great companies obviously in that pool as well. Do you think it’s going to be similar or there’s something out there that’s really a game changer? You know, it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be similar. It’s very tricky because at your point, it’s about adoption and also because we’re going to go again in one of these cycles and it’ll be different than the bubble because they’re great companies that are out there with real businesses, but you look at the multiples that are happening right now. They’re crazy, but you’ve got all these startup platforms where anyone can go and invest. A few people will make some money and then all of a sudden a lot of people are going to get burned when there’s a contraction and then things will change. I think it’s so hard to democratize that because if you look at the trajectory of transformation now is unprecedented, that’s what, COVID has accelerated digital transformation at just such an incredible unprecedented rate. I mean, long live the death finally of the industrial age, the digital age is truly, truly here. So we’re going to go, we’re going through another big cycle and I think you’re going to have these very large companies like Trade Desk or Airbnb, there are these anchor kind of tenets and those verticals and then what companies are going to need to decide along their life cycle is they have to constantly keep checking, where am I? Where do I want to be? Where am I? Where do I want to be? Because there are certain points and there’s one company I’m an investor in now. They were looking at where we had a point where we need to get, where we should be getting acquired, but then they were growing so fast they quickly changed and they did made the right decision where they decided, let’s keep going. Now they’re at the point where they’re too big to get bought by anyone, they’ve got to go IPO and I think that’s one of the things, I made that mistake, one of my mistakes early on as an entrepreneur, I got over $100 million for a company, we were in a huge growth trajectory phase and I said, we’re very interested, but I just need to get one to two more quarters under my belt to finish the cycle out and then I’d like to talk with you again and then literally in the middle of the second cycle, 2007 and the whole market started to correct again and I missed that window of opportunity. So I don’t know, I think democratizing it’s going to be very tricky. The smartest thing is to be able to be at the forefront of these giants, looking at interesting opportunities that you know that their market’s coming towards them and be able to build and be in front of them and then use them as exit mechanisms versus going to the public companies. I mean, I just took a company public, let me tell you, it is not for the faint of heart. Yeah, what’s that? Which company was that? Cubiant in the ad tech space, we have a platform, it’s a cloud based marketplace called the audience cloud and it’s a horizontal end to end marketplace, solves a lot of problems within the industry. The ad tech through digital transformation has become hyper, hyper fragmented and siloed between buyer and seller, there are far too many hops of people taking money out, which leaves tremendous opportunity for fraud to happen, which is a $42 billion global issue right now, besides that on the supply side, by the time they get paid, publishers are getting killed because they’re getting pennies on the dollar and it’s very hard for them to have sustainable business models because it’s so competitive now on the supply side and on the demand side, there’s tremendous waste that’s going on. In the last three years, there was $42 billion worth of waste in ad spend and so by building This is typically click fraud or what kind of basis is that? Oh my God, there’s so many different forms of fraud that are out there, click fraud, you’ve got guys that have can build thousands and thousands, why sell guns and dope when you can build thousands of websites off shore. There were two years ago, two Russians that were taken down by the feds, they were doing a million dollars a day and ad fraud and then one guy decided to throw the other guy under the bus, he lifted the curtain a little bit so the feds could see them, he lifted a little too much and they saw everything and they took it down, it’s a very, very big problem that plagues the industry along with waste and so now we go through these cycles where you have this mass expansion, hyperfragmentation and then I love what Seth Godin said a while ago how now we need, it’s like the big bank theory, these next phases of cycles are about gravity and bringing things together and creating organization within that and I think you’re seeing that happening in the ad tech space today which is one of the areas I’m extremely interested in as well as other spaces as well or now we’re seeing in the crypto space after we went through the first, like the internet, I love the first wave but the business cycles I’m really interested in are the second wave because that’s when you get these real businesses or the Amazons and the Google ad senses start to emerge out of that second wave after that collapse and that’s starting to happen, we’re seeing it down crypto which is extremely interesting and we’re going to see a lot of changes and consolidation there as well but ad tech’s extremely interesting space right now, it’s been dead for so long and finally ad tech 3.0 is here but I mean there’s so much opportunity out there, I love operating companies, I love building things but one of the things that I love about being more on the venture side and not really being on the typical venture side, I like to get involved in companies and help develop them as well, not just being money is that I get to be able to touch so many different things and as we go back to the beginning of the conversation and on this kind of infinite world of possibility that’s out there, the notion of me being stuck in one space is not something that I don’t function well in doing that, I mean it’s just remarkable when ad tech, clean tech, blockchain, ad tech, there’s so much transformation happening right now, it’s just remarkable. So when you share your time between the different businesses that you run or you’re involved in, the investments you make, give me an idea how this works and what companies do you look for for trajectory right now, is that something you see the opportunity when it’s being presented to you or you go out actively and say, okay, I want to be in that market, who is already in there, who should I invite for the next funding round or acquisition, how does this all work? Yeah, so it’s opportunistic and I’d say driven going back to that sixth sense intuition side of things, I’ll give you an example like when I first met the founders of Triple Lift in the ad tech space who are growing like wildfire right now, they had just left App Nexus, which I love because they have an incredible culture going back to the operations side, I’m very interested in the next mob, PayPal mafia, double click mafia, those guys that are highly functional and know how to execute, so that’s a really important pillar that I look for outside of the passion, the addressable market, and then the idea, but for example, Triple Lift probably pivoted, I didn’t say pivoted but repositioned three times. They started with the idea of the visual economy was starting to happen with Pinterest and there were no analytics that enabled you to really harness, I mean, at that time Pinterest didn’t even have any analytics, harness that economy which led to their building algorithms that can track images and associate analytics to it, we’re solving another bigger problem because let’s say Gucci produces 30,000 images a year and they literally have a guy at that time named Enzo and he sits there, oh, girls between 14 and 16 of this demo, Gio, it’s this one, it’s this one, it’s this one, and what they started doing is using their ability to track those 30,000 images, you as an advertiser or content creator could crowd source, well, actually what is the most popular image based on this demo, Gio, whatever I’m feeding in, so that I’m always using the most popular image that’s been crowd sourced and then from there it morphed even further into, okay, well, how do you apply it in native advertising, how do you apply it into now CTV, how do you apply it and they’ve now just morphed into this incredible platform that really is truly this next generation technology driven marketplace for advertisers creating tremendous value and they first started launching, the first thing I start to look for is like, what’s the data, data, data, data, and all I needed to hear was one in four people who click on something at that time and Pinterest buy it, I was like, okay, you got me there, I come out of the performance marketing industry, that’s extraordinary return on a conversion rate and the next was by using this visual mechanism we can increase performance by 20% and all advertising, literally I was like, all right, how much I’d like to invest with you guys, so those are the kind of themes that I like to look for and a lot of it is based on, I just love to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs see what they’re seeing because they might see things in the market that I’m not seeing and then I go do my own homework and then from there it starts from there and having a discussion and it’s anything from real estate to blockchain to ad tech, I really don’t try and pigeonhole myself to any one particular theme, the theme I’m more really looking for is the team their ability to perform the addressable market, what they’re building and then most importantly, are these guys able to not only execute, but identify and understand when they have to keep evolving because going back to those business cycles, things are moving so quickly, doors and windows are opening and closing so quickly that going back to the triple lift side, they ran through one window and then another opened and then they all of a sudden veered right and they ran through another and they ran through another as they were finding the market and that’s a kind of a characteristic and trait that I like to find in entrepreneurs who aren’t so stuck in there. I’m in my box, I can’t see anything else outside of what’s in my box. Those are really important elements I think as far as investing successfully and for putting my operators hat on all my learnings from building companies, ones that have been very successful and other sort of struggles or we’re first at the open window and then had tech teams that couldn’t execute fast enough and another company comes through the window and passes you and builds 20 million in revenues and you’re stuck there going like you guys, you have to be more agile, how do you do that? One of my next projects actually I’m thinking about is a thing called Elemental Cloud. I want to build a platform that takes all the things that you don’t learn in business school or at the accelerators and all the learnings from the PayPal mafias, the double click mafias, the guys who are successful and actually put it into a process going back to what we were talking about before that helps remove those friction points because there is a formula to it, and they’re the tools to do it. We now have Slack and Asana and all these different siloed mechanisms, but how do you put it into a comprehensive, easy to use platform that helps you take a company from what I call the four pillars from start up to starting up the scalable organization to an enterprise? That would be fantastic. That’s one of the biggest failure points right now that I’m finding. It does not exist. I have the same impression. So the question then is how much of this is an art or how much can be put into a quantitative analysis? I guess it’s probably both. We are absolutely right, there isn’t a lot of material that can easily access. Do MIT, for instance, has a lot of their business school open courses online so you can access them. So there is material, but it’s all over the internet. There’s founder interviews, there’s things that we do on the podcast, guests like you who are busy creating content. There’s lots of stuff on Twitter, but it’s not as concise, and I think that’s also true for general investing. I’ve been looking into a lot of more macro investing, forecasting trends, or giving my own prediction a better measure, but how markets might move. And we have this big trend now with the Fed. We have this reinflation trade going on, and there’s a lot of investors who’ve seen those cycles before, or the first time into them, what I was trying to find out, how do I get started, A, from a purely analytical perspective, but B, also putting things in the algorithm, like AI or just any kind of algorithm. And I felt there’s a lot of knowledge, there’s books, nothing much happened in the book market I feel in the last 10 years, nobody writes books anymore, wants to write books anymore because maybe it’s unprofitable, nobody reads books anymore. But there’s been a lot of content all over the internet that I found, but it’s difficult to come up with an aggregator because you compete in marketing with all the original content. How do you make the aggregator as successful in marketing as the original content? It’s like a meta search company that I ran on back in 2007, and we were competing with Expedia. But Expedia has this huge value chain that can draw any user, and they’ve been really good at that. They haven’t really got a desk in market and monetized it very successfully. So you compete with the same marketing opportunities and waypoints with Expedia, and they can pay a dollar per click, but as a meta search, you can only pay 20 cents per click. So I think this would be a similar problem. This is wonderful to aggregate that knowledge, but by the time you have it in the standardized format, the industry consensus might have moved on, and it’s all outdated, and you’ve got to go back to the original content, so get up to solve it. I think you have a good shot of creating something similar, but creating that scale is really hard. I wouldn’t have a good answer for it from my point of view. I would pull that off. Yeah, it’s interesting. No one has, so you just described there’s so many interesting bits and pieces, but there isn’t really a, and there are the guys who figured it out like the PayPal or like the example of the great team at Triplelift, but it’s everything that you don’t learn in school. You learn it in the trenches, but yet in my studying it and having both invested and operated in it, there are constant themes that you can start picking up over and over again. I think very similar to how Jim Collins was one of my favorite books when I was a earlier entrepreneur was good to grade. When you study, there are quantifiable themes within companies that became great, good companies, but what made a great company. I think that you can extract that base information, and again, going back to patterns and process that can be applied basically, they’re almost timeless, and can be applied to almost any industry and how do you grow a company? How do I take it from an idea? How do I prove that idea? How do I move from being a startup where we’re wearing way too many hats and we’re like cavemen in front of a cave, just killing everything that goes in front of it to then becoming more metrics driven? How do I go to, then how do I start removing hats? That’s one of the bigger pain points then as entrepreneurs start to go quickly, there’s a major failure point because it’s very hard to take those hats off and start to build an actually functional organization and what that even looks like and starting to start thinking about some form of projections and starting to think about some form of either dots and then making that next jump to what I call the third pillar, which is the biggest failure point within the ecosystem where it’s either failure or like you were already describing earlier, companies that kind of just, they lose their trajectory and that kind of goes sideways and gets stuck because they’re not able to make that jump to a scalable, hyper accountable, MBO objectives driven machine. What I loved about Jim Collins book when I was building media trust when we’re going through this hyper growth was in the beginning there were so many of these awkward stages where we’re going from crawling to walking to becoming a pimply face teacher in our cycles and I remember when the first few people went to leave and people freaked out in the company I got 50 copies of that book made everyone read it and they were like, okay, people get on the bus, people get off the bus. Some people will stay on the bus through the whole trip. Others at different points of the life cycle because that’s where their strengths are or their weaknesses are and understanding as an entrepreneur, an operator and an investor of those cycles of where the company is and what it needs to do to get to the next cycle. I do believe there are constants in there that can be turned into an actual tool or platform that can help mitigate that friction and risk and really enable that trajectory that these other companies and teams have had were highly, highly successful in being able to execute across those different life cycle stages. We have an enterprise software and technology for task management, slack for communications, big enterprise, but I just find that there’s a huge gap in the market helping entrepreneurs scale their company up. I actually got to, I was so excited, we were the Inc. 500, ninth fastest growing company in the United States and I was going to get to go have lunch with Jim Kramer. I was like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. I can’t wait to talk to this guy. I sit next to him at lunch and I start talking and I’m like, Jim, how do you fine tune a dragster while it’s going full tilt down the strip, not in the car running next to it, tuning the engine? He’s like, oh, give me all your knowledge and he’s like, it’s hard, isn’t it? Good luck. I was like, what, come on, there’s got to be, where do I get the knowledge to do that and understand it? It’s everything that you’re not taught in school. You live in the real world or you live vicariously by cobbling together bits and pieces of all that information, which by the time I’ve done that to your point, it’s probably outmoded already because those business cycles are moving so quickly as markets are evolving and we become, eventually we’re going to have that right angle business model driven by will be the ultimate agile methodology of operating. How do you do that? It’s so fascinating. Yeah, I think it’s a fascinating idea. I think you really onto something there and I feel we’ve definitely liked this as an entrepreneurial community and I was so excited the first time I came to Silicon Valley back in 2001 and I went to a random Starbucks in Mountain View and people were pitching their business plan to an investor and I’m like, holy shit, the whole, I mean, all of Europe I’ve never seen that ever and it was like, you know, there was just a thing that happens every day and there’s like, it wasn’t like a specific event, a bunch of people just randomly having a meeting and thinking about startups, so I feel I’m so close. That’s changing dramatically. Think about that, but where the world is now, I mean, I remember I had friends of mine that were in Europe that came here to go on the accelerators like, oh my God, this economy does not exist in France and then Germany or in Argentina and what I love seeing now is they’re coming here, having success and now that is becoming, you know, decentralized as they go back into where they came from and they bring the capital and the knowledge that they have and it’s starting to, you know, we’re seeing tons of technology and innovation coming out of, you know, the UK and France and Germany and, you know, companies that, you know, years ago when you came, it was like, well, literally, it’s not even apples and oranges, it was like apples and very small rocks, you know, it just didn’t exist. No, indeed. Certainly Silicon Valley as a spur has gone to the cloud and you see that in many Bay Area communities where the mayors are very anti tech and there’s a huge feud between those two and that you really don’t like each other. Maybe Palo Alto is still okay, but most Bay Area communities are extremely anti tech as a wider part of the population. Well, maybe for good reasons, Big Tech has their own issues, but I’m not a big fan of Big Tech. I’m talking, I feel like the reason I do this podcast is really to find out where will entrepreneurship be in the next 20 years and how can we encourage this because I feel this is the strong building block of an economy is entrepreneurship because it makes everyone’s lives better, right? So we create products that other people are willing to try out and they find out they’re better than what they had before and they’re willing to give us money for this. So it’s a voluntary transaction that makes everyone better off because otherwise they would just stop doing this voluntary transaction. This is what creates the world, this is what creates productivity growth, but in the end that’s the person who invented the wheel was probably an entrepreneur. He wanted to make money, he wanted to do something about the transport and he changed the way the world works literally. And I think every entrepreneur has that same, well, it’s probably more short term, but there’s a long term invisible hand that makes entrepreneurship so important. And this lesson was pretty vibrant. I think for the longest time in America, now we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve lost that leadership. It’s probably China is seems more open to entrepreneurship within boundaries than many places in the US, which is staggering to me. And yes, there is a lot of success outside the US, but it’s really tiny bubbles. And it’s not a widespread change of the economy. So the European economy, well, there’s lots of startups and good tech. The European economies haven’t changed much and the GDP growth is very low, the productivity growth is low. And it doesn’t have to be a tech bubble, but it isn’t a widespread adoption. So what adoption of new technology is much slower outside the US still, the US has slowed down as well until COVID. So COVID changes a lot of things. So I feel like entrepreneurship is undervalued in the public discourse from my point of view. And my question is how do we change this? And I think your idea that you just mentioned is fantastic because it really gives us an easy way to educate the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I fully agree entrepreneurship isn’t taught in schools. And so are many other life skills in school. And I think the topic you’re touching is something of education. How do we take all this knowledge that is already out there and that people put on the internet mostly for free? How do we bring this into the minds of the next generation? And I see this with my own kids who are 13, so they’re in a good age to really do online schooling. But it’s not the same in terms of output, in terms of what they learned than the old school system, the in person school. And I feel is what we are looking at is that like the first digital cameras who were kind of crappy compared to analog, but we knew that’s the future. And we knew it has so much more potential because the education could be much cheaper and it’s much more convenient for the individual student. Are we looking at a complete change in how the education system works literally from the kindergarten age all the way up to 90 year olds and isn’t what would you mention isn’t that a sub sector of it where we feel like this could be a beachhead because those are people who really interested in knowledge. But we all face the same problem. The knowledge is out there. We don’t know how to access it. We don’t know where to look for this YouTube, but then there’s like two our videos like this one, but we have maybe only interested in the middle of it, a certain section of it. We have to be on an atomic basis, access this knowledge and get it into our brains. Well, that’s such a I’d love to unpack there’s so many micro macro fascinating aspects of what you just said. I mean, you know, one on the overall one of the overall themes I’m extremely interested in is of two, you know, one is, you know, simplicity is the new innovation, right? All these things getting broken up this simple like slack, what’s that really, really simple communication as on a really, really simple task, you know, Instagram really, really simple does one thing. But at the same time, there’s another theme, which is there’s so much information that’s out there. So I’m extremely interested in cloud platforms that provide cloud based collective intelligence and that collective intelligence by defragmenting all that information that’s out there. Whether it’s like fraud.net, which is a company I’m on the board of an investor in has an incredible system. It’s game changing in how they’re using AI. The more people that plug into the system and the data feeds in the smarter the system gets arguably to one point where you’re moving from a supervised to a non supervised AI model and it becomes self learning and can just start identifying fraud in real time before it’s even happening or, you know, going down to the entrepreneurial level, you know, solving the problem of that. There’s a fundamental problem in the education system, you know, is evidenced by my experience personally going into, you know, my internship and coming back and being like, oh my God, there’s my education and there’s the real world and there’s so much in between and they’re so disconnected, you know, the education system of today and I think why so many people are not going to grad school. They want to go straight out the real world is because they see all that opportunity that’s out there and especially, you know, one of the things that driving it, which is access to capital and the ability to create such low capex when you think about when we were first in the Internet days, the average, you know, small ecommerce site cost millions of dollars to build or even a website was a hundred thousand dollars. I can go build one for 500 bucks now that the ability to conceive and manifest that capex of being able to conceive and manifest is so incredibly low. I find in all my conversations with entrepreneurs from Europe and like Argentina, the biggest problem that’s been there is not the ability to create and build, it’s been the access to capital because those systems have not changed to provide what we have here or hopefully that’s changing as entrepreneurs come here, they’re successful and now they’re taking that concept of angel and earlier stage money. I think that access to capital is one huge problem, those emerging markets, but that will be democratized hands down over the next 20 years. And then two, the way that we hopefully can look at revamping the education system so it’s more connected to what I want to do in life and how, you know, helping, how do I, how does an entrepreneur become an entrepreneur, right? I had to talk about that path and those things that happened to me. Isn’t that part of our education that’s supposed to help me discover, not only teach, this is what you’re going to think, this is what you’re going to do, this is going to be your path, but who are you, what are you interested in, you know, the concept when I first went was my senior year in high school, you need to know what your major is and that’s going to turn, you know, and I was like, my major, I have no experience, how am I even going to know that? And then going into college, you know, not having access to, I think one of the smartest things today that I don’t, I didn’t have then that entrepreneurs have today is mentorship, mentorship, mentorship, because that mentorship helps close that gap between education, the real world and building and that those experiences that are missing in that, in that kind of experience. And then the ability to your point, there’s so much of that collect that, that knowledge that’s out there, how do you take that collective experience and get it in a way or even into a process or even a software system that enables you to help you guide you down this path so that you can mitigate risk and friction points and have the ability to build, you know, without having to raise a ton of money. I think those are the things that are going to really start to, and we talk about in 20 years, where we’ll, where we’ll finance, look, those are the things that are really going to start to change the ability for companies to grow with that and not having to like get access to big venture capital money because they’re going to be so incredibly lean and efficient and understanding how to build without having to waste the kind of funds that are wasted now trying to figure it out. I think that that could be one of the biggest game changers in the next 20 years. Yeah, my hope is that we see these 9 billion entrepreneurs and not everyone has to be an entrepreneur all the time every day. It’s just once in your life or spread out over 80 years, there is one day where you’re an entrepreneur and you create something completely unique that is helping other people to live their life easier. This could be as little as an app or maybe an addition you do on GitHub to someone else’s code. But there is this huge potential of people who are not really plugged into this knowledge economy. And it’s really easy. You don’t have a system to do only do this, but do this from time to time. And I think this whole idea of education is there’s a lot of potential when we even be changed this because on average in the US we pay between $10,000 and $20,000 per student and that includes all the way to kindergarten, to high school students in our schools. There’s a lot of tax money that I think we waste on traditional schooling because that knowledge is basically free, you only need to record the teacher’s lecture, so to speak, the noninteractive part once, they only need literally one teacher per state or per city depending on how customized the curriculum is. And then what you need is in a homeschool environment, something that parents literally can set up themselves or there’s websites coming up like the Airbnb for homeschooling where you have a more interactive learning, where you tell people, okay, this part is of interest, this is what you should learn, this is what you should look at, this is what I want to test you at, and then I want to check out that test later on. And I think this works all the way down to kindergarten and could go all the way up to high school and it gives you social interaction, not to speak a group, not 30 people, but maybe five people, maybe 20 people, maybe 10 people, and it’s a very casual setup, so to speak. I think this is where the future of education could be because it would be extremely cheap. We’re not talking about 12,000 to 20,000, we’re talking about 500 to $1,000 per student in a much better education system. And the only thing we have to really solve for this, because the knowledge is already out there, you can go to YouTube and can do a psychology course, or you can do an arts course, or you can do a law course, or I did a lot of history courses on, from Yale. I thought it’s fantastic. All we have to do is create this serendipity, there’s only YouTube and a couple of recommendations. And I think we’re almost there, but there’s a lot of steps in between, most of them are adoptions in people’s minds, but there’s a lot of tools already there that we can go completely virtual for learning if people had a chance to figure out, that’s back to your point about the entrepreneurship curriculum or the corpus of knowledge, how can we classify this and make people already interested, that’s another problem, how to get people motivated and interested, but let’s assume we can solve this, how can we let them go along a certain curriculum, and there’s a bunch of online universities who do that, who take kind of unsorted knowledge and bring it into a series of lectures, maybe that’s what’s needed for entrepreneurship, is literally online universities giving you two semesters, three semesters, and entrepreneurship, maybe case studies, maybe it’s research, maybe it’s data that comes out of Amazon and kind of as a case study, I think you can pull this off with good professors in an online university, it won’t take a lot of money, I feel you can probably do that for, I don’t know, a few million dollars. And then the question again is how do we market this, how do we get all the entrepreneurs in line to take that course, I think a lot of online universities have exactly that problem right now, they don’t really know how to address this huge potential audience out there, how do you get the award out there, this is I think the biggest problem for most online universities as you say, the content is basically free, and once you have the professors motivated enough to put it together and collect it, but how do you find someone who’s interested in entrepreneurship, how do you connect with them and then make them pay for something they could get for free, if they put a little more effort in? And then I would say how do you have the experience of the yin and the yang of education, because there is the yin of the professor who is incredibly knowledgeable from a theory perspective that’s teaching you, and then balance that out with the yang of someone who’s actually in the world executing and understanding how those pieces come together. And I remember I was taking courses at Stern School of Business, and I had this big paper we had to write and was talking to a professor about, and I’d just come off of my internship and talking about what I wanted to write, and I kept saying, well, I want to write about this because that thing has no relevance to what happens in the real world. And at one point it got fairly contentious, and I turned to him and I said, how would you know, have you ever actually worked in the real world? So help me tell me what to do, and I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. But it was true, there was such a disconnect, not that he was wrong or I was right or anything, but that, again, that disconnect between theory and principle, which has a lot of value, but the disconnect then from how that’s applied in the real world or what you’re using and how you’re using it. And that to me would be extremely interesting to be able to package that up because there’s so much knowledge out there. I mean, I literally, then the mentorship, you would think that my father, one of his biggest, weakest points was I went to him literally and said, teach me everything. There’s those failure points from Gen 1 to Gen 2, where Gen 1 entrepreneurs have a very hard time passing on what they’ve learned, and it was tough. I wish there were so many, and then there’s Gen 2, me being a young, I’m going to go build a billion dollar company, and then my dad saying, no, when I was building my company, all I did every day was focus on making it operate better. And it grew on its own, and I’m like, what, fuck that, I’m going to go build another company. And I’m like, shit, I wish I had listened, those tidbits of knowledge. So they’re more connected in a way that they’re effective and even technology at certain points that gives you access. Oh, you’re at this point now, here are the things you should be looking at from a professor or from guys who’ve been doing it. I don’t know. We’re still all just kind of wandering around as entrepreneurs figuring it out, which is remarkable considering how much enterprise value is being created now. And I would argue over the next five to 10 years, like the industrial age, we have really hit a point where this is going to get bigger and broader and faster and global, and it’s going to be, nothing hasn’t been remarkable. It is really the industrial age is here. One thing that COVID did was accelerate. I’m fully with you, there is this drive now with COVID that we had to change the way we typically interact. And as bad as COVID is, this is a good thing, I feel, because it makes ways to interact and learn more scalable. There’s a couple of online accelerators, so literally, there’s no in person pitches, there’s never any in person interaction. Daniel Ross, he’s on the podcast tomorrow. He runs one of them, Pioneer. And I think, I don’t know if he has focused on this, but he might be a good source of knowledge to look into this, because the entrepreneurs interact with each other. But I’m sure there is a body of knowledge about entrepreneurship, learnings, theory that everyone has to go through in order to complete the course before you get an investment from the accelerator. That would be incredibly valuable, and a lot of them don’t do that. I love Y Combinator. I think they’ve done an incredible job in creating a very vibrant and important part of the economy. But I just go back to this entrepreneur that I was mentoring, his guy was remarkable. I mean, when he was 12 years old, he built a real estate website for his parents and then sold it for $6,000. And I met him on Twitter, he was like, I’m going to come, will you mentor me? Can I come intern at Media Trust? He told me that story, I was like, you’re in. And then I got to be a part of his journey as a young entrepreneur. And he got into the Teal Foundation, he got into Y Combinator, and it was just fascinating learnings for me to constantly keep talking to him about where he was, what he was doing, what was working and not working. It was, and he, one day he was in the Y Combinator program, and all of a sudden just was in my office in New York, and I was like, John, what the hell are you doing here? And he goes, I couldn’t take it anymore, he said, I just, what do you mean you couldn’t take it anymore? I said, I just don’t understand, you know, we have plenty of money. Why is it all we’re focusing on is getting the demo day, and we’re talking to our customers, but I’m building spaghetti code that I’m going to have to go rebuilding. And I don’t need the demo day money, it’d be great. I want to build a real product, and I thought, that’s so interesting. And he said, all we do is sit there, heads down, doing that, and we have no time to look up, you know, and I thought that was very, very interesting. And I said, well, then don’t they talk to you about once you’ve got that product live and you go to demo day, what do you do next? And he said, you know, sink or swim. It’s just a math game. I do 100 of these and two hit, and I went. Yeah, so I feel the individual in most of those white companies, I never joined one of them, and I only looked at them from the outside, and I’m going to talk to Daniel Gross about Pioneer, and I’m going to raise that question. I think the individual doesn’t play a big role, the talents of an individual. It’s measured into, as you say, the demo day, from the outside, it seems like it’s a pure numbers game. And it’s a pure throwing a lot of darts against the wall and hope 106. And for the development of the individual, the question is, is this bit like going to the military because you’re being de individualized in the military, right? Nobody cares about you. You go into this role model and then you can go and succeed, maybe, or maybe not. Most people won’t succeed. Most Navy SEALs don’t make it through the basic training. In fact, 99% won’t make it. So maybe this is a necessary process, and I always ask this question when I have people on what they feel, what role religion, especially the Old Testament, the monotheistic religions play in entrepreneurship. I feel a lot of things that we talk about entrepreneurship, and on a higher abstraction layer, we see in the Old Testament, there’s this belief in a better future, there’s this common then, there’s certain rules we have to adhere to. It’s kind of a software upgrade to the human mind, at least from my analysis. And what do you think happened to entrepreneurship outside of places not affected by the Old Testament? Do you think it was an advantage what happened with Christianity, and obviously it seems like it took off at that time in the 15th century, at least. How do you feel the Old Testament fits into entrepreneurship? Now, that’s interesting, anything about that, I see where you’re coming from on that perspective. But from my lens on it, I feel like it’s more about Buddhism with a hint of Hinduism, because I think of more the, going back to the theory that what makes a great entrepreneur is being able to think multi dimensionally, and seeing patterns, understanding them, but most importantly being able to act on them, and I would venture to say that my experience is more based on that ability to tap into whatever that sixth sense is, or whatever you want to call it, and being able to see things that those people who are just kind of surviving their lives are doing their, I’m 50 years or 20 something working at Time Warner, and I’ve got my job, I don’t need to think about anything different, I view it more as that kind of more Luke Skywalker, Hindu, Veda, tap into the force kind of perspective than more of the New or Old Testament perspective. Yeah, I don’t know enough about Hinduism to be honest, but I know a little bit about Buddhism, but that’s it, what I know about the oriental religions. I’d be curious on your perspective what you’re talking about, how you see that connecting into it, that’d be an interesting perspective for me. Well, in my mind, we should look at the success of monotheistic religions, and apparently there’s something to it, right? The old, original Old Testament Israelites were very successful in rolling over the same stories, many of them were older than the original Old Testament, they were rolling them over, but sticking to them for a long time. So there must have been something to it that helps people enough, and often I think it’s self improvement, you know, the Old Testament is very much, you got to be the best version of yourself possible. So it’s like a self improvement book, if you want to see it that way. There’s a lot of rules, but most people that play an important part in the Bible, they don’t really adhere to the rules too much. They’re like, okay, there’s rules, but you know what, I’m going to do it differently, and let’s see how this is going to play out. And over time, the Israelites, at the culture of the Israelites, survived a really long time. Most of religions, they don’t make it too long. There’s exceptions to Hinduism, for instance, Buddhism later on. And then it catapulted into basically the rest of the world in Europe with Christianity, which I think is a bit of a polar trick, but the same values, but kind of dumbed down, much better markets had got exported to Europe and later on to the US, to South America, Africa, everywhere. It really, it’s still around. And there’s a lot of, I mean, people who are part of the church and they see that it makes them a better person. Now, we can argue what is a better person, but a lot of values like entrepreneurship, I want to create something better. I believe in a better future. I believe in the future that is balance between my individual needs and the needs of others, the society, and God is the one who makes that final judgment. It’s not me. It’s not the president. It’s not a person who’s very worried about the climate, so El Gore, no, it’s going to be God. So it’s kind of, it gives you enough structure. It gives you scaffolding, but it is flexible enough to deal with pretty much anything that has come along since then. Now, the last 100 years are pretty special. They’re kind of like the Roman Empire, less and less people believe in religion and believe this is a useful scaffolding to them. But I see entrepreneurship as this, you know, it starts off of me and I create something for the world and artists have that too. It’s very much like the Old Testament if you’re influenced by this. So it’s a very Jewish idea. I find that fascinating because then I start to think of, okay, well, how does that work? What’s the difference between a religious person and a spiritual person? Is religion, the framework, and the vehicle, the spirituality? And if you almost think about it, then you start seeing the mechanics behind that from corporate culture. It’s almost, it’s fairly similar in a way. I mean, as Christianity spread and that aspect of religion, I mean, I would argue that it just was teams that were able to market better, execute better, and basically commercialize it better. So religion became a business, right? Yes, absolutely. And it probably always was. I just no doubt about it. It’s a self improvement business, right? You have people feel better. To an extent that it’s the opium of the masses, as Marc said. That’s true, right? So, but this is like a very nihilistic view on that. That the Christians were much better marketers than the Israelites. Also, they had a different story to it. But it’s a voluntary transaction. You don’t have to believe in God. If you feel like, oh, it’s not helping me. I tried out for a couple of years and then a couple of years later, you’re like, man, it didn’t really help me. Then you just get up on it. But the religion kept surviving and kept being sold properly. So from my point of view, I think it’s a survival help. Everyone should know it and then should put their own layers of technologies or so to speak of belief on top of that. I would say that in the earlier part of that aspect of religion, it was one of the things that really changed is when it became a business where before it was truly religion as a vehicle to becoming a spiritual being and then as all the interesting sociological and psychological issues for any issues of man, it started to become a business because religion also became powerful and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That aspect started to change it from where it became was very extremely authentic and we’re all spiritual beings. I went through a phase in my life where I became fascinated with that and I studied Catholicism and I studied Hinduism and I read the Hindu Vedas and Buddhism and traveling all over the world and I said, God, it’s so interesting and I’ve spent time in Jerusalem and I found that every single religion to me is like we’re all five people are standing at the base of a mountain and I say, whoa, I’m going to take that road. That’s the snowy mountain road. You go, well, I love the beach. I’m going to take that road and then my friend in my left says, well, I’d love the city. I’m going to take that road and then we take the road, but we all end up at the same point at the top of the mountain because when you break them all down, they basically have the same quantum mechanics underneath them. Why is it that what happened? It’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I have trouble with the exclusivity that some religions apply to their own belief that it’s completely exclusive and that’s the end of it. I find that hard to associate myself with, but what they definitely do is they increase trust, especially the monotheistic religions and that also works with Hinduism because there’s a few gods that in the end have the majority of believers and majority of followers. The effects are very similar there, but not as widespread, but the increase in trust is like the shared economy. It’s a free upgrade to trusting each other so you can specialize more. Obviously, you increase GDP and that I think is very pronounced effect. I’m curious about your travel stories because I’m hesitant to sometimes go into deeper discussions when I travel with other people. Sometimes I don’t speak the language. Sometimes talking about religion and politics is not a topic that goes lightly. Everyone’s different. Like in Ethiopia, it’s surprisingly easy, for instance. Everyone talks about it all the time, but other countries is kind of a no, no. In your travels, where did you go? Where did you feel? You found a culture that’s truly different or that’s truly alien to you, but you were able to explore it and see, oh, that’s really interesting and that’s something that I could learn from. I think travel has been one of the greatest educations that’s affected my life more than my traditional education. After school in the United States, you get a year all past and you travel around Europe for a couple of weeks and you come back, but going and actually immersing yourself and living in places for weeks and understanding their culture. I’ve lived in Paris for a year. I’ve lived in Milan. I spent a month in Kenya with a friend of mine who was from an old ex Pat Anglo, old school Kenyan family, and we spent a month. He was a war photographer who he’d just quit after a sixth friend was shot and he basically, we met in New York and he said, look, it was just a numbers game. It was going to, my number was coming up next. I’m a big adventure traveler. I like going off in the middle of nowhere. I’ve done things like driven a boat from Nantucket to Venezuela for three months with my father off in the middle of nowhere fishing in places where you never saw people for days on end. I like that. I think that’s another important part of my learnings about me is that sense of adventure is what keeps that window of curiosity open. A few trips for me that were incredibly eye opening, I spent a month in Kenya. The three of us drove through the back, back, back parts of Kenya and then ended up on the coast in Mombasa and then drove up to Lamu and then took a 15 hour Dow sailboat and lived for two weeks on an island in the middle of nowhere. The experiences that I had along that way were absolutely remarkable. I didn’t touch a phone. I didn’t touch a newspaper, watch television. I was so disconnected from our lives back here. This is right in the middle of 1999 and the boom, boom days before the internet went down. I was so touched by it when I came back. I had a very hard reentry for two weeks. It was so eye opening to think about what life was really about and what is really important because life there was cheap. One night I was pulling people out of a car wreck at one o clock in the morning where the driver’s daughter was beheaded and bodies strewn in the street. While we’re trying to find people alive, everybody’s coming out of the woodwork and taking their wallets while I’m trying to take their pulses and we’re all running around with nine millimeter clock pistols. My friend’s like, don’t pull your gun. They’re dead and they don’t need their things anymore. It was just experience after experience after experience like that and then coming back to the United States and then literally being dropped straight in back into the startup culture here. It was very hard for me. I would get up right in the middle of the day and just walk out of the office. My business partner’s like, where are you going? I just, I can’t do this anymore. This is not reality. What I saw there was everyday life, life is hard. How fortunate we are, we live truly in an amazing bubble, but also how disconnected we are from that. Same experience in Sri Lanka. What an amazing culture there. Then just my travels throughout Europe, living in the difference between living in Paris and then living in Milan and the languages and cultures. I think a lot of that and I took a lot of that. Even what we’re talking about religion, I think going back to culture, I think culture and core values when I’m traveling or when I think about religion are really the core things that make that drive not only organizations but countries and cities and towns and families and religion globally. It was one of the things that I found when I was building my first successful company, when I applied all those learnings from traveling about the importance of culture and core values, the sense of belonging and purpose and community and being a part of something was game changing for us. It was amazing to see how those aspects and similar I’d say in the way that it’s impacted religion and other experiences and places I’ve been turned us into an unstoppable machine because of that belief system that we put in place. That being said, the other learnings that I had was that while we had one piece of the stack of a company, I always think of everything in the sense of stacks now. When we were growing, hyper growth, we’re talking to all of the venture capitalists and private equity guys are like, how the hell are you guys growing so fast? You guys haven’t even deployed the real hardcore technology innovation. I said because this is one of the key parts of the pillars of an organization, but that being said, then I realized that there were different pieces that were not fully aligned on how we were developing, what we were developing along with our brand, our culture and our core values. My understanding today is of building a company that are companies that evolve culturally and through core values like we were doing and building media trusts. They’re companies that do it purely through tech innovation. They’re companies like Zappos that do it through brand and customer experiences. The companies that are truly great, very sustainable companies are the ones that really understand and they align the full stack of all of those aspects from our brand. You think about Apple, when you go to a store or you buy something, do you open it till you use it? They’ve aligned every single aspect of the entire stack of that company. I find that most companies, and this is one when I work with companies and I look at investing and I look at where their stack is and how out of align or not it is and try and help them align. This also goes back to the systems and processes and even a software program that helps you do that because it’s so hard to do put these moving pieces together in a place. I think from all those learnings going back to the beginning of our conversation to really a lot of what happened to me while traveling really helped me formulate a lot of these things by giving me these adventure experiences that open my eyes up to things that I would never have known had I not done that and stepping into very uncomfortable situations like some of the ones in Africa and other places that I had that are near life and death or dealing with Somali bandits and crazy stuff like that that really enabled me to shed the skins of what we’re programmed to think and what this is what your life is going to be and take a step back and look back. It was game changing for me and the way I look at the world, how I operate, how I’ve gotten to where I am today and had I not done those things, I wonder where I would be in my life right now. All those things that we’ve been talking about all kind of really lead to that and I would so encourage everyone whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re someone working in a corporation already to take the time to be able to step out of your comfort zone and do things that you wouldn’t normally do because it really helps give you that perspective that I think we lose in life because we’re just kind of living our lives and we get disconnected from that. I think that’s been the most incredible things that’s coming out of all my traveling to places I would normally not go being off in the middle of nowhere, nowhere, Africa or other places where we didn’t see people for days. I think what you’re describing, I call it positive PTSD and PTSD is the syndrome when soldiers come back and they’ve done something or they’ve seen something but usually this is what they’ve done where they’re totally not expecting that they are capable of this. It doesn’t have to be super negative, often it is. It’s an extreme margin of your own personality, of your own ego, the way you perceive yourself and at that margin I think we learn very quickly. We learn from literally just a few occurrences. We can model a mental model of the world updates very quickly. We don’t need to do this hundreds of times. We do it once and we are literally a different person and it’s not as traumatic as PTSD and it’s more positive but it’s at these margins that often we don’t know that we are at the margin. We have to push ourselves into situations that are kind of risky, that are shaky and maybe it’s a bit of the hero myth so we have to go out there. We have to find that dragon. We have to be able to get outside of the community, take that risk, fight the dragon, fight with the dragon, hopefully win, come back and bring the gold back. This myth is still out there but a lot of people I think especially in this comfortable society that are caught up here with all the technology, it makes it harder for people. It used to be a male pastime. It doesn’t have to be, I feel. It’s open to everyone to go out there, see what you can do. The benefit of this is not just as your shocker system and that you can show off to your friends. You create this confidence in yourself that you’re able to accomplish things without all technology as you describe it but also it gives you this confidence that I’ve survived this, I’ve came out of this and I’m still here so I can deal with other things. Other people’s fear mongering and I think a lot of what today’s society is, is people manipulating each other. Usually for monetary gains, advertising, we’ve always been very good at marketing in the US but now we use the same skill highly leveraged by AI to just manipulate people all the time in basically all directions just to monetize it later on. This could be for political gains, this could be for personal gains, so I get more attention and this is much easier to push away and to keep your own sphere if you have those positive PTSD experiences and I think what you described that’s not just to create your personality where I think it’s really important but it also gives you this bubble of your own identity despite all the stuff that’s going on that you read every day on social media and a lot of people have missed out on this and I think that’s why they’re so easily being influenced these days and they’re very fearful and they’re very depressed because they don’t have things to really, in their own court they’re really proud of and they feel like I can take anything that’s that nature can throw at me or at least I can give it a shot. I might not be able to survive but I give it a shot and I can live beyond this and I feel that’s a problem these days and technology kind of created that problem, right? It made our life better but we also become these big headed great aliens very soon. I could not agree with you more on that. I mean this is something I mean with our nine year old we really try and teach him to think to be a critical thinker and don’t take what you see is what you get because he’s got access to so much information now. It’s just remarkable. I mean we are truly finally in the middle of the attention economy and to your point it’s a great thing because we have so much access but at the same time we can’t be sheep. We have to be able to learn to think for ourselves and even when we’re interviewing schools going back to education you know asking like great you’re going to teach the math and science and history that’s wonderful. What are you going to teach them to be a good steward of our planet because they are responsible? We are all responsible for the life of our planet and its sustainability and how do you teach them to be a good digital citizen because now there is the physical me and the digital me and they are not necessarily the same thing and especially now that they have all that access and to teach him then to not take things at face value and to be able to ask questions and do his own homework and be able to be able to be a free thinker that can access this information to come up with hypothesis and and decide what reality is for him versus the issues that you’re talking about which is now where it’s determining people’s reality it’s which is very scary. It is I think this last four years has been hopefully one day someone will write a big paper you know paper about the sociological aspects of what just went on but I think it just you know shows that like people are lemmings you know like we what happened to modern man we have accessed all this information and I would say actually it’s been more counterintuitive we’ve become more we’ve become unevolved because we’re not able to think for ourselves and we take everything at face value it’s I think the last four years have been shocking and appalling. The tools the tools of propaganda have gotten really good I’m really sorry it’s so basically Twitter can run and AI we would give you more stuff of what you like that might be interested in and it can personalize this for like a billion users and it’s free so it’s kind of like a perfect tool to push people into their own but it’s certainly it’s a it’s a mindset other people put you into because they want to sell you shit right they want to they want to they want you to vote for them or they want you to be angry and then watch more more CNN these things I’ve gotten they’ve always been around I’ve just but when you watch Soviet propaganda it’s kind of stale right it’s not very interesting people didn’t watch it for long they’re like okay that’s really boring but now the propaganda has gotten cheap and really good and I think what we have to do in our brains is you know level up and realize okay this is just propaganda not by estate actor but by the lots of little actors playing their own little propaganda game but they’re not clear with their intention and the fact and our brains maybe by the help of some AI have to level up and kind of build the defense system against us and I think we’re already in that that stage that this is beginning but it’s rolling out slowly through the population if you give it four or five more years maybe that’s the opposite right we were like we feel like we have full control over ourselves now our own mind again right now that’s absolutely not the case I feel oh I mean you think about bit when I think about what we’re talking about now and then the idea of you know the what religion and how it became a business you know big tech almost is a religion in a sense there’s so much it’s so powerful and all that data that they have and you know how that that battle just that humans have in general with you know going back to simple concepts of your what you eat and absolute power corrupts absolutely and it’s very very difficult to have so much power for good and I think most people trust all these platforms and they think that they’re being objective and that is absolutely not the case I mean I’ve been in situations working with yahoo and other platforms and advertising you know side of the business and we could we could absolutely see that things were getting manipulated on the other side whenever it says trust and safety we have to replace it with propaganda department usually my shortcut and I know like trust okay I can’t talk to these people they’re compromised and I don’t I wouldn’t blame it necessarily in the tech giants I really believe they didn’t want to be in that game and they wanted to just build technology and eventually because they on their own they had a very progressive DNA they attracted a lot of activists and the activists obviously love it because there’s a lot of leverage so they kind of got pushed by other people but this ship is way out of port I don’t know if we can get it back so maybe these these platforms will not be able to change we have to create something new over time that will I think will more protect our individual thoughts so like an AI that prefixes everything and kind of things like you it’s like trained on what you things are propaganda and automatically puts them in a dark room you never see it because then the whole incentive goes away they only do this propaganda because they make money from it but if propaganda makes less money again then it’s over propaganda won’t exist anymore and we go back to facts yeah I agree with you I think you know it’s not necessarily the fault of big tech but then there are all the people then who start to access it and how they use it in the many different ways like the fraudsters are constantly looking at different ways of manipulating you know and how cyber security how they’re dealing with you know the more especially as the more gets digitally transformed it just creates more cracks for people to get in but that ultimately you know again going back to the religion aspect of it I find that to be a very kind of Buddhist Hindu you know Luke you can take the the light path and the dark path and the way that you can use that information information which has been a human conundrum since the beginning of time of man because we have free will and you know we’re self aware and things like that and in use for good you know going to that point you were just making and even even to the point you’re making up earlier which I absolutely love right about being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean I’m going to build a six billion dollar company it can build something as simple as a single app or an application that does good and helps change people’s lives there’s so much good that can come out of it and that goes back to my you know fascination with the ability to use AI and harnessing all that collective intelligence within that data to really affect positive positive change you know versus the darker side of the way people are using that information and I I’m very curious to think you know I think in that 20 year period we’re talking about you know what happens with the democratization of startups and entrepreneurialism a big part of that I think a thread’s going to be dictated by you know what happens from a regulatory perspective too you know when I was first getting in the ad tech industry and we were forming uh I was one of the founders that helped found the performance marketing association because performance marketing all it was huge you’re really not an industry until you have an organization representing it and it was formed last minute around the beginning of the amazon tax and an online tax and then quickly morphed into starting to deal with fraud and all these other issues and it it was an incredibly interesting experience going to washington dc and talking with regulators about and because we’d always said like it’s your fault you should have been regulating this more from the start you can’t just now parachute in and decide this is during 2008 and 9 of course because all the states you know local and federal level we’re looking for tax money you’re going to parachute and start taxing all these online marketers because you’re you know you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to actually cripple and take more money out of the system by shutting because you’re going to shut them down and you know having regulators trying to regulate something that they really don’t understand similar to that first day that zucker bird was talking in in dc which I found to be horrifying because the question city was getting so to where where i’m going with that is then you know what happens now and in relationship to the threat that we’re talking about do we self regulate or do we allow you know what’s going on with big tech or regulators to start coming and what happens to media going forward because media which i grew up in has completely lost objectivity everything has become so incredibly polarized with the pendulum swing and where you have um you know fox news with pictures of donald trump but jeffrey upstein where they photoshopped trump out of the photo is that you know like we’re we’re where’s the where’s the line of what’s right and what’s wrong and our responsibility you know as creators um you know will will we be able to figure that out on our own you know uh or will some new government body come into place and have to start regulating almost like it did you know in the 50 in the 50s media again you know to try and get rid of all that propaganda or fighting communism it’s a very interesting if you think about the uh i don’t think regulation is the answer i mean it might happen or it might not it’s very hard to predict but it won’t be really the answer in the long term and i feel these these mega trends of how monotheism survived let’s go back to the old testament or the capitalism and the entrepreneurship and the way it drove the the us and the progress of former british colony right in different trajectory than the uk itself i kind of took off in uk gave up kind of so to speak um after the second world war and i think these trajectories are still intact i’m not really worried about them long term i i think there might be a war spirit the next 10 years um and it might be it might be a war with china but it’s obviously economy when you look at these these global um dynamics the fastest growing economy always wins and it’s easy to grow an economy in the beginning once you get the middle income that’s where china is it gets really hard that doesn’t mean china stops growing but once the us gets their own growth back and it might not happen for another 10 years or maybe even longer i think we are we are safe and something will come up that that will fix that problems with media that we have right now i think they’re temporary and i think they’re pretty terrible and they might get even worse but i have a lot of hope that something will and it probably will be some layer of technology will fix that for us i think regulation is just too slow and you can always circumvent regulation relatively easily especially if we talk about something like free speech which is so hard to really define because nobody really has free speech we all self censor all platform censor all the time like islamists are taken off um the platforms right away and have always been but if you go full free speech then we should have all kind of use a twitter all the time 20 for seven for their propaganda right so that there’s always limit to these things and i just will be we are all redoing our mental model because we’ll be a push out of this laziness we will be in this you know positive ptsd period all of us and we we’re redoing the learning in our mental mental model once this is done i think we will be a much more effective society right now it’s very split and nobody wants to go anywhere or like you know there’s like for some reason in the us 50 50 there’s a lot of progress on this side and that’s a lot of progress on that side and we all hate each other for another few years i think that’s going to be a fix but probably not the next four years or next 10 years it’s fascinating i i hope like i regulation especially since regulators have not proved to me you know to have a deep enough founding understate understanding of what they’re going to regulate i worry more about regulating than self regulating or things being able to basically you know as we go through these peaks and valleys you know kind of work them work their ways out because this is all new territory for us globally but you know the thing for one of the things you were talking about that i’m most interested in is is the you know while the the us economy is is stagnating and one one aspect it’s really driven now the globalization and the more i’d say the level setting of the global economy and all these what were third world countries and economies now being able to through technology become more you know level set in a way and they’re emerging and growth and growth to where we become ultimately i hope i get to see it in my life like a truly synchronized global economy you know i love what the blockchain does to level set you know the micro macroeconomics around you know what is money and and access to it and i just it’s one thing i keep thinking about like i how long can i hopefully there’s a biotech company that can keep me going because i want to see what’s going to happen in my son’s lifetime i think we’re about to in the next 20 years see some just absolutely marvelous miraculous things that i hope take us further into that right into that right direction versus the left side of the path i i i i have a question for you there i have a couple of quick questions so you can answer them with just a word or just a sentence and one of them you’re gonna like i’m pretty sure and one of them is do you think there will be a singularity as what records one predicts in 2045 i think the odds are far greater uh heavily weighted toward there being that and and certainly in what we’re seeing today there the tools and the technologies being created that would that would um that would bode well for that singularity i think it would be but you know miraculous you know in a sense but not in a george orwellian kind of singularity with three different you know basically um you know economies but truly a global global singularity both from monetary and and but at the same time i hope i hope that that that singularity doesn’t equate to homogenization you know one of the things after traveling a lot in the 90s and 2000s even today and you know i see where you know where i hope countries and cultures through that singularity we don’t lose those unique aspects of those things um so well while they’re i’m more i think a singularity is a positive i hope that those what i think of not necessarily negative aspects but aspects of it that they that they don’t they don’t affect um us as human beings humanity and our cultures to lose all those unique aspects of all these cultures i’m hoping that that singularity actually unlocks value of so many things that i can learn from other cultures and things that i’ve never been able to experience before i mean i i an amazing story along those lines i was in australia and um i was talking to an artist who does a tremendous amount of work with the aboriginal tribes way out in the middle of nowhere kind of like you know my experiences in the middle of nowhere in africa but even more so um and he was describing his experience to me of those of that art and those cultures and was telling me about how um heartbreaking it is now and i said what do you mean why is it heartbreaking he said well because and this is related to one of his projects i’m working on the process of using the power of digital to capture the history of these cultures they have so much information about science and health and wellness and medicine and health and well being um that we’ve never had access to and i said okay but what’s the problem with he said well the entire history of these aboriginal cultures have been handed down there’s always one storyteller in each and each group and that storyteller then has the entire history of that culture in them and they pass it to another person and another person and he said but today all the kids want to get blue jeans run off to the cities and go work and this one tribe that i’m working with that he is the last storyteller of his kind and when he dies all of that information will go away and i’m going to do anything in my power to use technology to capture that and preserve it and and and allow people to have access to it i’ve never like my god that’s so fascinating i want to see it that it’s just you know so there’s that singularity and the great things about technology but then there are the other counterparts of it and so hopefully you know like everything in life we have to find a balance between the two of those and that will be that constant pendulum swinging and the roller coaster ride that we go go on as we go towards that and hopefully as we’re getting there it will become less and less bumpy i have one last question um because maybe that i think we gave up on the quick questions anyways um and the quick answers but given that you’ve been you know you you lived your life i’d say in in different places in different um identities so to speak it’s there’s more of a there’s a there’s a real science approach to this but what is your gut feeling on do we live in the simulation and will we create our own simulations for maybe ourselves maybe for a whole ecosystem so it’s the whole universe in the first place the simulation and kind of entrenched in that question do you think we will start building simulations of ourselves as an economy as a universe or just as an individual why just see is this for me um i’m will i be an entrepreneur so kind of you live your life simultaneously um in like thousands of different simulations but it’s it’s your your your mind that lives or feels like it lives in all of these simulations go that’s just thinking about that scares me i’m already living in i’m already you know have my ptsd hyper digital add and i’m trying to think about more of me and what that would what that would be like and then i makes me think about you know with uh you know what we eventually be a culture where i’m just sitting at home in my big company chair with my virtual rally goggles on ordering things that are being delivered and we have all this human to only have three fingers with big thumbs because all we’re doing is this all day long and we don’t need people anymore and i well i think conceptually it’s really interesting i think humanity will always need more you know that singularity that more of that you know um and i don’t i don’t i don’t think humans are weighted toward weighted toward being predisposed to being able to live that way outside of the few who are entrepreneurs or who are um i mean like you look at people like elon musk who are just you know he’s living multiple simulation i don’t even know how many simulations he’s living in real life i think it would be very very very difficult for people to to live like that i personally um i don’t know how i don’t know what a functioning society would look like in that in that sense i wonder what the societal mechanism would be be to facilitate that we’re needed well it’s kind of like the cloud now right maybe we create our identity in the cloud obviously it’s just a small subset of our real life but it gets bigger and bigger and and one of the premises of the internet i’m not sure that’s still true was that we can be free and this freedom means we we don’t we can try out a different online persona the avatar where we go back to um what was the name of that second life now so that was kind of the original science fiction idea that you create most life like avatar but it could be any kind of avatar can be a different sex can be a different age can be a different personality all of those and i i feel it’s something that our mind really craves it’s feel like we’re born with this so in my mind we already in a simulation and we we are craving this so much because this is kind of where we come from i would say for me i understand it and but it’s probably not something that i would i look at in this way that my nine year old does and i watch him playing roblox and all these other games and he loves that creating all these different characters with different looks and feels and becoming those and becoming those characters and i wonder what that’s going to mean for that generation and beyond because it seems to be something that he and his friends really gravitate towards now is that a phase in his life now because of where he is you know societally and sociologically and psychologically or does that actually become you know more i think the point that we’re talking about something that becomes a longer term sustainable actually part of the way he is as a person that’s that’s fascinating you know i mean we’re talking about talking about technology truly truly changing the the possibility of you know who we are who we want to be versus who we really are yeah there’s a lot out there i i really hope we can do this again leader i’m kind of running out of time uh that was fantastic um thanks for joining me i enjoyed our conversation immensely i’m not i’m as you know i’m not good at the short answers but i i’ll get better for the next one we should do a next one where it’s just one sentence answers if we should re listen to it in two years from now and and see if something changed to the positive or to the negative or maybe in six months from now the world is going to be a very different one already i i greatly appreciate the way that you’re you think in the way that you approach things and having these kind of dialogues i don’t think there are enough of there are there are a lot of dialogues about a lot of the same thing but there are far and few of these types of dialogues that i’ve had with other people that really i think what it’s there’s so many different lenses who we are what we do how it links into society what is it you know what is it what does it all mean and um they’re they’re the conversations that i think that we need to be having substantially more of and especially from an entrepreneurial perspective and understanding who we are and why we do what we do and ultimately thinking about what the net impact of it could could be and the responsibility that’s associated with that um yeah but i don’t think necessarily as people are thought about so much as you’re going 10 000 miles an hour so yeah but i appreciate it i enjoyed speaking the honor was all mine i really appreciate that peter and it was definitely one of the best podcasts we’ve had so far right oh i’ll take that all right awesome thanks a lot yeah talk to you later bye bye