In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast Robert Matzkin and I talk about:

• Does surfing make you a better entrepreneur?
• How to avoid ongoing fights between co-founders.
• A better future of education in schools and universities.
• What blended learning might be the future.
• How should we deal with the reduction in equality?
• How we will deal the major new innovations like AI and Quantum computing?
• and much more!

Watch this episode in 4K on Youtube.

Robert Matzkin is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of myquest.co. Robert also mentors others entrepreneurs to find a better work and life balance.

You can reach out to Rob via LinkedIn.

 

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet, risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes or YouTube or go to our website judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 round trip tickets to Hawaii from many cities in the US or $600 life lead tickets in business class from the US to Asia or $100 business class life lead tickets from Africa round trip all the way to Asia. In case you didn’t know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash MTP or if that’s too many levels for you, simply go to MTP, the number four and the letter U.com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. I meet today with Rob Madskin and Rob is a serial entrepreneur just like me and he’s co founder and currently still works as a CEO of a company called Micrest.co. What’s really interesting also Rob is kind of having a business on the side and he’s coaching other entrepreneurs and I’m reading from the website to grow their business through innovation while generating power and momentum by finding true balance and fulfillment. That’s a big ticket. I’m really curious about that. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It is. Thanks for doing this Rob. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here and happy to be speaking with everybody today. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it here myself. I’m just looking at your website. I really like that surfing picture. Where was it taken? It looks really cool. Thanks. Appreciate that. That’s actually El Salvador, El Tunko El Salvador, which stands for the pig in El Salvador. Did you have like people set up on the beach to take these photos or? That looks like a nice tool, man. So that wave is one of the, it’s a world class wave. It’s one of the most popular in the country and there’s some photographers at the beach, but that’s taken by a guy named Rudy, who’s a friend of mine with a waterproof camera who’s sitting right at the break zone. So he’s like right there. So it’s a cool shot and a cool sequence actually. People really warned me about the surfing lifestyle. I had a couple of investors and I talked to them about I’m moving to California. I was still in Europe and they said, well, why are you suddenly so lazy? So the only thing they associated with surfing, but it’s not a big deal in Germany that it surf spots, but it’s just too cold to really develop as a sport and the waves are weird. And I was really concerned that I’m suddenly just quitting entrepreneurship and become a surfer. You’ve been doing this for a while, it seems. I’ve surfed for about five, six years. I’ve lived in a few different places and I’ve been fortunate enough to live on the water and you wake up with a crack of dawn and get your surf in and go to work. And I’ll actually, last year I worked a few times from El Salvador and got up at 5 a.m., surfed for two hours, eaten, do a full day of work. So it works out really well. Yeah. I think you just spoiled the sport for me when you said 5 a.m. You could do a sunset. Some of the waves are terrible over at sunset, I realized that I’ve been to Bali and I’ve been a lot of times to Bali. I love the beaches there on the West Coast and I love going out on the board, but everyone tells me you’ve got to come back in the morning and I’m like, dude, I just can’t do it. And they say, yeah, yeah, the waves are terrible now. You’ve got to come at sunrise or just before that, like, okay, this is not going to happen for me. So I admire that. I appreciate that. But you actually brought up something interesting when your friend said moving to Cali would be lazy. You know, I just moved to South Florida from New York and I was living in Israel before that. And I lived in other places I actually lived in Val before, but I think your environment and the people you have around you is so interesting and so important to really have that ecosystem to propel you as an entrepreneur to succeed. Well, also, you know, like New York, you could overwork yourself or burn yourself out. So choosing the right place, I think, is because I go picking, picking Florida was an interesting thing because I was like, well, maybe I’ll just go to El Salvador and then I was like, what your friends thought was what I definitely would have turned into if I moved to El Salvador. Yeah, probably they didn’t know enough about Silicon Valley at the time, right? So that’s not a place where you actually you go surfing, but it’s it’s there’s too much going on. There’s too much opportunity at least they used to be. So you don’t really make this a pastime. How did you decide, you know, you just mentioned a couple of places where you spend quite some time and one of them is Israel that I’ve been, but I always wanted to stay longer and learn more about the language and learn about the history. Obviously, everyone is intrigued being in Israel for a while. How did you choose those places? They don’t seem to like my typical, my typical pattern that I apply where did what did you don’t know much choose, it doesn’t really apply to Vale, Tel Aviv and El Salvador. Yeah, I think I was a digital nomad before that was a thing and I never looked at myself as a digital nomad. In fact, I’m kind of I’m quite confused with the the programs that you only stay a month in each place. I think that’s great and you could live and still be a tourist, but community is so important to me and the people that I have around me are so important to me. You know, I studied abroad in Florence and I didn’t know any locals, I just knew a bunch of Americans. So I didn’t really get the city. I got like this experience that wasn’t authentic. It was just, I don’t know, it wasn’t it wasn’t as authentic as when I moved to Israel. What happened was I started, it was supposed to be there for four days and I met, I met some people through, I’m also an acrobat, so I met some people through acrobatics. I liked it, I met a girl, I stayed for another week. I stayed for another week, I met, I met a business partner, the story is much longer than this and I decided to stay and build a company called MyQuest which I’m still working on five years later and, you know, it was the right opportunity at the right time. On top of that, it was something I was really seeking which was a purpose driven company. So Israel kind of called me and when I got there, Tel Aviv was the right city at the right time, living kind of next to the beach with a huge high taxi and great weather, yeah, just really, really called me at that time. Yeah, I mean, I feel with you, I think Israel is one of those places, a lot of people maybe have the wrong expectation about it for many reasons and then Tel Aviv is this, it’s kind of like California but it has more European feel to it. It’s kind of, you know, I grew up in Germany so it has a lot of things for better wars that remind you of Germany. There’s a lot of European culture and a lot of people actually made it to Israel after the Second World War and the only problem obviously that a lot of people have would go and moving to Israel is how can you afford it, right? It’s one of the most, and that surprised me, one of the most expensive places on the planet. It beats out even Australia in a tight time and you know, Australia has come down a little and the currency has changed a little bit and it’s definitely gotten cheaper. But I think this is what holds back and probably the only thing in the region that holds back a ton of people that will move to Israel and heartbeat, especially Tel Aviv. Yeah, so, you know, the dollar is actually, well, the dollar globally is pretty weak right now. At the time it was a little bit stronger there, you know, but as a local, making a local wage is certainly one of the top five most expensive, top 10 most expensive places to live in the world. So, you know, I was fortunate enough that I was able to make it work. But I was also coming from New York so everything seemed less expensive. That’s true. You know, coming from Berlin, my rent is $600 a month versus New York for its three grand. You know. I mean, $600 is boning it in Berlin. At least it used to, I think it’s changed, it’s definitely gentrified over there. You know what, I want to figure out that’s kind of a unique project you run before we go a little bit further into your venture. You coach other entrepreneurs and I think the way, and you explained it to me beforehand, it’s really about seeking balance and finding balance. And you help other entrepreneurs do that. The first question that I had is certainly as an entrepreneur, shouldn’t you be able to, like I have high expectations of entrepreneurs, let’s put it this way, shouldn’t they be able to find that themselves? That’s my first question. And I know it’s a lot of people have trouble with this, including myself. So would we be all struggle with this and what are kind of the values you can teach people? Do they go through a seminar? Do you mentor them? Do you coach them? And how long is that project typically, is it a couple of years, a couple of months? Well, there’s I think six questions there. So I see if I can remember all of them. I’ll let you choose. So I think the first thing, one of the things that made the most profound difference in my growth path was stopping this conversation that I needed to go through the school of hard knocks to learn things and learning things by osmosis and I think finding true wisdom. And I think finding true wisdom for me, and I think a lot of people have slightly different definitions from this, but the best definition of I’ve heard of wisdom is really learning from others mistakes as if they’re your own. So if you could listen and acquire everybody else’s mistakes and truly have them as your own mistakes and learn from those lessons, I think that is pure infinite wisdom and talk about a growth hack of how you can move quicker and move faster without with a lot less friction. I think wisdom is that to me. So no, to your other question is, can entrepreneurs figure this out themselves? Well, I guess actually, yes, they can. But do you want to take years to do it or do you want to take days or weeks to do it? And we have such little time, I mean, this year, unfortunately, I’ve been reminded so many times over friends passing and their thirties and their forties, you know, that life’s shorter. Right? We don’t have time to necessarily waste and, you know, not to start throwing out all these quotes, but I also live by the philosophy of live every day like you’re going to die tomorrow. Right? But I misinterpreted this quote for many years. I thought that meant, especially as an entrepreneur, I had to get everything done today because there is no tomorrow. But what it really means to me is I need to be complete with everybody in my life. So if I don’t see them ever again, there’s nothing there. And then you could be free and clear and move rapidly and not have regrets really. So yeah, back to the question of can people learn this on their own? Sure, but why go through it on your own? I think one of the most profound moments, another profound moment I should say, there’s a book called The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Harwitz of Andreessen Harwitz, which is one of the top VCs from the country, but Ben’s story is a lot even more impressive than that. But he was talking, he’s like, listen, you’re going through hell. You can’t tell anyone how rough it is, how scary it is, how, I’ll have conversations and I’m like, yes, we’re going to crush it. I’m worth like nine figures. This is an absolutely amazing. And I’m going to the next meeting, I’m like, how are we going to make payroll in 30 days? And we’re so screwed. And it’s like, we’re done. We’re shutting down. I’m going to be sleeping on my parents couch. And you could go through that in a matter of 15 minutes, especially years ago. So I think, so for me, hearing that come from such a successful entrepreneur, like Ben was talking about the hard things and hard things. He was really talking about this company called Cloudinary. And I just read Amazon and Bezos moving on and the head of Cloud Services taking over and cloud computing is the next thing. I almost lost everything because the cloud computing business in the dot com bubble evaporated and it was nothing. And it reinvented itself to HP, but going through for like 1.5 billion, but going through these crazy journeys and realizing, hey, we’re not alone. This happens to everyone was so profound for me. And I think early on entrepreneurs don’t necessarily know that don’t necessarily realize it and having somebody that not only is an outside set of eyes to look in and ears to look in and see things that you can’t necessarily because you can’t coach yourself. The greatest athletes in the world don’t coach themselves. They have coaches. But then also just really having also somebody there with you that you can confide in and speak to about these crazy scary things that you can’t speak to investors about that you can’t speak to friends or family about you can, but it’s got to be a very special relationship that most people don’t have. So that’s kind of a lot of times where I come in as well, amongst other things, and that’s just kind of more on the personal side of things, not even necessarily this is a foreign side of things. Yeah. I think this is awesome. I myself have struggled with this quite a bit and I think you hit the nail on the head there. It is the emotional tax that you pay as an entrepreneur between those ups and downs and the uncertainty that strikes you and you are in the end and I feel it’s a little better if you have a bunch of cofounders, if there are three of you and they all come from different angles and viewpoints. And then I think it gets a little easier because you can kind of feel and you can share it a little bit. If you’re the CEO, most of you don’t have a lot of cofounders, you have a management board, but they’re not at the same level and they don’t have the same skin in the game. You’re literally alone and I think you’re describing a big problem that a lot of entrepreneurs as younger they are, they don’t really know about and I think they underestimate how tough that gets because that’s Navarravicant’s quote. With this enormous amount of leverage that we have, the stakes are so much higher. Literally you put the wrong thing out on your social media as a CEO on Silicon Valley and you blow up a storm that basically you will never get finding again or it can be the other way around. It can be that tweet that everyone reads and suddenly you have five people calling you, do you want a serious seat tomorrow? So the stakes are very high and there aren’t a lot of people that you can ask for advice because all these people that you’ve pulled into your ecosystem, like a lot of family and friends are probably investors, right? You can’t just talk to them because they can’t understand the magnitude. Also because they’re already investing, you can’t go to them and say, well, if you don’t get another follow up round, this whole thing is gone and all your money is gone. That will be very, it will be kind of embarrassing even if this moment might come anyways and they probably have a bit of an, they know this could happen in their investment with you as a founder. So is that, do you feel you can, and you said that earlier, you want to avoid the mistakes that other people make. The trouble is often that our brain doesn’t really work that way, right? So we feel it’s much harder to learn from abstract knowledge. Do you feel you can, in these mentorships, when you hang out with entrepreneurs, do you think you can, do you go through like a list? That’s what I’m trying to say. Is it like a canon? Is it like a Bible you go through? Or it’s, you know, I’m going to help you with what I know and if I don’t know, then you don’t pay me or we’re just going to have coffee. So, I think my first parameter is, and my rule of thumb is if I can’t provide you 10 acts of value and growth and revenue of what I charge, then I’m not going to be of service, right? Now, I have about 26 different parameters that I kind of look to push on, right? And a few different themes is really what I focus on. So there’s two aspects, right? And I think if you’ve never gone through a coaching program, some of the things that you don’t necessarily realize, there’s, hey, I want to dump and I have a tremendous amount of wisdom that I want to share with you and I want to give to you, right? But a lot of times, especially the first month or two, I can’t even get to that because we’re putting out fires left and right, personal, professional, interpersonal, right? You talk about cofounders. First of all, I will never do a startup again alone, a startup, right? The coaching stuff, it’s my own, it’s my own little baby, but I’ll never do a hypergrowth startup alone again because first of all, your ego gets in the way, it’s always your baby. You, the superhero syndrome is what I had 10, 15 years ago, but when you have somebody, one person’s, at some point, we can’t slam the gas pedal 100% of the time. We’re going to back off to 90 or we need to take a breath or it’s the holidays, but you have another founder to push hard and collaborate with. Sometimes I’ve never had, no, I’ve had four cofounders. I like two or three cofounders. I think having a partner is the most powerful and then having somebody maybe who’s, depending on the project, a technical role with a technical cofounder, but having somebody to collaborate as a partnership versus a trio to make decisions on, I find really powerful. By the way, one thing that was always surprising me with cofounders is not all cofounders have to have the same amount of equity. I had this misconception that everybody had a third, a third, a third, or 50, 50. In fact, I highly frown against advising that that somebody should be 51, 49. Somebody’s clearly the boss. Somebody clearly at the end of the day makes the decisions. Even if you all share financially, basically essentially the same, power wise, somebody should always be the clear executive, be the clear decision maker, not the decision by committee. Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. I actually struggled with this. My first starter was the four of us. We all had the same share and there was no CEO. Our investors didn’t really care in the beginning, but I think eventually everyone is like, so we talked to two of these guys and they gave us this picture that they are up to it, right? And then we talked to the other two and they don’t even know about it. So there’s a lot of things that happen in this marriage between four people, like four cofounders that were really struck us by surprise simply because we didn’t think it through. So I think this is golden advice right there. And then one other thing with cofounders is, by the way, that would have been a great snare of all you had the same amount of class A shares and class A shares were where the money was, but board seats was specifically put towards one person. So that was clearly the ex, that was clearly the chairman and CEO. So you all win if you all win and you all lose if you all lose, but decision by committee is death by committee in my mind. The other thing I’ve seen way too many startups fail before they even get started because there’s not paperwork and proper paperwork, especially in the beginning, specifically and explicitly stating what happens when with the IP with vesting structures and everything else with their attorney that’s properly set up. So if a cofounder decides to leave and he’s a CTO and he wants to take a 30% of the company’s equity and you’re three months in, well, the company’s dead. You can’t raise money, it’s dead. So having that in place that he got nothing, unfortunately, but because it’s the company’s no ones, the company’s the investors, the company’s its own entity. You guys are the cofounders of the parents pumping their lifeblood into the company. It’s not theirs, it’s its own baby and you need to treat it as its own human, its own entity. I think for a lot of people it’s hard to distinguish, especially when they’re younger, what is this that we just hang out together and we work on this and we do this over the weekend. When the actual startup begins, what is this phase of, we just play around and I call it my first startup, but it was actually the 15th project or something. I went from making illuminated toothbrushes to, I don’t even know, there was some live streaming we wanted to do back in the late 90s, which was really exciting at the time, very unheard of, not like today. There were thousands of ideas, let’s put it this way, and ideas are cheap, there’s a lot of ideas out there, and then eventually you figure out, and I think this was a really useful process, eventually we were, at some point we were 12 cofounders, it was a really big team, and we didn’t consider ourselves cofounders or we were just, okay, we were hanging out with students in college and we’re trying to experiment with things, and then we eventually trickle, there are a lot of people left, there’s other shit going on, and they just didn’t care enough. What I felt it was a great year or two to really find out which people you can trust because you don’t know, right? It’s not even, and I admire people who can do this, who literally can sit down, run through a couple of interviews, and then say, oh, you’re the person who can lead this company for the next couple of years, I’m like, what, it’s got to be an actor, right? Because you don’t know the intrinsic values, you don’t know what someone can do positively or negatively. So I always felt having this runway of seeing how people behave in different scenarios that gave me a unique insight, and that also helped us, right? Because a lot of us, we’re just, we were not interested in it, and we weren’t ready for the challenge, we didn’t want to work through the night. And I always feel it’s hard at that point, when do you start formalizing this, right? A lot of people do it just before the first investment round. I would, I’d found upon that, if I feel it was all 12 of you, great. I would have had some sort of term sheet, piece of paperwork spelled out, you know, why do we create contracts, right? We create contracts because at some point a partnership’s going to end, and you want to spell it out while you’re all still friends and amicable, right? Now it’s not, because it’s disastrous when it’s not, and I’ll implode the company. So there’s never too soon to formalize to spend 5, 10K on paperwork, yeah, maybe right before, but to have something laid out, term sheet that’s clear, maybe it’s not bulletproof if somebody really goes after you in court, but it’s specified, everybody understands it, there’s a signature involved that, hey, this is what it is. And then also, just having vesting structures that, you know, maybe nobody, you know, in that case, nobody actually vests until such time as funding comes on board, right? And then a clock is a year of vesting structure, a year of cliff, and then with, you know, your cliff over a four year vest, which essentially means, you know, you get, let’s say a 10% equity in a company, right, and I don’t need to explain this to you, but you have 10% equity in a company, every year you get 2.5% of that company of you working over a four year period. That’s what a, you know, a four year vest is, it’s 2.5% of you, right? But cliff will say that you don’t get any equity until after year one. So I think that solves the, you know, I can’t interview after three people and say you’re going to be a co founder, you need to, and it’s, you work for a while, and I don’t want that exposure. I don’t want somebody getting equity after month one, it’s especially the type of equity a co founder gets, and they put their dues in a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely good advice. And it helps when you already have identified something, and I think we both see how this game works right now, but it’s always evolving, right? So you have this case of the Instagram founders who literally work on the same app forever, from what I know, right? I don’t have, I didn’t have them on the podcast, but I want to. So the obvious issue is you work on something that seems completely worthless, and a lot of people are dropping out because nobody cares about this app, right? They developed this app, and it was a bunch of functionality that they had initially, and it never took off and the team changed. And then eventually it, I think the original project shut down and they took what wasn’t the Instagram, what became Instagram, and just used the photo filters and literally just set the photo stream. So something that before didn’t really work in any kind of commercial project suddenly took off a year later and was worth $2 billion. And I think these enormous amount of scales and the differences, and I think this is how our brain works, right? It doesn’t really think logarithmically. We have this relatively linear progression in our, in our lives, and then we feel like this is how it’s going to be most of the time with the startup too, right? And then obviously we were shooting for the logarithmic explosion, but it happens relatively rarely, but when it happens, it’s amazing. We don’t really plan enough for it, but maybe we should. I mean, that’s why I think your advice is so useful. Yeah, I think you have to plan, you have to plan for success, right? You have to, one of the things I was just saying last week is, do you know how long, you know, first skyscraper, right? Do you know how long it takes to build the foundation? I don’t know, two years, a long time. Yeah, a long time. It takes as long as it does to dig down, as it does going up. So the higher and the longer it’s going to take to go up, the more time it’s going to take to build that foundation, right? And it’s like the same thing as like a Chinese bamboo tree, right? It won’t grow for five years, and your water and your fertilizer, water and fertilizer. And after you’re five, I think it grows like 90 feet or something, crazy, right? So it’s like, yeah, but when’s it actually growing? Right? Is it growing year one, or is it growing year five, or is it growing the whole time, right? Yeah, with startups, you know, there’s not just that. There’s also the, you bring a lot of outside experience on things that you don’t, you don’t think you’re going to use in your startup. You bring them in and you learn them on the way, right? That could be social media marketing or just skills that you pick up randomly. You never think make any difference to your startup. What’s your professional work in the first place? And then suddenly that’s what really, you’re the expert, so to speak, in a company, and then you get promoted, and then you use that leverage to bring the first investors in. Those are things you can’t really plan on. You have to, you have to plan them and hope that they’re going to turn out that way. But you can’t really plan them, right? And I find this, I mean, I find this an accelerating journey. I’ve done it almost a dozen times. All kinds of difference, configurations, and I’ve paid my dues, I’ve paid for my mistakes. So maybe I wish I would have talked to you a couple of years ago. If you already had that knowledge. So it’s… Maybe a couple of years ago, maybe I would have been the same boy as you. Yeah. This is why I do this thing. So I see this with my children. There’s one impulse and that is to, they definitely are really curious, they’re harvesting knowledge. That’s what they do the whole day, right? But on the other hand, they also want to avoid learning things that are too abstract because I think their fear is that they learn stuff that is not relevant anymore. And so when I tell them something abstract and tell them about my own mistakes, they’re like, okay, this is just a stone age. Well, it doesn’t have any relevance to them right now and their early teens. So things are still changing. But the finding, I think, and I think this is a real skill. If you find people who are curious enough and are able to learn from abstract mistakes from other people or written stuff, they learn philosophy, which is the same thing. They learn about history. I think it’s relatively rare. There is a lot of people who actually can do this or want to do this, let’s put it this way, on a grander scale. No, and you’re right. I think one of the things that got me to where I am and have some really amazing people giving me advice and me, I have two amazing humans giving me and my co founder advice and they both have been wildly successful. One company, one of them sold this company to, I think, for nine figures, another person sold the company for 10 figures. So we absolutely dream amounts of success. But the reason they continue to work with us, one is actually an investor. Another one just does it because he wants to, is because we’re coachable. We listen. We’re thirsty. We want his advice. We respect his advice. And we’re going to implement his advice, right? Because he actually has a real experience that is an abstract, right? And you have to want it, and I want it. I’m sick of beating myself up and running into brick walls at $1,000 an hour. Oh, thank you. I don’t recover like I used to, I’m not in my 20s anymore. But then you figure out how to do this without running into the brick walls. That’s pretty cool. I still do that. I didn’t say I never do it. I didn’t say I never do it, but at least somebody said pick me up. Okay. I mean, I feel like I slowed down in the last second. Maybe that’s the only thing that saves me. What is your current startup about? And I know it’s about learning, and that’s a topic I really feel strongly about. Tell us a little more about it. Yeah. So we’ve been around six years now. It’s called MindQuest. And really what we’re all, really what we’re up to is how do we really be effective when it comes to learning, especially in the digital world, especially in today’s world. But most importantly, how do we really make sure we’re having that success, that knowledge retention, right? And how do we really build skills in today’s environment? You know, there’s so much knowledge out there now with YouTube and Google. If you’re just going to watch something, if you’re just going to get abstract knowledge and not actually be able to apply it, then it’s very, there’s a very low likelihood that you’ll retain that information. So what we really focus on is how do we give our partners, our companies that we work with? We mainly these days work with large organizations. We also work with coaches like myself, but more business trainers and stuff like that as well who are going into organizations. If we give them all these tools, tactics, and techniques to really be successful in training and building skills instead of large organizations. So we’re really a technology company and just to spend one more second on to give you the philosophy behind it, if you have a traditional education where, again, you’re just getting information passively, but the way we’ve been hardwired to learn for 10,000 years is learning by doing, is learning through our apprenticeship model. So we really give those digital tools to all our trainers and companies who want to have and make that difference and really train by doing it. So that’s what we do. That’s what we focus on. Are you involved in the actual generation of the knowledge or you just basically have a technology platform that is then used by the actual domain expert to create courses? I assume that’s what you call them, right? All lessons or series of lessons or certificates? Well, we’re called MyQuest, so we call them Quests. Okay. I’ll explain now. Yeah. But a question. What is like a course? I’m just going to thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a course. Yeah. So we’re industry agnostic, we’re contact agnostic. We have a team of people that coach our partners to build up that content and help and support them to optimize things, but we’re not content experts and we don’t sell content. We’re a pure technology player. Yeah. How do you see, and I know the view from inside the enterprise is quite different, or maybe it isn’t so different, but I imagine there is some wiggle room, how do you see the future of education? And I’m talking about K to five, but going on all the way to college level or beyond college level. We know that the current structures, institutions are definitely under a lot of pressure. We saw this first with the colleges and we saw what, how much political games are being played in colleges. We know, and I’ve done this myself, I had Paul Friedman on last week, who’s an amazing professor of history, the Middle Ages especially, and his course has been viewed a couple million times on YouTube, and the whole lecture is on YouTube, at least the early part of that lecture, so 50% of what he would teach in, I think it’s a year or two. And I felt like I got a lot out of this. I didn’t go to a seminar, I didn’t apply it, but I feel I retained 60, 70%, just facts, those are history, I didn’t apply it, I don’t work with it every day. So I feel the colleges, just hang on, I just wanted to paint the picture. And then these institutions have been the first to see that the internet can basically disintermediate them quite a bit just by having this content out there. And this, I mean, Professor Friedman still makes money from it, probably more than before. And then it went down to, I feel it creeped down to a low and lower level, and now it’s probably at the level of middle school. It hasn’t really reached elementary schools yet, where you have so much good content online, and then obviously you need like a seminar level later on to probably actually apply it. But what do you think will happen to these institutions? Anything from middle school to colleges in the next 20 years? So I have to say, I’m not a, I have strong opinions, I’m not an expert in K through 12. That’s what we want, the strong opinions. But in corporate education, I do have some clout. So I think there’s a premise that, I guess, I don’t need to call the platform out, but that the MOOCs, the massive online open course put out five, 10 years ago, that the more you democratize knowledge, the more you democratize learning, which is true. Everybody’s learning from YouTube videos now. But LinkedIn has a study in 2019 that says that 87% of learners will forget what they learned six weeks later across all training, across all training, and I’m sure that applies to any video that’s, it was mainly done in the workforce, right? Maybe there’s something wrong with the videos. Yeah, it wasn’t just videos, it was just all training across the board, but a lot of people, so I’m a big, I’m a very auditory person, I read 20 books a month, I actually listened, excuse me, on Audible, 20 books to 20 books a month or so. Last year I read 240 books, the year before that I listened to 200 books before that, and I’m able to absorb and remember a tremendous amount of information, I don’t absorb and remember everything, but I don’t think everybody’s very auditory, I think it’s from me pulling my friends what I’m saying, listen to a book, most people read it, feel it, touch it. So I think the professors had a lot of success, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. But as far as higher education especially, it’s got its work cut out for, you saw Columbia, excuse me, students go on protests and not pay tuition just last week because they wanted a 10% discount, if it was me, I would have wanted a 90% discount, I’m paying $200,000 for a higher education for what, for lectures that I could find on YouTube, and then you’re going to tell me you spent $200,000 and it’s worth it because the network I could build in this year, I can’t even go to school, and I can’t even network. Yeah, you could do the same thing on LinkedIn, right, and it’s free, and you might have to put some time in, it might not be the same level, but you know, you can get there. And no, I mean, it’s their parents money, I think, if it would be their money out of their pocket, and it would be no student loans, these tuition fees would be much lower already. I guess that’s a highly leveraged industry. It is a highly leveraged industry, and they’re not only selling the connections that they can make, and their argument would be, well, we’ll open all these doors. My friends who went back to their MBAs, and they work in finance, they’re like, if we don’t get into top 20 schools, it’s not even worth it, because the top 20 schools, top 20 business schools, besides that, it won’t open up the doors in finance that they want to. Men as well just continue with their job, and you know, $200,000 to make back, it could take you 10 years more, you might not pay that back, you might just be better off staying in your job. It’s really, there’s a few career paths that you’re really going to see, 20 plus K yearly return, right, on going to school. I’m fully with you. I don’t see the return on the high end. For most people, you know, there’s always, obviously, and what a lot of people don’t really consider is they have the ability to reject 99.9% of the applicants. So the people that you see who actually get into Harvard, who get into Ivy League schools, those people might have been very successful without Harvard, right? So they have a very skewed selection in the first place, and this might be if they have a good reader talent, and I think after so many years they probably have. It’s virtually guaranteed without teaching them anything that they will do very well, because they were the best of the bunch anyways, and they know how to select talent, which is quite a skill. It’s not an easy skill, and I think this is what employers pay them in the end. They don’t actually pay, it’s not that there’s actual learning in there. Maybe there is or was, I think this is not existing in real life anymore, but it is this ability to select people in a really small group from a really large group that’s really tough for organizations, and you will never get fired for hiring a Harvard MBA or Harvard lawyer, right? I mean, there’s no risk to an employer, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, I’ve hired Ivy League grads before, and I’ve had just as much make success as I’ve had with any other population center. Yeah. One of the interesting points though is with hiring, I want to, you know, why do you go to school? What is the purpose of a university education? In these days, it’s a lot of just, okay, so you could grow up. Well, go travel Europe, you know? Go travel, go grow. I don’t necessarily believe that the higher education is going to make you a better or smarter individual. Maybe professors disagree with me, I don’t know, but I want the scrappiest kid out there. I want the kid who knows how to learn and who’s scrappy. I don’t want the kid who goes to the best school. I want the scrappiest person in my mind, especially in a high girl’s startup. I don’t want somebody to put their, it’s not a nine to five, you know, I want somebody who’s scrappy. Yeah, absolutely. It’s, you know, I see this a lot of times about my kids, I’d rather have them go for a year to Ethiopia and, you know, see the world in a very different light and see the challenges and then come back much less spoiled, so to speak. And appreciate the, well, I’m at odds with the school and the way school works right now in this system of, you know, people sit at home, kids sit at home with their iPads. They literally what they get, they don’t even get like a lecture part from a teacher, right? That happens, but it’s relatively rare compared to normal schooling. And on the other hand, they fill out forms, which is basically multiple choice. So when I think of what they do in their virtual part, and I think in school it’s very similar, this is something where we feel like we used to be 20 years ago, there is a part of knowledge that we look at, it can be a lecture on YouTube, that can be a book that we read, it can be all kinds of things. And then there is one set later on where we run, basically run through an automated test and it tells us, okay, we figured it out or not, right? I remember studying for a GMAT and it was just like that, there was a lesson part and then there was a testing part and then there was a lesson part and the testing part eventually would improve, you could take it as many times as you want. And I feel like this seems to be all the answer that the schools have right now for having students study from home. And I even feel in school, it’s not any different. And if that’s it, that’s the big if question that I’m asking you, then I mean, we don’t need them at all, like for what? Yeah, but I think, you know, if you want to quote Simon Sinek, I think, education’s lost as why, yeah, it’s lost as why it’s like, why do we go to school? Well, because we need to pass the test and because we need to check the box and we need to look and we need to keep our jet like whatever it is, they’re just so focused on making sure you could pass the test or so focused that they are that they are delivering you something and they have paperwork so a lawyer can’t come after them or you can’t come after and look, we did this versus saying, we need to educate, we need to grow, we need to develop, we need to deliver skills, right, we need to make that impact in that child’s life. Right. I mean, to make sure we get through, but we get so, I mean, it’s not an easy job being a teacher. One of my best friends is a New York City school teacher and that’s taught eighth grade for the last 25 years and it’s exhausting and it’s Oh, it’s rough. Yeah. It’s not easy. It’s not rough. Virtual, I think, I’m not so sure it’s a rough job, but it’s not super pleasant either. I don’t, I think it actually got harder, you know, you try, man. You try. I mean, I’ve been on conference calls with 10, 15 people and they’re all grown adults and trying to wrangle them is hard enough. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. You know, so there is systematic and systemic challenges that nobody has figured out. Everybody’s necessarily addressing or asking, you know, questions when it comes to business or education, we got to be asking the right questions and great questions and over asking great questions, we could get great answers, but I don’t even think everybody’s asking the right questions. It’s just like, how do we serve as pure survival this year? Not a lot. We had three months to get ready. You notice the year was going to be a hundred percent remote, but listen, they didn’t have it. Nobody had it easy this year. That’s not fair, but I can say that one of the things that you made me think of just with education in general, whether it’s this year or the next five, 10 years, you know, I’m severely dyslexic, right? So if I didn’t go to this particular school that broke down reading phonetically for me, I would never have been able to be where I am today and it would have been extremely difficult. And I was extremely blessed to have that, but, you know, having an education that resonated with me, the mainstream education, the way people are taught today simply didn’t work for me. Like I didn’t read till I was 10 years old. So it’s just an interesting dynamic where it’s not tough, it’s not easy for anyone and it’s tough for everyone, but… Well, there’s a big, I don’t want to diss on them, right? But what I want to lay the groundwork on or the groundwork for is this massive amount of opportunity. So the first thing is we pay in California about $12,000 per student per year. And that’s, you know, from elementary school all the way to high school, and I know New York City is even higher, almost $20,000, insane amount of money. And you know the prices in online learning, that’s kind of going to an online university in Harvard. Like the online university might charge you $500 a month or maybe a thousand and Harvard charges you what, $20,000, $15,000. So the efficiency goes up, it’s sky high and what we could do also if we have a proper online learning model, if we have that, we also could customize it much more. There’s no need for everyone and then I know it was set up in a different time. But the model that we now have, we want to do all the basics and you have like the most common knowledge, the common sense by the time you’re 18, but you have actually no common sense, nobody has any common knowledge at that time. I mean, there’s no life experience, you just know a bunch of random facts. So we just throw this all out of the board and say, and actually my children told me this, they said, why don’t we do what we are interested in and we will go really deep into these topics. And with our teachers, with the guide, with the mentor or with the parents, and then these puzzle pieces, they eventually get stacked up, but they’re much smaller, right? So we can go into not just arts, but you go into digital design, for instance, and you do this for five years. And then you go to the next challenge, which is history, and then you go from there to psychology. That’s kind of how I learned, right? You fall into these rabbit holes for a couple of years investing or psychology, and then you go on because you know everything there is to know from your point of view. Maybe that’s the model we should go for, for children and for, I mean, for employees too, I think it implies there too. So, you know, quite a few thoughts on that. One, one of my best friends in Israel, her daughter goes to school that does just that. The kids choose what they want to do, choose what they’re focused on, and choose where they want to spend their time. And they have very much like, it’s more like a PhD where they choose a subject and have somebody to oversee and make sure they’re doing the work versus sitting up at a course filled with stuff that could go sideways, I think really quick and you have to have the right children doing that and really want to learn because you could, if that was me at 16, I would have gained the hack out of that system and used all my creativity to gain it. You know, but it’s also, I think a wide breadth and a well rounded education is also important at that age. I was just talking to one of my really good friends and she’s a radiologist and very successful at the pinnacle of her career. And you know, she goes, I was an idiot at 18, I didn’t know what I was doing going into medicine. I was an idiot at 26 when I decided to go into radiology, I didn’t know what I was doing. So, for somebody at 14 to make that decision, and by the way, she’s great, she’s successful, she loves what she does, but you know, she made choices not necessarily knowing what she was getting into, you know, 10 years later. So, for a kid to choose what they’re passionate about now is not necessarily going to be relevant, but it’s all about learning and learning how to learn, I guess, at the end of the day, right? It’s not necessarily… Yeah, you know, you make a very good point. Obviously, kids try to gain, will try to gain the system, but they gain the system right now too. And in the end, if people don’t want to learn, if they just go through the practice of being there, but they actually don’t want to learn, I think it’s no use anyways, right? There’s a ton of people, at least in California, who are graduating from high school, and they don’t have a specific problem, but their reading abilities is almost zero, their writing abilities is almost zero. They don’t know any math. They’re texting abilities, really, they’re texting abilities pretty good though. Texting abilities, and they probably have 500,000 followers on YouTube, so, you know, the game has changed, and what I’m trying to say is there is opportunities for kids, but we do everything to keep this bureaucracy in place, and I think these kids are going to be fine, because if you let them go and they find something they’re passionate about and they want to learn, they take off. They’re like, you know, it’s called investing in yourself, suddenly you become an entrepreneur responsible for your own outcome. Yeah, you know, Europeans, I think, do this very well, the European past, traditionally, and maybe you could talk about that. Is there such a term in Germany for helicopter parents? Well, there’s a term, but they definitely don’t do this, but they’re on the other hand of this. Yeah, all right. They say, you know, take these kids away and bring them back when they’re 18. That’s kind of the German model. It’s a very Kibbutz style model. It’s different in the sense of they don’t see their children as an investment, right? They see children as other people’s responsibility, and the children should better behave and learn some basics, but beyond that, they feel like there isn’t much you can do about children in any ways. They have to find their own path, and if they don’t, you know, there’s very little you can do from the outside, and there’s less standardized tests. I mean, there is standardized tests, but they’re on a smaller level, like on a state level, or even smaller than that. So that makes it a little easier for the teachers also, because they can say, well, we have a different plan, we teach you different things, and that’s fine, right? In the US, that’s often tricky because of the standardized tests. Yeah. No, I think standardized tests, I mean, they’ve gotten so hard, so rigorous, so that I guess a lot of teachers in a lot of districts are all the doings, just from day one is prepping you for the test. Yes. 100%. Yes, absolutely. And nothing else worries them, but they don’t teach anything else, yes, of course, which is ridiculous in the sense, right? And I mean, these change a little bit, but not much. It’s like Soviet Union took over our education system. So I want to shift the conversation slightly because I feel like we’re unfairly ripping on the system with being slightly ignorant, at least for me, because, you know, listen, people that go into education, they are saints in my mind, they come with a tremendous amount of passion, and they are only trying to do the best with the cards they’re dealt. I think it’s up to the leaders in the community and the school districts and the school super intendants, who are also just trying to do their best, who are mostly kind of teachers themselves. But the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from corporate America and from corporate education doing what I’ve done is purely digital education isn’t the Holy Grail. And purely in person education, well, we’re talking about the challenges of that right now, whether it’s 2021 or it was 2018. But blended learning has always been what I’ve been a big proponent of, right. And what we’ve really focused on in my class, especially this year, is how does, and blended to me is live training, whether that’s in person, or whether that’s on Zoom, and a digital lesson component, something that you’re doing in front of something that you’re taking home. And I think blending those two together and creating curriculum that is both collaborative from a peer, from a student and teacher perspective, and a student to student perspective is so powerful. And when we look at the future of what we’re going to need in the job world, and we could go off topic really quick with this conversation. But when I look at the gender gap. There’s no off topic there. Okay. So when I look at the gender gap, and everybody’s talking about it, what 2019 was all about, I think it’s really going to solve itself very rapidly in the next 10 years for really one reason and one reason only. And by the way, I’ll probably step in it here, and probably won’t be politically correct. But I think females have a naturally, and I don’t necessarily understand why, a much higher EQ than males. Me, I really had to work on my emotional intelligence for years to have any remote chance at having anything. And every girl I know was basically not born with it, but they had it by the time they were born, and I think the skills of tomorrow with automation and everything that’s coming, it’s not going to be about somebody physically doing their work. It’s going to be managing teams, it’s going to be managing systems. And it’s going to take EQ, it’s not going to take IQ anymore. It’s going to how do you work with others, how do you work with peers, how do you work with systems, how do you manage projects, and those skill sets are going to be in super high demand. And the best jobs are going to go to the people that can best fill those roles, which is going to naturally fill out the gender diversity gap. Going back to the education point is we need people collaborating, hard, we need people understanding how to learn, how to find knowledge, how to collaborate, and how to succeed together. Yeah, no, my model that I wanted to paint off the future of school, we didn’t really get there. I think the local collaboration I think is extremely important, and it’s always going to be person to person. And what I envision is for children is to have places where, and I think this exists in other countries very well, it might be on a per block basis on New York City, it’s maybe a couple of those, where literally there’s five, 10, maybe 20, maybe 30 children, they all learn and they know each other, but they don’t learn the same thing at the same time, right? There’s not one teacher who teaches them, there’s different online teachers, but they spend time in the breaks, or after that in an after class, they spend time together and they get to know each other. I think this is really relevant, I think this cannot be replaced. And obviously the person who is overseeing this also has a role to play. So the teachers are not out of the picture, I’m not saying we don’t need any one of them anymore, just the model will change and it will become more local. And I think this is just a choice of time. But I want to take your cue there, and I feel like the world will look different. And I think it’s going to be interesting to see, and I’m very surprised how people were able to cloudify themselves, I call it cloudify themselves. So there’s very little resistance against the restrictions that you had like in the state of California against COVID measurements. I feel they’re overbearing. But on the other hand, there was very little resistance. And I think the reason is that people kind of want to modify and transport a part of their existence into the cloud. We’ve been doing this for a long time, right? We make video contents here, I have a podcast. And this is also something where people feel that job will change, but the job will more likely be in the cloud, and it will be once that happens, right? It will be, maybe that’s just, maybe the options that you have as we know the internet, right? Now that everything kind of behaves like the internet, there will be way more options for anyone with a particular talent. I think this is still going on, this major drive, unless we face a really deep depression, which doesn’t look that way anymore. I feel the specialization will go on, and as you say, people with high IQ will do very well. But so will people with high IQ. Literally, they only need to cram out one product in their life, and that’s going to give them revenue after revenue on a monthly basis from, maybe it’s a patent, maybe it’s something on the app store. But I think we don’t see any more, but maybe I’m wrong, and I was wrong with that before. We won’t see these big corporations. So the scale of the corporation, and there will be big corporations that produce the platforms, but I’d say we either have these mega corporations, or we have tons of people, I wouldn’t use the word freelancers, but they can make great living on their own, maybe more like an actor personality. I think that would be my gut feeling how the future of work looks like. So you think the future of work looks like everybody on their own, and there’s no large corporations? Well, there is a few really large ones, right? It looks like it can be valued, to be honest. So you have these mega platforms that they can just shut you off, and there’s a visa, obviously, and all these companies won’t go anywhere, and there will be others joining them. But most of them, it will kind of look like we all work for YouTube now, or we all work for Uber, or we all work for one of those platforms. And they give us opportunity, but it’s almost like a Manchester opportunity, like a Manchester as a symbol for the 19th century, early industrial revolution. It’s kind of easier to make money, but it’s kind of much harder. You have to have more and more skills, and you have to try more things. So there is entrepreneurship, but the gulf, at least, between these big corporations and the entrepreneur, it will be pretty wide, and that might be fine, right? We all might have enough money. Maybe we don’t have to worry about anything. But the middle corporation, I think, so anyone starting corporations with 50 to 1,000 employees, it’s going to be tough, or it is already tough, I feel. Yeah, I mean, it’s super tough. I just had a buddy who went IPO this past weekend, and one of the things he always said, and he got to 3,000, he said 3,000 employees now, and he goes, set 1,500 employees at the time, and he goes, never gets easier, so it’s always never gets easier. But he always used to be so much easier to operate, right, and you’ve made it, at least for a while, that was true. I’m not sure it’s true anymore. Yeah, yeah, you got to celebrate the wins. Yeah, I don’t know. I think, unfortunately, the stats are that entrepreneurship, small business ownership is down over time. Large companies, I mean, fang has eaten the world. I mean, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, they’re untouchable at this point, and Microsoft, nobody talks about Microsoft, they install 800 pound gorilla inside of enterprises, inside of part of the conversation, but there’s these tremendous corporations, and when we’ve seen GE go from one of the most powerful corporations to now, I feel like their stock price is not doing so hot, but I mean, everything will rise and fall, but these guys are so big that they’re going to be hard to touch. Yeah, I mean, there is obviously, I mean, on one side, I’m really worried about that because part of the reason why I’m doing this podcast is, you know, keeping that sense of entrepreneurship alive, and I think it has been forgotten a little bit. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of opportunity in this scenario, right, there is an opportunity, I think this is what we see more, more from the left, and I haven’t made up my mind there, and this is, we talked about UBI briefly, if we are able, and this is a big if, right, if we are able to finance $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month, nobody knows what the right number is, if it’s much, might be much lower, or maybe UBI isn’t the right thing, but just assume we have the ability, and this, people make these comparisons with the industrial revolution, right, so we had this, we worked in farming, and barely anyone had enough to eat, I mean, a bunch of people were well off, but mostly it was a struggle. And then the industrial revolution seemed to be not much better, people had to go to a factory, but their productivity was so much higher, and in the end it turned out, well, we have like 3% employment now in agriculture, and we have way too much fruit in the industrial nations, at least, and even everywhere else, we have plenty of food, at least, as it’s badly distributed. So maybe this is the point where we say, and again, this is a big if, I’m still making up my mind, maybe this is the point where we see, well, there is something that is kind of an evil big corporation, but on the other hand, it can be that thing that feeds us, and we’re still competing, I mean, it doesn’t mean we’re all just going to stay at home. Well, I mean, corporations, that’s paying their fair share, it’s its first, which is no easy game. But Google, Google and whites all corporate taxes easily, they pay a lot of taxes for them. And Apple doesn’t even bring home any of the cash, I haven’t looked it up in a while, but you know, they’re not paying their fair share, but also by the way, I think UBI is a billionaires escapism and the values escapism to say, we don’t have to worry about everybody and we don’t have to give everybody a job because screw it, we’ll just make sure they have the minimal amount, we’ll put everybody in on welfare, it’s glorified welfare, and then nobody has to work, and nobody has to go to school, but it’s like, I don’t, I think that turns into a very dystopian reality when you take away work, it’s still, you know, working to just put food on your table and just to survive is extremely tough and the fair fear and everything else that comes with it is no easy story and completely alleviating that. You know, we’re arching so much about the $15 minimum wage this week, right, in Congress, right, but you know, and to just take away that level of poverty, but UBI will also take away people’s purpose. And I think that’s something. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the question is, how much do we define ourselves through jobs? I know this is a big argument, yes, what would that be? And I don’t think people would be out of job, right, they would just, they would have that and we probably end a lot of inflation. So it might not be what we think of 2000 today, maybe it’s 500 of what we think today. So there’s a book, I got to look it up, there’s a book they call it, it’s called Al Economics. It’s actually Bernie Sanders, economic advisor, actually gave Bernie a lot of his ideas, but basically it talks about how, man, I should not be the one teaching this or explaining this. However, it talks about the way we understand and control inflation today is based on the unemployment number, so we’re always going to have a certain amount of people or certain amount of subset of people unemployed to control inflation, but there’s other ways of handling it where you could give everybody a job, which is similar to universal basic income and then use different parameters to control inflation and the amount of money that we spend on debt, which will actually be tested now with the amount of debt that we’re taking on this year. When you have a truly sovereign currency like we do, we can take on more debt than we realize, but that’s risky. It sounds like you lived through the crazy inflation of Germany in the 90s, and I’m sure that’s something that you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Yeah, the 90s wasn’t so bad, it was the 20s and 30s of Weimar Republic, and my grandmother had a billion dollar, Deutsche Marks and notes, and everybody had one, everyone was a billionaire for quite some time. I think they scaled up the trillions within a matter of a couple of years, and the idea was to basically not pay the reparations, a lot of those reparations were in gold and silver from the First World War, so it’s kind of a bogus story in the first place. A lot of countries had that problem that they go into crazy inflation, and I think we right now look into something similar in the US, but the big thing, because we’re taking on so much debt, the big thing that nobody really can tell is, what’s the impact of technology? If technology, we’re taking on this loan basically, we’re spending more than we can, but we’re taking on this loan, the question is, if you take a lot of money like you as an entrepreneur, know very well, and put it into something productive, it’s going to be very worthwhile. Everybody should do this. Everyone should be a little venture capitalist and monster. I had Darren Marble from issuance.com, and you can, startups can now crowd fund up to $100 million soon. It’s not yet done, but Biden doesn’t change his mind completely. It will be law very soon, and this is insane, right? So, when you feel like an eye fully are behind that, when I feel early stage investors should be citizens like you and me, it doesn’t have to be Mr. Horowitz, if that happens and we all become investors into something good, let’s put it this way, and we feel that’s something good because we made our mind about it, then this capital is well invested. Let’s assume for a moment that all this debt that we’re taking on will actually be productive. The question is, if that’s true, and technology will actually sprout so much and AI will triple our GDP, then we’re going to laugh at the debt that we took on and say, well, this was just a joke. That was totally worth it, kind of like what Mr. Horowitz does with most of his investments. Most of them fail, but one has to come through and easily pays back. Well, and that’s the thing with why what we’re seeing in day training today with Robinhood and what we’re seeing, there’s a reason you should be using a professional investor because you can have a diversified investment portfolio over a course of time, and it’s risky to be in startups, and even the best of the best, whether it’s Horowitz or any of these super well known funds, they’re not making their money on 10 bets, they’re making their money on one bet, and they’re making their name on one bet. Whoever invested in Teal in Facebook, he is who he is because of a $500,000 check, and it’s these one bets that he is a very incredible human being and has done a tremendous amount, but the name of the reputation, if he didn’t make it there, we probably would have made it somewhere else. I’m not trying to take anything away from the man, but it’s one bet, so for investors that want to make five bets, not really knowing the risk portfolio, it’s over an individual. Even as somebody who knows the ecosystem, I find it very hard, and most people find it very hard to angel invest, even when they know what to look for and have a good thesis, so it’s interesting. But I agree, it’d be nice that people could also, it’d not be such a small niche of people benefiting from all these profits, but by the way, to your point, in putting capital to work, when you have huge megalith corporations hoarding a tremendous amount of cash, not putting it to work, or the super wealthy, and I’m talking billionaires plus, a lot of their capital isn’t necessarily always being put to work, especially not into entrepreneurship, especially not into specific projects. I don’t know, family offices actually now, I guess, are getting into startup ecosystems, but some of that money doesn’t necessarily go back into the economy, which is the scary thing with all the wealth being controlled at the top. Yeah, that’s why we have the Reddit army now, that helps GameStop to bail them out. And I think, what was the other company, they almost bailed out, they kind of raised at the money, when the stock was up, yeah, AMC was, but it was a couple of months ago, it was another story like that, Chesapeake, I think it was Chesapeake, I actually know what they do, and herds, a couple of companies were really safe, but a Reddit army, I find this very interesting phenomenon. I’m trying to join me, I can’t keep up with Reddit, but… Everybody has that problem, right, everybody, and you never know which of these things will actually catch on. One thing, I think that’s really relevant, and I think, I asked this a lot of people, I get really different reactions. Do you think we are in this big stagnation, you know, Peter Thiel’s team that, nothing really happened outside of the semiconductor and the financial industry since the 70s, you know, semiconductors, now the internet industry, do you think that’s true, and do you think we’re going to break through this now, or it’s just going to keep going? You know, so I do agree with the thesis, too many of us are focused on making, doing marketing or sales, or, you know, we haven’t done real innovation, like real invention, we’ve just iterated, I think, the last 20 years in many ways, you know, Facebook hasn’t, you know, it’s Facebook done, what is Netflix really, I mean, they’ve made our lives more convenient, but have they made society better, right, Google, sure, Googling anything and having information at our fingertips, there’s a huge thesis there, Amazon being able to get everything delivered, I love it, I’m a huge fan, but has it made us better? So I kind of agree with that thesis, excuse me, I think the next 10 years and the acceleration of the next 10 years are going to be, when you look at 5G and what it could do with wearables and connected devices, when you look at AI and what that could do across the board, across the industries, and when, you know, you used to need, well what, you used to need a team of 100 people to develop a website, when AI, which is a year or two away, literally becomes the same as the equivalent of Shopify, right, and I could plug in any of my ideas into a narrow AI, right, and what that’d allow me to do, and that already allows me to do when I could build products is highly fascinating, and as AI expands, it gets richer and richer over the next 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be very interesting, and then what happens with like, you know, if the singularity is actually real, right, or if we actually become cyborgs, and or CRISPR becomes real and we start manipulating our genes and everybody has a 300 point IQ, right, you know, what does that look like, and that’s what’s actually scary to me is the singularity, right, is where you and me and us being humans and untouched, we’re just monkeys and everybody else is, you know, is superhuman, because they could think a million times faster than us and run circles around us, that’s a dystopian future too. So I don’t know, the next 10 years are going to be as interesting as any. Yeah, I mean, I talked to David Orban, and he said that the day for the singularity has been moved upwards, so to speak, to 2038, it used to be 2045, and they say the problem, well, I keep telling my kids, this is the way to make money, right, so this is the Cambrian explosion in technology, and I see that all the, that all the pointers are still pointing towards it, and you would feel like we have a better idea now, but that’s kind of the whole idea of the singularity, like that you don’t have, that it’s, you can’t see inside it into it, and you don’t really know what’s coming. And by the way, I forgot, I forgot quantum computing too. Yeah, yeah, see, but that’s, you know, China seems to be more ready than we are, but who knows who’s going to win. I think there’s so much potential, and all of these technologies, and I was chatting with David Orban about AGI, literally you just need one AGI to change everyone’s life in a heartbeat, it’s like we all use Google, but this age, we have an AGI for pretty much anything, and it’s free, right, and we, we could put the internet, we can connect to that AGI, you, I mean, the amount of changes you can do if someone comes up with this, it might be China, it might be us, it might be you, someone in this basement. If the right person comes up with it, and if they, you don’t want it to be someone, you don’t want it to be someone, because if it’s someone, you know. How do you control this? It’s a very scary thing, if you look at the Great Powers game, and you look at what’s going on out there, there are forces that, you know, Oral’s 1984 is child’s play to what’s being done and what’s about to be done. If you watch Black Mirror, Black Mirror is a great example, do you ever see the Black Mirror episode of the social media score? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw them all, I love Black Mirror. But it’s, that’s scary to me, and that’s being, that’s happening in certain countries right now. That’s not tomorrow, that’s not, that’s reality, especially with COVID, it’s literally happening. And so what, you’re going to have access to everything or not? But we already have that. I think this is, I think whoever created this meme, I feel like it’s maybe QAnon or someone, we already have that, we have Americans have a credit score, that actually didn’t exist in Europe for the longest time. That’s only one part, but it basically, if you defraud people, then your credit score is so bad, you won’t have one, right? It will be, I don’t know, a hundred. But you could recover your credit score, it’s not that forever, but what if that’s applied for everything? And it’s like, you hear somebody out, you honk at somebody, and all of a sudden, the next time you rat the cards, 10 times higher? It already is, but think about people in small communities, that’s what they do in their mind, right? There’s no social credit, like a credit score on you, and they elect the one with the best as their local leader. I think this is, I mean, it is scary, but on the other hand, you also have to see with that data, you can massage it, right? As an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of opportunity in this to help, and this is in the movie, right? That’s where they have people who prove your score. Well, so I want to point out, I want to highlight something that I think is actually profound of what we’re talking about. I love speaking to people who are born in this country. The way you think, your German mindset and your German experiences are so different than mine. It’s beautiful when we get together and actually collaborate. I think it doesn’t exist. You’re like, no, it already exists, you’re here and here, I’m like, all right, you convinced me. But it’s like, there’s too much, we spend too much time being around people that think exactly like us, I think, too much time, there’s too much group link sometimes. Yeah, it’s the echo chamber. But that can only be, that must have been way worse. Think about 15, 20, or longer than that, say 50 years ago, because literally there was only one newspaper and all the other information you had was coming from other people who you knew your whole life, who basically, and they were kind of your friends or they were people you knew. So they had kind of the same opinions as well as you most of the time. Certainly, there was a few quadrarians, there was always room for that. I think it’s only gotten better now. And I mean, YouTube can’t shut down accounts quick enough, there’s always someone who’s going to come up and say, okay, this is how I see reality and I’m after these same opinions here in this show. I see reality quite differently and this is why you can’t shut down the world, I mean, there’s no censorship in the world who can do that, there’s always a VPN, there’s always a hack. And think about, maybe you know a little about it, I’m trying to find someone who can fully explain the Q&A, but I’ve watched this documentary and they said, it’s 15 to 20% of the US population who have some allegiance with Q&A and like for better or worse, they think this is something they want to know more about it and they feel it’s good stuff. Let’s put it this way. And this is amazing, right? It’s something that the media hates, it’s something that the YouTube hates and any social platform hates, maybe for good reason, maybe not, I actually don’t know enough, but it’s spread like wildfire. There’s always been a conspiracy theorist like, thread in America, you know, I mean Area 51 is just one easy example. Wait, that’s not real? No, the base exists, you know, whether you believe or what they say is going on there or not, I’m not touching. But, you know, so that’s always been a thread in our democracy. I think what’s scary is people literally risking the Republic to be right. I think that’s scary. Yeah. Well, I think from their point of view, it’s the Republic doesn’t exist anymore, right? So that would be their response. They would say, well, we don’t risk anything because it’s gone already, and you can make that case, right? I think that’s definitely a case to be made, but things are moving so quickly, six months later, it could be, we could have the Republic back, so to speak, and where we create a lot of damage. But on the other hand, I’m really curious what’s going on in QAnon, a lot of people say that’s the new religion, that’s the new cult, what people will gravitate to, and it seemed to have already happened. I really don’t know the numbers if they are correct. You know, I mean, my dad’s not a member of QAnon, not that I know of, but he’s certainly conservative. And talking to him about politics is very challenging because, again, he sees the world very, very differently than I do, and it’s scary sometimes, but there’s also a lack of listening across the board, and I don’t think anybody’s, you know, it’s QAnon or anything else. I don’t think anybody’s listening to each other anymore. Nobody wants to sit down and listen to each other anymore. Everybody just knows that they’re right, and everybody else must be wrong. Yeah, I mean, there’s this sense of you just want to win. You don’t want to have necessarily, and I think this is partially social media, and partially it is, I don’t know what happened to people’s minds, right? You see education, they just want to win, right? They don’t want to, nobody cares about what, how the world should look like. Nobody cares about winning a relatively short argument, a small argument, and I think it gives you a lot of, you know, it’s emotionally, it’s great, but it’s a weird, it’s a weird way for us to see that, right? We still need like the aggregate, and someone needs to do the aggregation and say, okay, this is all these small fights, but the big fight is actually quite different, and someone that used to be the media, but that’s kind of gone now. No, it is gone, and you know, whether you believe it, QAnon Theory, that it’s, you know, Bill Gates and crazy forces behind everything, or I don’t know what, but there are definitely forces at play, whether nefarious or coincidental, that are forcing us to argue about the things that really, in my mind, and other people’s matters, but like, okay, you know, could we move on, six years later from abortion, could we move on from gay rights, and you know, accept that this is people’s right to choose their own pathway and not a place for the government, and you know, people argue with that all day, and I’m stepping into deep border there anyway, but there’s things that really matter to all our lives on a day to day basis, that are our business, that, you know, huge forces that are coming to bear, like we were talking about 10 minutes ago with, you know, the singularity is in, you know, 2038, it’s going to be, if you thought COVID was a disruption, it’s a whole other horrors of magnitude different, and there’s the great powers game again, and you know, what that matters for the free world, and for billions of people’s lives, I think it’s, you know, I think the sad thing about the Republic, whether it’s fault, some people say it’s fallen, which is, I strongly believe it is not, but even risking the Republic has been, or certainly not that, that banner of freedom for the world, we’ve lost our inspiration, you know, and, Yeah, I mean, the rest of the world has to go through the exact same path, and I just went to Bogota a couple of weeks ago, and you can feel and see people are like six or maybe six months, maybe 18 months, maybe two, maybe longer, behind the US, I think everyone has to rebuild the mental model of the world, and I think it’s just a time of change, right? I think there’s some better alternative. The question is, it’s very hard to predict, it’s almost like investing in dot coms back in 2000. Do you know, I mean, all of us knew there was something to it, right? This was real. There was real economic growth, productivity growth, but selecting from, I don’t know, 100 companies that were public on NASDAQ and were all dot coms, that would be incredibly difficult. I couldn’t have done it. I tried, and I completely, Well, it’s the same thing with crypto right now, right? I remember reading about Bitcoin was at 200, and I’m going, $200, and I’m going, shit, this is really interesting, and then I read, like, well, the banks are going to get involved in it, and there’s going to be $2,000, and you’ll never be able to pick the winner. They’re still right. They’ll never be able to pick the winner, but the masses, the Reddit board, and then the crypto board, they pick Bitcoin, and I certainly messed that one up at 200, but picking a winner, it’s not exactly easy. It is hard. It’s very hard. I mean, even if you have the main expertise, there’s a lot of factors outside that makes it very difficult to pick a winner that you just, you can’t predict that it just happened to kind of sneak in your equation, and I think that what you just said is it’s very useful. I feel EQ is much more, maybe it’s always been true, but EQ seems to be the more determining factor now for investing, at least for public markets. Figuring out where the crowd goes is so much more important, and this might only be a week, and knowing what is a good investment on an intellectual basis. Maybe it’s always been that way, but that seems to have, it has turned quite a bit. It’s funny. I think the whole world woke up in the last month and said, I woke up, when I saw Bitcoin get to $40,000, I was very, I had a lot of emotions, and to say the least, I didn’t have any money in Bitcoin, my friends were like, we’re throwing a frigging party, you’re going to come celebrate, this is like, fuck you, you spunk bitches. I was very jealous, and I was like, you know what, I missed that, why did I miss it? Because I was an Acer, I was smarter, and I knew that in the long run, my thesis, I knew that Bitcoin wasn’t a winner, and it might be, it might not be, who knows, that thesis will play out. Same thing with game stuff, but the fact of the matter is the hordes going for it. There’s a middle ground there where you can still ride that wave. Now, knowing when to get off it, and timing the market, well, that’s been proven time and time again over the last 500 years of markets, since the Dutch in the 1600s had their first crash, that timing the market is not a sound investment strategy, but you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take as well, and I’ve been sitting on the sidelines a little bit too much with trying to overthink some of these ceases. I didn’t ride the GameStop wave, or the ANC wave, I just didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just, I stayed as far away from that as I could. A lot of people had figured it out a couple of days earlier. I read Zero Hedge, only for the financial news, anyways, but they have, they figured this out a couple of days before it actually exploded. It was still, they probably made the 3X or 5X on what they recommended, but they, and I think a lot of hedge funds also went in. That’s why it exploded so much, it really exploded, because it became a bigger audience besides Reddit, and then eventually Monday, that was all over, but Zero Hedge is kind of the only place that I read where I feel like you’re a little bit ahead of the crowd. Maybe it’s just 24 hours, but they’ve been riding a lot about a couple of COVID things. I think that’s all you need, and that was the other takeaway I learned this year with COVID was to trust my God. I was like, my parents were like, how’d you know it was coming? I’m like, mom, all the students are in news at a China. By March 1, it was inevitable it was going to come here. I think we could have done a lot to stop it, but I knew what moves I should have made. I was fearful, so I did him. I didn’t trust my God and didn’t take those actions, and maybe that will burn me in the future. I don’t know, but I learned to not trust my God this year and take actions on things. What did I hear six months ago? If I think of taking an action on something, I give myself five seconds to do it. If I don’t, I’m not 100% bought in on it, but if I want to make it happen, I need to do it then because if I say I’m going to do it one day, someday it’s not going to happen. That’s tough. I don’t know, VB. That social media talks to our limbic brain, I think what you just said, the gut feelings are kind of a limbic brain. There is a lot, maybe that’s not emotionally driven, just it’s something our unconscious talks to us. I think there’s a lot of knowledge to it, but if I say I would have done everything right away in a few seconds what my God told me, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Maybe actually I would, things would have played out quite differently. That’s an interesting thought actually. Yeah, I mean, so it goes into like, do you know Eckhart Tolle? Is it the one with the pyramids now? No, Eckhart Tolle is the book for the power of now and the whole book breaks down to is that life only exists now and now and now and now. What now is, is your subconscious is here and if we’re thinking, we’re either worrying about the future or worrying about the past in that present moment, but if you inherently think of something and take that action that it’s probably you, not your mind kind of overworking it or without getting too far down that rabbit hole, but I think if you know something to be true and you have a gut instinct for it, especially as entrepreneurs, I think a lot of times that initial instinct is true. Have you ever thought where this comes from? So is that like a different part of the brain or do you feel that’s something like a near cortex or can’t react to it yet or like Jordan Peterson was saying that what he finds really interesting when he sees patients and I’ve been in hospitals too, in a mental hospital, I worked there and I feel nobody really knows where these thoughts sometimes come from, right? I don’t know where my thoughts come from and a lot of people that I took care of there in the hospital, they definitely had no idea where these thoughts came from and I don’t know if that’s unconscious or if that’s somewhat conscious, have you thought about that? Even a lot and I am not nearly qualified to answer those questions, but what I can say is my work that I’ve done in like transformative education where, you know, what’s the quickest way of getting admitted into that mental hospital is talking to yourself and having conversations and stuff, right, but, you know, you’re talking about, well, where do those ideas come from? Well, maybe you’re talking to yourself. So, you know, so it’s interesting, I think in the transformative education world, it would be described that this is a computer, this is hardware that’s meant to kind of think and meant to control and define our ego and our identity to really protect ourselves or always kind of blocking ourselves and protecting ourselves from some fear or something to coming to, really, again, I’ll leave it at that, to really protect ourselves from some sort of fear and anxiety, right, so that’s why we’re worrying about the past or worrying about what could happen in the future and that’s kind of what our mind is and then there’s that other thing and I don’t know where this comes from. I don’t know if it’s hardwired or, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, your micro got biome and it being connected to your mood and everything else, but there’s a moment where you do have those spontaneous thoughts and they are, sometimes it’s brainstorming, but you do have those epiphanies that come to you. I don’t know how or where or why and I don’t know the science behind it, but those guttural instincts, I think, are the truest thoughts that we’ll have before you kind of work through it in your own head because then you’ll distort it, I think. Yeah, yeah, I mean, if you can, you can help people, you know, get more of those serendipitous or inside, sudden insights, you know, light bulb goes off, that would be a trillion dollar idea. But so by the way, that is, so that is, I don’t want to say that is what I coach on because that would be arrogant, but that is the world of transformer education that is landmark education, that is Tony Robbins, that is the Jim Rohn, that is, there’s a tremendous amount of world out there that it literally gets you out of your own way, gets you out of your own fears, gets you out of your own head to allow you to do that. So when I coach, it’s just a small part of that, right? Now, there’s a tremendous background in it that you really have to do to truly get somebody out of their own way, but having that observer will get you there a little bit, bit by bit, and that’s really what the end of the conversation is with coaching, who’s getting there. Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about Tony Robbins. I watched a couple of documentaries and some TED talks, well, I actually didn’t know the guy until a couple of months ago, and it’s hard for me just looking into it. He seems to be, how do I say that? That’s my gut feeling seeing it, but I have too little information to really form an opinion. I feel like he takes something that he learned somewhere else, he changes it slightly and then presents you with a framework, but he doesn’t tell you his sources, but I didn’t see enough. No, so first of all, you’re 100% right, right? Tony has 100x more success than any other person in that space because he’s an amazing marketer. And by the way, you talk about the last 30 years of innovation in technology, somebody takes somebody else’s idea, tweets it, puts their label on it, blows it up, does it right, and then the next Facebook, you know? Yeah, it’s through a city convalescent, that’s what you just described. Yeah, I mean, so it’s not like where the stories come from, you know, on Insta, it says, everybody’s copying everybody else, Gates didn’t invent dust, he bought it, right? So yeah, so that’s why Tony’s successful now. But that’s, so take away Tony from it and look at the core of his work and look at what he’s implementing and look at the change and do I think he has the best content and the best delivery out there? No, but he’s touching the most amount of lives, which I think is beautiful. There’s other, my particular access to something called landmarkworldwide.com and it’s called landmark education and they were very profound, they’re one of the originals on the block and their creator, Warner and I, was kind of the source of a lot of things, but he still sourced it from, you know, whether it’s PhD neuroscientists and Heidegger and things of that nature to really look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and take away the conversations that we’re having with ourselves and just get to the root of things, which makes life a lot simpler. Does it have some religious undertones? I always feel like he strikes me as a, he could be as easily in a Mormon church that he is a coach, right? Is there a real relationship or is it accidental? No, it’s coincidental in the sense that when I think you break down religions to their core there’s a few different things and one of them, you know, I know Judy is in the best and there’s the religious and the traditions and the things that we’ve gone through over the course of time, but the other day it’s about giving people rules to live by, to give them the, to empower them to have a more successful, more purpose driven life, to also make life simpler so they could focus on what matters and alleviate their anxieties. Then there’s the whole higher power component, but there’s a tremendous amount of components in religion that are about the, about people and easing their anxieties in their fears, right? And that side of the things there is overlap. There is no spirituality or religion in any of these programs, but there is that overlap of how do you make life simple? How do you be happier? How do you alleviate anxiety, right? Yeah, a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people say this about what the, all the hardcore liberal policies, they’re kind of, they’re feeding into the same instinct, right? So you have a, you have a religious instinct that everybody needs and as you say, I mean, we need a software upgrade, right? That’s, I think what the Old Testament really gave us, it’s a software upgrade to live like life better and there’s a lot of rules, but these rules are, have stood the test of time because otherwise, you know, the Old Testament wouldn’t be around and there wouldn’t be a whole new religion built on this or two of them. And so that’s, that’s one thing I mean, we need, there’s always things as we don’t know. So and we will, we have to call them something, we can call them, we don’t know, but if you call them God, the good part is, and we think this has been ever lent God, oh, that will take away our anxiety, as you say, right? So we, this, and this keeps on going. This will, will never end. I mean, even if we build our own universe, we still will not know things and we have to attribute it to something that doesn’t make us anxious because that will reduce our productivity. So I’m fully with you. And a lot of people say this about this, this religious instinct keep, it stands and it’s always there. People haven’t, they’re born with it and it will sooner or later gravitate towards it. That’s what I felt when I saw Tony Robbins. He kind of, he, he, he, he responds to this religious instinct to help me make more sense of the world so I can see the abstract rules and then I can incorporate them into my life. That’s kind of how it appeared to me, but that’s again, I’m just an observer. I don’t know the details. No, it’s not a bad thing. But, but, but do you think it’s better than religion? I think everybody needs their access. I think not having access to some sort of framework. I know a lot of people that are figuring it out by themselves. Again, it comes down to where I got my definition of wisdom was like, I would not be the smiling jovial person that you see today without doing a lot of this work with landmark, right? I want to be able to sell my last company without doing it. I want to have been able to, you know, get out of my own way. I mean, I used to walk into every conversation being arrogant, prick, because I had something that approved that I didn’t think I was smart enough, I didn’t think I was good enough because I didn’t read when I was a kid and I thought I was in smart. So I had approved everybody how smart I was. Guess what? I was just an asshole trying to prove that. Right? And until I was able to… You definitely caught up with the reading. The opposite personality. Oh, I got, I got something to prove there, but, but, but it’s how do you let go of those traumas? And we all have traumas from growing up. We all have things that have happened to us. Right? What, what, that’s, you know, I’m not a very religious person, but I always felt like what’s great about them, they’ve kind of, they’ve worked the line a lot between steering you too much in one, one side and also giving you enough freedom. Well, this is debatable how much freedom is in there, right? So that’s, that’s obviously a big debate, but they’ve worked that line for a long, long time. And I always feel if, if you have new religions or things that are just like religions that feed into the same instinct, the risk is always, um, and maybe the overshoot in guiding you too much, so to speak, right? They give you a rule and then you have to adhere to it. And because that gives you a lot of followers, it makes it easier to market. But it also kind of gets rid of your, your, your own personality, your own freedom. I think this is what happened to Christianity, for instance, right? It started off as something that’s more free, more open, and then it became the Catholic church and became extremely, extremely difficult to, to navigate for a lot of people. And then, and then man got involved, not woman, but man, right? It was pure and then, you know, it’s man’s creation over the last two thousand and twenty years, right? Um, the verses. Well, what do you think? Yeah. Go ahead. No, it, it, it’s just, it’s just man’s creation now at his purest and roots, it was still man’s creation, but there’s, but over a lot, and I’m going to probably offend people, but um, you know, there, there’s just humans making decisions and updating it for the, for this world. Don’t be livid. As opposed to the Old Testament, is that what you’re saying? Or? I’m not saying the Old Testament, it’s, it’s not a, yeah, I guess as opposed to the Old Testament, it’s changed because every, you know, every twenty, thirty years, a new, a new human has put their touch, their opinion on it for better or for worse. And, you know, I mean, yeah, I mean, look at the divisiveness within the, the whole Catholic lineage that I still don’t understand, you know, and Lutherism and Protestant and how many wars have been fought over the smallest difference and change of man’s creation? Yeah. Well, because it helps us so much to define ourselves, right? And if you break it down, whenever you break down a religious tone, and I know Judaism has this too, and, but it has, has been able to kind of catch some of the outliers over time. It’s, it’s so, well, I was making that in another podcast in his comparison, and maybe you think the same, entrepreneurs, cult leaders, and priests, philosophers too, they’re all kind of looking, you’re looking at the same personality profile. They’re all kind of looking to, to put their lens of reality onto the world. And when you, when you think of religion, you know, it’s this big tool where you can influence people. It’s kind of a marketing tool to market your own ideas, to market your own social standing. And then obviously, if you break off from a lineage, create another one, all you want to do is, is, is to fend this, right? If someone comes in, then your whole, the whole work is kind of gone. The center, you start up, right? Someone steals your idea, and then you, you’re toast. You don’t eat the idea exists, but you as a, as someone who has taken advantage of this, that person, that benefit is gone. Yeah. No, you’re not right. I think for some of these outsized, you know, startup founders, they have this, I think what you’re describing is a reality distortion field, right? Whether it’s Travis at Uber or Adam at WeWork, they distorted reality. Anybody who’s around them, they like made them believe in their dreams. And there is that, that thread, that, that, that gift that they have that I’m very confused if I, if that’s a gift that I want, because it’s a, it’s a superpower and you can wield it for good or wield it for evil. Yeah. Absolutely. But, but you don’t know if it’s good or bad, right? I always say this about entrepreneurs. We all start out to make the world a better place, but then Zuckerberg one day woke up and said, oh man, this didn’t turn out the way I want it because I never thought about these things. I don’t know if everybody has such good intentions. I think you’ve been drinking the Koolaid in the valley for too long. I think, I know, I think they do. Give me a bunch of examples where people start out and do something and they really want their, everyone’s lives miserable, but they just want to make money. I mean, there’s even, even drug lords, you know, think about Pablo Escobar. Everybody’s in it for the, like, you know, a lot of people are in it for the money. Not everybody’s in it. There’s plenty of people that are in it for the aspirational making difference, but at the core of it, people are going to make a buck. I think if people, you know, and when people get too focused on just making a buck, nothing else matters when they don’t have a mission that’s actually something that they truly believe in and they have started purpose driven, and they don’t start a purpose driven company. Well, that’s company we sold alcohol. I had an idea that alcohol should be delivered, right? And we’re the first person people to execute on it and it was a great thesis. Friggin drizzly just sold for 1.1 billion. I did fail to execute as well as them. Okay. You know, they had, they, I didn’t know what sounds like. You may be very little early, I guess. You may be very little early. That’s a relatively new market to explode. Right. But, you know, there wasn’t a thesis of making an impact. There’s no make a buck. They didn’t have a big one to make a buck. No, I agree with you, but the, you know, that’s, that’s the beauty of it of Adam Smith. Just making an idea that there is a lot of exceptions to it. But in general, when we come up with something that a new service or product that we offer, it’s not that we want to change the world for the better necessarily, we want to make money for ourselves 100%. But in turn, because we do something useful that is cheaper, better, different, and people buy from us voluntarily, we make the world a better place. Now it doesn’t always work out that way, right? There’s a lot of exceptions, but I’d say 99% of innovation works that way. It’s accidental. People have a, it’s, they don’t want to be do gooders, right? I mean, maybe they want to, but they actually want to make money and that does the good. That’s what I’m trying to refer to, not people’s, you know, altruistic motivation. Maybe some people have that. Maybe. I mean, I come to, I come to bear with a very altruistic motivation and I want to bring everything to bear and one of the things, every company, I start to want to have a purpose. I want to have a purpose that actually makes a difference to other people. And it’s, by the way, it’s a selfish reason because if I’m perfect, one of the things that motivates me is making the impact in other people’s lives. I don’t want to think that fulfills me is making the impact in other people’s lives. If I don’t come with a purpose, I will burn out. I will not be motivated. Give me a year and I won’t want to do it. So it’s a selfish reason for doing it, but it’s the intention that I’ve also created that, you know, I want to have an impact in people’s lives and I want that to be the core thing. And, you know, when I, when I sold the last company, I was like, well, what do I want to do next? And I knew I want to have a purpose and I’m like, well, maybe I’ll be, maybe I’ll start an NGO and I’ll do it that way. And I’m like, no, I’m an entrepreneur. I enjoy making money, but I really, what wakes me up and what gives me fuel in my tank and what fulfills me is making that difference for people. I think you’re absolutely right. But I think I always look at people who make outlandish donations and gifts. And I feel like, whoa, they really have a really terrible conscience. So they give so much money because their theory in their mind is, okay, I’m doing something dirty, Pablo Escobar, and I’m killing a lot of people, maybe not directly, but indirectly. So I giving ever give a lot of money away, so it kind of cleans my soul. And I’m just running this startup or this company. And then I use all this money to make the world a better place. I think this is, I’m actually, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I think that’s great. If people do that, if they stick their whole money to good cause, but the good cause for me is entrepreneurship itself, because that actually is the weapon to wield. And that’s a fair point. I mean, look what Gates has been doing for the last 10 years, right? And really wielding his knowledge, know how to try to make the impact in that world and change the world to make a better place through entrepreneurship. So that thesis is absolutely 100%, right? I think a powerful thesis that I try and live by, and then they’ve been playing out for the last six years, it’s worked for me really well. And there’s a concept that we live our lives in, which is why people donate at the end of their life is we’re going to go after the things that we want to go after. We’re going to have those things that we want to have. We’re then going to do all those things that we’ve always wanted to do in our lives. And then finally, at some point when we make all this money, we’re going to finally be that person that gives back, we’re going to finally be that person that makes a difference. And we’re going to finally be the person we’ve always wanted to be. The thing that made my life so much easier was being that person today, being who you truly want to be and know you are, and doing those things now, and giving that money away now or whatever that is for you, right? And doing those things that you want to do and not waiting for someday, one day to do those things. And then eventually you’ll have those things that you want. But I think doing in that order gives you a lot more power, freedom, self expression, fun and joy, which is something I want in my life, and you’re just a better human for before. Oh, I’m with you. This is the philosophy to follow. And I think this is when it’s obviously just one reading, but that would be my reading of the Old Testament. You know, be the best person you can anywhere you are in life. And in Christianity, it was really interesting. They had a lot of warlords in the 6th, 7th, 8th century, from what we know, they had priests traveling with them. And the idea was that they killed a lot of people, they ravaged their countryside. And then the second, if they actually injured, they have a couple of seconds, they can pledge allegiance to Jesus, and they go to heaven, right? So that was clever, so to speak, right? You’re as an entrepreneur, but obviously something is really wrong with that. Well, I’ve ran into that in the real world these days, I ran into some shady business people somewhere in the world, and they had their own religious, I won’t say what religious, their own religious guru, who is a member of that religious sect that they were part of. And it was their private guru, it was their private priest, rabbi, whoever. That was, they had them on call, and they had them on staff, because they were making such shit decisions. I remember going to my business partner, I’m like, do we really want to do business with somebody who has to have their own private religious guru to clean the conscious daily? I’m like, nope, not worth it. That’s a right flag. That’s certainly a right flag, but there’s so many ways to gain the system, I guess. That’s one of the most crazy ways I’ve seen, do it in that way, and it’s not good for everyone. So if you find a scalable system that works for the individual, but also society, I think that’s the holy grail, and we only have a very few of those. I think this is, religion is overlooked as a system that, but Adam Smith is the other one who described that, but I think the system is much older than this, there’s very few things that are so finely balanced that they can actually achieve that. And I think a startup is like that too, right? It’s an incarnation of this forward looking positive belief, and you incorporate it with a few people, just yourself, and then a bunch of other people, and any idea grows, and everyone’s better off unless you do something really dirty. But in general, I think 99% of startups, it’s all good, what comes out of it. Even Facebook, as nasty as I think is Facebook, there’s a lot of good that they’ve done. Maybe I convince you one day, maybe I’ll convince you. No, there’s definitely some good that they’ve done. We met that we’re addicted to our phones these days, and the fact that they’re single premise is to make sure that you spend as much time on their platform as possible, and that’s their number one KPI. I need to figure out how to balance that, because that’s just, I think that’s the root of a lot of evil right now, is that we’re phone addictions, and I don’t know, that’s a whole other subject that… We have to get to it next time. I have a lot, a lot that I thought about that too, but we have to get to that next time. Thanks for doing this, Rob. That was awesome. Thanks for helping me with all these questions. I know we went all over the place. We definitely went all over the place, but I felt like we were just in your backyard shooting the shit, so thanks for your time, and thanks for having me. I enjoyed it tremendously. Yeah. All right, Rob. Talk soon. Take care. Bye. All right, guys, thanks for your time, and I’ll see you in the next video, guys. Bye.