The Daily Stoic - Tech Investor Joe Lonsdale On How Philosophy Makes You Better at Business

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

Ryan speaks with entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale about the intersections of business and philosophy, what Cicero means to him, why so many people are relocating to Texas, and more.Joe Lonsdale is a major Silicon Valley tech sector investor. A co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Lonsdale was an early investor in companies including Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, and Orca Bio, and is a partner at 8VC, his venture capital firm. Lonsdale also started the Cicero Institute, a group dedicated to public-private partnerships to solve problems.This episode is brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars.This episode is also brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Joe Lonsdale:Homepage: https://joelonsdale.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/JTLonsdaleSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target,

the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. My guest today is Joe Lonsdale, one of the great investors and technology entrepreneurs of our time. I've gotten to know Joe over the last couple of years, at some events we both spoke at, some mutual friends that we both have. But most of all, we connected over our mutual love of the classics, the four virtues, of course, courage, justice, wisdom, temperance. As it happens, Joe, in addition to being one of the co-founders of Palantir, founder of 8Vc, a tech VC fund and investor in a bunch of really interesting cool companies. Joe is a philanthropist,

an activist involved in a lot of interesting different ventures. But Joe is a lover of the classics, as I was saying, and he's the founder of the Cicero Institute of Public Policy Research Think Tank. And of course, I love the name, but as you'll hear in the interview, we sort of talk about why Cicero is here at a Joe. What's the cautionary elements of Cicero's character? What's also inspiring about Cicero? What we can learn from about Cicero, bunch of cool stuff like that. Joe also has the honor of being one of the only human beings who I'm not married to or living with, that I have seen in the last several months.

He stopped by the Daily Stoic offices a couple weeks ago when he was in town kicking around a move to Austin. And we had a socially distanced breakfast and then a walk around town. Welcome to Texas, Joe. And of course, welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast. I think you guys are really like this. And Joe's thinking is, I think, provocative.

I wouldn't say contrarian, Peter Till, who Lon Stell's obviously worked with for a long time says, you know, sort of Contrarian is to be opposite of someone it's reactionary and I don't think there's really anything that admirable about being Contrarian, but it is important to be an independent thinker to figure out what you think about something independent of what other people think about it. Joe is an independent thinker that means that he and I don't agree on everything. We may not agree on much even as you'll see we disagree on Cicero, was Cicero a hero, was Cicero a tragically flawed figure. I'm more in the ladder camp, he's more in

the former, but I always think it's important that we talk to and discuss with people who we think differently then because this is how we learn and this is how we get better. This is also how we change minds and this is also how we clarify what we think. So anyways, here's my interview to Joe, Lonstail and Joy. I thought we should start with our mutual friend, Cicero, that's obviously what you named your foundation or your policy institute after. But I'm curious like, why and what does he mean to you? Where did he come into your life? I probably haven't studied the classics as much as you all, the classics are something

I'm very passionate about. But you partially just assemble in general of the ancient values and of ancient emancipation philosophy. I think we were talking about this earlier. There's a lot of Kato in me, and I think my instincts as a young man was the Kato, but I actually want to get things done in the world and be a realist. And Sistro, to me, represents whose value is tripped off the Renaissance and who's who was just a really extraordinary person who had got a lot done and was willing to do things even though they were on popular, at least it claimed anyway, you know, because they were the

right thing to do. And so just bringing that ancient wisdom and acknowledgement of the history and the history of our society and applying it to the things working on today, that was very important to me. Well, I think that the dichotomy of Cato and Cicero is really interesting. And then it almost sets up kind of the perfect Aristotelian mean if you then put sort of Caesar on the other end of the spectrum because they're all brilliant, they're all successful, they're all ambitious, they're all successful. They're all ambitious. They're all motivated by a certain sort of personal philosophy Definitely and the reason I would choose and I was awe-void I've been very inspired by all three of those men Of course, and I think I think little boys grew up in the 19th century reading about Caesar and Alexander the Great In a way, we don't anymore right now, right as you learn more

You know similar how as a Jewish young boy you learn about King. Right. As you learn more, you know, still learn how as a Jewish young boy, you learn about King David. And then as you learn more, you realize actually there's a lot of flaws with King David and there are a lot of flaws with Caesar. And that's the nature of these. The reason Cicero, more representative for my institute anyway,

is Cicero really believed the power of commerce in a way that the other guys didn't as much. He's very, you know, he and Kato as well, we're very fans for attacking special interests, which Caesar probably was not quite as much. He and Kato as well were very fans for attacking special interests, which Cesar probably was not quite as much. Of course, Cisro is more of a pragmatist. And then, you know, supposedly abide integrity. I'm more skeptical of this now, if you're reading your recent work, but I do think overall in general, he did have a lot of integrity

in his legacy. And I think what he did and how he approached the world. Well, I think you're your point about commerce as well, mate, because when you look at a Cato or when you look at a Marcus Aurelace or you look at a Seneca, they have this virtue about them and this commitment to philosophy, but what goes on said is that almost like the Southern planting class in the United States, like it's disembodied from actually having to work for a living because. Totally. If somebody else is doing it for you. No, it was a new man. And that's something that was really, you know, a new man in the Roman sense where he

can't put the equites in front of announcing that, right, which is the landholder and commercial class, right, which is very different than coming from this like, ancient, erster chronic class. Yeah, it's like the Spartans. It's sure it's impressive. They were this fantastic warrior culture who sort of embraced every hardship and shared everything in common, but that's also because they had a race of slaves doing all of the work for them, which created the privilege to be able to, you know, sort of live in this fantasy world. And these days, instead of having that, we have this race of technology that's doing everything

for us, for some people who are quite wealthy, but even so, I think being tied to value creation, being tied to building, I think, is a much healthier thing. You see a lot of people who are born into wealth, who've never created wealth themselves, tend to have very silly ideas of the world. They tend to be a lot more socialists, for example, because they actually don't understand how the world works, which then leads to these very dangerous, lack of virtues. If you're not careful. I get that criticism, you know, people go like, what would Senica think or what would

Marcus really think that you're selling, you're selling philosophy to which I would say I actually think the income earned from writing a book, selling it in the open market is actually a much more honest dollar earned than the sort of deeply stratified hierarchical sort of slave based economy of ancient Rome. So I think commerce is actually the equalizer in the most honest way to make living. Totally agree. And this is one of those things where I think America and the classics are related where people,

the values of the founding of America can be built upon, it'd be greater than the founders themselves. And the values of ancient Rome, the values of the Stoics, for example, of what is justice and what is wisdom, you can take there insights, you can build upon them to have an even greater society and even greater choices you're making than they made themselves. And you're right. You look at the germ of the idea originally and then we build on it. Zeno is a merchant.

I mean, he made his living trading Tyrion Purple die. I do love the idea of philosophy and business not being at odds with each other. Eric Weinstein was telling me once that his description of Peter Tio, who you know is that he was the world's richest applied philosopher, which I thought was kind of a good way of looking at it. You know, 100 years ago, Peter would be, Peter would be a professor who was not very wealthy.

And then I think these days, you're able to take that kind of intellectual leverage and apply it in ways you were definitely not in the past. Why do people think that they're at odds with each other? I've never quite understood that. This seems to grow out of this very leftist view of the economy from the last 50 to 100 years, where they kind of saw themselves as being above the merchant class, right? It's like older risk or credit view of the world. And they assume if you're busy making money,

you're scrambling for yourself, and therefore you're somehow against the higher values. And as opposed to realizing, especially today, especially the last few decades, you can have these values, you can apply them within sexual leverage, but even in the past, of course, you can do that as well.

In one of my favorite books, I've recommended before, I think it's actually fictional, but it's called Letters from a self-made merchant to his son. And it was written in the 20s, I think. And the premise is that it's this sort of self-made sort of pork baron or something from Chicago made his money in the stockyards, sort of a grimy, you know, blue collar tray that makes millions of dollars.

And now his son's at Harvard, and he's trying to sort of pass along the virtues that made him who he was, but are almost completely alien to his now upper class from cradle to grave son. Wow. I haven't read that one yet. I love this one. But I think that's, you know, that would have been, that's even the struggle in Cicero's life, right?

Like Cicero's the new man, although he does come from a wealthy family, like he makes it to the top of Rome society and then he writes his book on duties to his son Marcus because he, you know, like his son didn't have to struggle the same way that he did. And that's something that, you know, you and I have some mutual friends from very successful

families here. And I think the ones who have been brought up right where I really admire their father did have them working on the farm and did have them working, and you know, doing hard work as a young man. And I hope I can find the same way to do that with my kids, because it does seem to, there are these values and virtues of that hard work and understanding what it is to build value in the world and understanding that businesses are very hard to build. And the society is not naturally prosperous.

You need people with the right virtues and the right hard work. Well, and that discipline of moderation itself, discipline is tricky. My parents, and I forget who I'm taking this from but you know my parents We're in a position often to say we can't like we can't go to Disneyland just because you want to you know We can't buy you the car that you want you know just because you turn 16 whereas you know my position and certainly your position Is much has to actually come from a more virtuous place in some degree, which is it's not that we can't, it's that we won't. Yeah, this is because it's not a good idea. This was all like really clear to me in theory before having kids, and now I have you know,

three daughters, a three and a half and a two-year-old and they're very cute, and I am guilty of not always saying no, we can't do certain things. It's quite difficult to put this into practice. So I'm still learning, I have to take notes. My parents did a great job on this and I'm not as good at it. But yes, the theory I agree with you. Well, no, it's tricky because you,

the Stoics were fascinated with the idea of wealth, sort of saying that's not good or bad, but that it just provides its own sets of tests. So in some ways, like I was thinking about during the pandemic, it's easy to say no to meetings when they're illegal, you know, but then once life just goes back to normal to some degree, now it's difficult, even though you don't want to, but because you can, it's hard to say no, right? And so I think what money does is create the challenge of actually having to decide whether something's a good idea

or not, not whether it's possible or not. It creates a whole set of challenges, which is like no one wants to hear about the challenges money creates, of course, because I said there's some options. Of course, we can talk about, but it's actually very true. What I've seen is with a lot of friends who are successful, there's just a whole set of new types of challenges. One of them, of course, is that if you're already successful, there's just like infinite,

interesting things you're invited to, and always think you're supposed to spend time doing being a successful person and showing others you're a successful person. So if you're not careful, you could just basically not do anything useful anymore. Because like, being a successful person is very different than the activities you do to actually build and actually create and actually work. And it's usually challenging to basically push all of that back and then keep your core original values.

When I bet, like, certainly I experience this as a writer because like most of what I do requires just like sort just thinking time. And you can't be doing something else while you're doing it. But I've got to imagine as you transitioned from founder actually building the business day in and day out to investor slash applied philosopher as we were talking about, when you actually need is like time to think, time to have ideas, time to understand what's happening in the world, and you can't do that if

you're saying yes to everything that comes back. Exactly. One of the reasons I'm excited to move to Texas and to be a little bit outside of Silicon Valley, because in Silicon Valley, there's literally every day, like a list of 50 people who want to connect and need to connect in an interesting heads of state and billionaires in town. And ironically, it turns out there's a lot of people here in Austin too who want to meet. But I am trying to create more open space for myself because that's that you have to have

time to think and you have to have time to make your own plans for just reacting. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle,

and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, It angered some fans. A lot of them.

It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Yeah, I was curious about thinking about moving here. When I was thinking about Texas, what ever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. Yeah, I was curious about thinking about moving here. When I was thinking about Texas, what I wanted was,

you know, you could move to Bozeman Montana or something and you'd see nobody. So you don't want that. It's like, I was thinking of the idea of people flow. Like, I want people coming in and out of town so I can see them when I want to see them, but I don't want to be surrounded by so many people in so many events and so many opportunities that

I never have time to do what I need to do. Exactly. And Austin is heating up, but it's exciting. It's becoming a big center, but I think you're smart to live a little bit outside of the city too. Maybe one of my fantasies maybe next year, I'll go buy a bunch of land and build something more and more outside of the city. Just I like the whole warm buffet from Omaha being out of the way sort of thing.

No, there's also a little bit of a sort of a power move to it too, where it's like if you, people will come to you if it's worthwhile and then if not, then you don't have to do it. You know, like I think when everyone lives in a small block radius, it's more egalitarian in one sense, but then also you're much more accessible. Yep, and at some point, if you're too accessible, you're not actually getting your job done. As an investor, it's important, you're obviously seeing and networking with people,

but you can actually have other people who are senior do that for you as well. The most important question are the macro questions, are the philosophical questions, and where the world's going, the next 10 years, and what's possible now that wasn't possible before. These are things you get more about reading and thinking. Well, that's what I was going to ask. What is your process for that? Is it reading?

Is it long? Dinner conversations? How do you shape your macro worldview so you can do what you do? You know you're constantly entering on these TCs and giving your ideas to smart people and so Elon Musk is spending more time in this part of the world. When he comes through I'll see him soon. I saw Peter T.O. last week. We could work a lot with over the years. Soon I saw Peter T. L. Last week, you know, we could work a lot with over the years. You know Drew House, and you probably know is Dropbox CEOs now actually based in Austin. Can I see him tonight? Probably and you're just you're costly meeting people who are running things who know what they're doing and you're giving them

Here's my ideas. Here's why things going on the world and what do you think and you're in your iterating with them? I think I think I think it for me it is people you have to get feedback you have to iterate you have to be challenged So I'm being challenged by my team by these other people. In terms of coming up with it, it's really based on seeing great companies, seeing what they're doing, seeing people, you know, I'll give you one example. I was pitched like 50 times in the last, I mean, about the times, the last year or two on these new gene therapies, people are trying to do where they need to raise over $100 million to do phase one of their gene therapy.

And I realized, wow, there's just a lack of infrastructure for building these, because not every one of them should raise $100 million. So how can we take the very top people in the farmer world and build an ability to manufacture these in one place, and so we put several $100 million in one thing that they could all use. And that was, but it's like,

this is obviously a trend where these all-aging and therapies are going to be a big deal. How do you then capitalize on the infrastructure for that? And so being in the flow, being in the flow of the team that obviously helps a lot with these. Yeah, I was thinking about the idea of dinner parties as a sort of way to learn about the world. Like, I remember I went to a thing at Peter's house

when I was writing conspiracy and it was this huge party and I said, like, did he just pay for this? Like as a favor to you and he said, no, this is just part of his entertaining budget. And I realized that the entertaining budget was part, was essentially the research budget, right? Like he would have these dinner conversations and then learn things, which would then,

you know, if that affects one investment, could have a massive return on its own. So our fund, our funds, puts on, this year is obviously an exception, but our fund puts on about 180, 190 of these events per year, of which I'm at, about a third of them, but they're mostly, by events, I mean, they're mostly dinner parties, or they're, you know, get together as much as the guards and cocktails or, you know, or we'll bring some philosopher or somebody interesting to speak, you know, to get to know. Yeah.

Yeah, and I was reading about Kato once and Kato sort of, he works so much, he didn't have time to just like take philosophy classes or attend philosophy lectures. So it was sort of long dinners that go late into the night, which isn't, doesn, feels stoic, but in fact, if that's where you're learning, I guess it doesn't really matter what it is. Why doesn't it feel stoic? I'm curious.

What feels more epicurion is what I mean, like a long dinner. I'm trying to get the dinner here, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like a long dinner with wine and food, and I mean, you can't feel very temperate. I'm not very temperate if you drink too much. I try. I'm learning how to be more stoic and my temperance with that when these dinners go a long time.

No, I mean, I certainly find it to be more educational than going to a nightclub or even flying to a conference, right? Like, you know, over dinner, you, I think, political correctness falls away, performance falls away, and people just sort of say what they think. Yeah, that's right. These are important to do. So I'm curious to go back to the conversation about money. Is this something I've been curious

about? Obviously, Palantir went public recently. You've been, you have big investments in other companies. They're sort of upper middle class. there's upper class, and then there's like really hitting it big, right? One of these like thousand X investments, or what changes for a person when true kind of generational wealth is created? Does it change how you see things? Does it change how you see yourself?

When that first happened for you, like, did it take a while to sink in? Like how did you integrate that into your understanding of the world when you're like suddenly, this is probably an amount of money that it would be difficult to spend in a lifetime if one is remotely temperate. Yeah, and of course, that's the important caveat.

When it first made money in my early 20s, I was probably not as temperate as I could have been. Solomon path to wisdom, I guess, is the excuse, right? But yeah, but, but, but the, you know, and so I was doing quite well at this hedge fund that I was top trader, a Peter's fund for quite a while. And I was also doing some early angel investing, and whatnot that was starting to work out very well in my 20s. And the very first thing I did is I got at a few different houses. I had the coolest place in New York City, living under A-Rod, the baseball player. It first came to my apartment by mistake and they're really giant. And I'm like, wow,

anyway, it's like silly stuff. And I had a place in Paul Walton San Francisco because I was working hard, both between the fund and the company we were starting to balance here in Paul Walsh. And it was actually very inconvenient and I always have my favorite stuff at the wrong place and it just be a lot to manage and it was wasting my time. And I finally, after a few years, just like just gave it, just said this is ridiculous. I need to have one place and I need to have not all of this, you know, basically I'm tired of going to think like expensive nightclubs, you know, basically I'm tired of going to think like expensive nightclubs, you know, tired of a few of these silly big giant, you know,

intemperate trips and whatnot. Right. And kind of got past that stage, but you know, it's obviously very lucky to have gone through that stage. I can see some people getting to the money later in life. I can have them to go through that stage later because I haven't done it before, which is probably a lot more disruptive if you can, if you can, for me,

being already single anyway going through that stage is probably a lot healthier. And then, you, for me, being already single anyway going through that stage is probably a lot healthier. And then, you know, the real thing you learn is that money is just leverage to get done things you care about. And so you have to stop and say, what do we actually care about? What do we actually want to spend resources and energy on? And for me, a lot of that is working on,

there's certain plans to be around the world where you can help people very cheaply. and then there's also certain things about helping to fix our society. In my mind, one of the biggest problems that businesses cannot fix is we have to teach our society to be a free society and to use its resources really well to solve, whether or not we're talking about how prison's criminal justice works, how education works, how healthcare works, there's these policy problems that I really want to solve and how people solve the maker's society work better. So hiring smart people, working on those has been a

lot more meaningful to me now with the resources than it was obviously in the past. And yeah, I found most people with money are not very good at creating leverage and bringing in other smart people and applying to things that are meaningful. So that's a scale I've been trying to build out. I heard this expression once. It was like, we don't work to make money. We make money to make more work. And that was a creative person was saying this,

that the point being, you're not just doing crappy works. You can have money. The point is you're trying to make money be successful. So then you can have more of more artistic or creative or in your case sort of policy freedom to do what you really care about. And you know, the work I do myself is also a big motivator in the sense that one of the key lessons I learned is every success you have is a platform for that a much bigger success.

There's certain things you can't do until you've done something else to kind of get you into the club that you now could do this bigger've done something else to get you into the club that you now could do this bigger thing. It's like multiple layers of climbing or every success you're going to do something bigger than you could do something bigger with that. I'm able to get access to resources and to people and to things that I just never could have before. So this, then you can use that to build stuff.

I really do believe. There's a whole lot of people say, I'm making money and I'm going to go give back separately. As if you took some money away when you made that money, most of the things I'm making money on are not things I have to give back for, they're things that frankly are really good for the world that they exist. Like, most of the problems of the world you can solve with entrepreneurship, you can solve with new innovation, and that's a positive thing. But then there are some things you cannot solve with entrepreneurship that you then have to do philanthropically. That's my view. So when you look at someone like Cicero, what's interesting is he has that ambition, which I admire too, but then it seems like so as I was saying in

live, he gets this sort of prophecy that says, you know, like, you will be great if your actions are guided by your conscience, not the crowd. I think maybe that I've always read it as the sort of the trap that Cicero falls into is chasing ambition or success for its own sake a lot of the time, or advancement for its own sake, which is tempting and seductive, and I empathize with it because I've done it myself. But it seemed like, unlike a Kato who had that sort of moral certainty, it wasn't always clear what Cicero was doing it all for. There's two, I think there's two different interpretations of that quote you gave. The other interpretation, just another quote, Cicero's famous for is, I've always been to the

opinion that I'm popularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all but glory There is a certain take to it that very often the right thing to do is the unpopular thing and And so so so not being guided by the crowd could also mean that like that like this This is this even though not everyone else is doing this like this is clearly right And so it's a certain type of courage. It's certain type of there's courage There's justice. There's wisdom kind of, there's courage, there's justice, there's wisdom, kind of all built into that to go after the thing that you know when you see is right,

which for me, there's a lot of things like this right now in healthcare, where like, it's just like very obvious what the right thing for the world isn't how to stop cronies and analyze areas. And like no one else is doing it. And they're paying off both parties. But that would be like, it's important for me. That's a very necessary and type of thing to do,

which is go after this one. No one else is and take this orthogonal approach of just saying, this is actually the right thing even though none of you guys are talking about it. I think that's a baffling thing for a lot of people. We look at these like, and be curious because you know them. You look at these sort of extremely successful people, people who have, you know, fuck you money and in the true sense of that word, like billions of dollars, nothing could take it away from them. They have, they should

be the freest of all people. And yet they seem to be the most conservative. And I don't mean politically, I mean, like, as far as like preserving the status quo, not challenging things. Why is it that these people who have, who could be attacking those things that you're talking about seem to be so reluctant to shake things up or take risks? There's a lack of courage. There's really is a lack of courage. A lot of people just say,

my life is easy and good. And it's almost as if they've been trained that their job is to not have to have stress in their life. Like that is like the highest virtue for people is that I wanna create stress for my wife or my husband or my kids. And I'm just gonna do whatever, or people who work with me,

cause I don't wanna be that person who's training stress for people who work with me. And therefore, I'm always just gonna go along with whatever is not gonna create anyone, cause anyone to attack me. And so no one stands out against these special interests and for these things that are, you know, once you, if you really dig into it, they're obviously correct. It's like you obviously don't want, you know, health systems being able to pass laws and

stop competitors. You obviously don't want insurance companies to be able to force doctors to have to work with them versus work directly with people. You obviously don't want doctors not, you you know, to do a lot of past laws in certain states to stop nurses from doing things in order to help the doctor a lot of you. It's just, there's just tons of this cronism and I'm just focusing on healthcare for now

as the example. And it's just like, it's just too much of a headache for people to fight back against the special interests. And so, and, you know, I think courage is not taught in our society. I totally agree. I mean, so, so if I'm understanding it correctly, because I think from the outside, particularly on the left, there seems to be this sense that what it is is sort of self-interest, its

corruption, you can't get someone to understand something, their salary depends on that not understanding it. This kind of, that it's incentive-based, but you're saying that a lot of this is actually sort of more cultural and social, like it's just not wanting to get involved as opposed to it being financially plentiful for them to get involved. It's, I mean, the, the, the left line, entirely wrong, right? Is it, but there's a lot of tragedy, the comments here, where it's very clear something the government is doing, thanks to the fact things that are captured by some industry is bad for

everyone, but good for that industry. And so there's a huge strategy, the comments, and then there's, and the car is effort and courage to stand up for it, and then much easier thing to do is just not fight and just go along. So how do you cultivate courage? Both personally, I'm curious how you think about it, but then also how has this society or how amongst your peers do you try to get people to go down that path? It's tough.

The first thing you need is you need to help people be more clear thinking about what's going on. It's very easy to muddy these waters and these interests are very good at doing it. So I think first helping approaching things in a clear thinking way where it's really clear like what is cronism and what is competition and how should a free society work and just agree and just like we try to just we try to teach people these and teach people and you know the best way I found is just painting

the optimistic picture of how well off everyone would be in this area if it was actually fixed and really showing that vision is sharing that vision. I think there's a lack of optimism in our society right now. So rather than focusing, which I'm guilty of as well on, okay, this is bad, the wrong way to do things. A better way to do it would be to say, listen, we could be spending a third as much here for better results. And you wouldn't have all these people probably protesting in the streets and etc. I did going bankrupt on this type of stuff.

And I think trying to show the optimistic possibilities in our society and then allying around that. In terms of getting people to be courageous, that's hard. I think the best you could do is just give do example yourself and step up yourself and try to be a good role model. And more we have role models to do this. Maybe we can get a positive effect going, but it's a not an easy thing right now. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right

back to the show. Stay tuned. If there's a general Mattis quote, I love, you wrote it recently, but you're saying cynicism is cowardice. And I think that's the other way to do it is like obviously current, you can lie in eyes courage. I think that's important. But I think also we have to do a better job painting the decision to not get involved as not a morally neutral statement. Do you know what I mean?

The problem makes you complicit. No, most people are part of the problem because most people are just ignoring it and being cowardly and going on. And you know what, a lot of people have really tough lives and they have to work really hard to get by and they're really busy and this is not what they want to be doing, but a lot of people, especially a lot of people

who are maybe 20, 30, 40 years older than me. I'm my late 30s. I have a lot of these mentors and great people, 60, 70, 80s. They've made so much money. And they're basically like, oh, there's no need to be involved in government. That's what weird people do who have problems in our strange. And that's not what I do. And it's those, I lay at the feet of every billionaire who's in his 60, 70s and 80s,

who has not been actively involved in fixing our country. It is their cowardice that is wise as broke. Because that generation did not have the duty to go solve these problems. Well, maybe they thought that the extent of one's involvement in politics was putting money, like that, and money is, you know, a corrupting force in politics, or at least a, it's sort of,

it's like created all these giant proxy wars about this issue or that issue when really if smart, capable, competent individuals had just gotten involved in government, it could solve the problems and then those people could go home and back to their lives. Well, there's different ways of getting involved.

The question, most money in politics is pushing something that's your own interests, right? So I get a lot of the down in these state legislators. So I've learned a lot about this. And the vast majority of the time, there's money involved because this is your industry, this is your interest, this is your thing that your focus on for a living.

Taxi cabs fighting Uber or something. Exactly, exactly. Right now, I happen to agree in Prop 22 in California is trying to fix the AB5 thing. We're trying to make it, so drivers don't have to be employees because this is going to allow a lot of people to drive flexibly. It creates more jobs. It's good for the economy. It's a big battle between the unions and these companies. And so there's like $200 million going in from DoorDash and from, you know, in Sikar at Newber on this

thing. And that's the classic thing where all the money goes in. And you know, I think they're right in this case and they're right to be spending money on it. But that's the thing for themselves. It's very rare to do what I'm doing and to do it only a few other groups I know are doing where you go get involved in these issues because it's basically fighting special interest as the general public and saying that this work is, we're not, I'm not doing this because I'm going to make a bunch of money on health care in this area because of this happens. I'm not doing this because I'm going to make a bunch of money because of criminal justice reform because of my fixed probation or parole suddenly, I'm richer than I am or something.

I'm doing this because it's a right way to fight for our free society and to help people in our society. And you get that, that's the type of duty. And money is a great way to do that if fighting for the common good, but you haven't seen the billionaires do this. You haven't seen successful people in the 1980s, 90s, 2000s. Get involved in these issues very much at all. There's exceptions, but it's the exception.

Right, no, and it seems like it's often the most pressing issues of our time. Unfortunately, there are issues in which there's very little financial interest so they tend to get neglected. I was driving to my office yesterday and there's enormous lines to go vote. I was thinking of the NBA thing where they opened up all the arenas to be voting centers. It's such an obvious idea

that only came about because basketball players pressured their billionaires to get involved. But it does seem like a lot, a lot of people sort of throw up their hands, whereas society with a little bit more agency, particularly, and ironically, with the people who have created something from nothing, we could solve some of the fussing issue. I'm lucky. I'm an entrepreneur. I built a lot of companies, and so I have a little bit of idea how to organize people and

how to put things together. On the voting line, it also reminds me of the DMV. These are obviously problematic. It takes too much of your time. They have bad feedback. The way government should work as an entrepreneur who thinks about these things is like every interaction with government should have some kind of NPS score, which is basically not promoter, which is basically saying like the feedback of citizens unhappy.

They just waited for four hours in line. They should be unhappy and they should get their feedback. And then there should be some kind of competition where every service government's providing, whether it's voting, whether it's DMV, even if it has to be provided by government, have two or three different departments each doing their own way of serving people

and whichever one gets the worst NPS score is out and someone else is in charge of it. Everyone's getting the best one, gets more budget next time and just having keep competing each time. And guess what, the competition of it. Everyone's getting the best one, gets more budget next time, and just haven't kept competing each time. And guess what, the competition of ideas, that's how free societies work, because you can be better, you have accountability.

I mean, the fact that we don't have competition of ideas, don't have accountability for things like DMV, or things like voting, it's ridiculous. It's obviously wrong. And so this is like, this is basic leadership. And the government unions try to put in rules to stop this stuff. We just have to as a society say, no, I'm sorry, government union, you can't stop this. We're going to have accountability. We're going

to make it better every time. And we're going to have competition. And so this is the kind of stuff we just need leaders to do this. And frankly, the leaders right now in charge are pretty poor. And I think we could just pretty obvious we do a lot better. And it's funny. I was, I believe it or not, I was talking to Nick Denton two days ago, the founder of Gauker, who I got to really know, writing the same book about Peter Teo and their sort of battle with each other. And I was saying to him, I was like,

what is during the pandemic, what's an institution that you feel like has done a good job? Because I feel like what this has really done has shown us just how weak and fragile and antiquated a lot of our institutions were. I think the military's done okay, not amazing. But he was like apps.

He was like apps have done a great job, which was a category and institution you didn't really think of, because it's not governmental. But it's true. I can get my groceries easily. I could pick up an Uber if I wanted. Those things have done really well. Meanwhile, the things that we actually rely on the most that

are the most essential have sort of really struggled to hold up. 100% the parts of our society, their parts of a free society that are accountable that have to compete, have done extremely well during this. And you know, there were some mess ups and logistics, but we had adapted. I've involved in a lot of things in logistics space, a lot of things supporting companies like Wish, which I'm a big investor in the number three commerce company in the U.S., which has obviously grown a lot during this. And there were new challenges, but they adapted and they worked and that force of competition worked on it. So you need to bring that in government as well. Yeah, I was reading about an app that Brown University came up with, which I guess you could

say is semi-governmental and then it's an institution of higher learning. But it was like, because I was thinking, I was starting to get opportunities to talk again, to give talks. And they were like, what this app does is you go like, okay, here's where I am, here's how many people are gonna be there, here are the conditions that we're meeting, here's the ages, here's the help, you put in all these factors and it gives you out sort of like a risk profile of whether you should have

Thanksgiving in Cleveland with your two parents who are 60 and your brother who's a, you know, a worker in a meat factory and you have to fly there. You know, like you put in all the inputs and it gives you information. And I was like, man, that is like a great idea. The exact kind of thing that you would expect to be bubbling up in a system like this,

but unfortunately we've lost both the technical competence and the policy acumen to be able to execute on something like that aside from just like one person making it and hoping that it takes off. Well, that's a great thing about these. One person can make it. That's why these platforms are so cool. But the one person can make it and it can't bubble up. It's funny.

I have a dinner in two weeks. It's a very prominent people and there's a whole big email chamber. They're all fighting now because some of them say this is bullshit. I don't want to take a test. I have to have someone take a test. I can't go and I don't take a test. Anyway, yes, it would be good to have some app helping with this. So I have two two last questions. So one we talked about courage. I think one of the interesting things about Cicero, and I put this in the book, or actually, I don't think it was in the book.

I found it later. But the quip against Cicero, Cicero invites this guy who's sort of over. He's just challenged Caesar to his face. And Cicero says, oh, you should come sit with us. And the guy says, oh, I'm surprised. There's room given that you, Cicero, typically occupy two stools, right?

It's point being that Cicero in the sort of breakdown of Rome kind of fails to choose a side. And I'm curious to, like, what do you feel like? But you know what I mean? There's sort of a wishy-washyness in our society. Obviously, if some people are very polarized, but then it seems like there is a lot of smart people who are just kind of like standing on the sidelines waiting for things to figure themselves out, which was sadly Cicero stance in the Civil War.

If you, I mean, to bring in a little bit of German philosophy into this, you know, in my view, the world tends to be true, tends to be broken down in dialectics. You tend to have extreme truth on both sides of most issues. This is a really important part of reality. Therefore, in order to get things done, you actually do need, in a sense, to partially occupy both sides because you need to acknowledge the deep truth of what each side is saying. But then, of course, you need to propose a policy. So what we do at the Citroe Institute, is you do... we try to be non-partisan, we try to say there is a deep truth, those deep truth here.

But then you have to compromise, you have to say, okay, well, we want to move this towards how it should work. And here is a better policy that would howl hundreds of thousands of people, it would save money, everyone wins except maybe a special interest. And you push it forward, but you have to push it forward while being allies with each side. It's very dangerous, especially in our society today. You just put a shings forward something that only one side is going to work with. You're not really contributing to the conversation because we're all going to move forward with

positive, optimistic, positive, some compromises is my view. Yeah, Keats had that idea of negative capability, the capability of holding two semi-contradictory ideas in the same mind at the same time. Maybe that's sort of the... Yeah, that's the point of the dialectic. And almost everything we see, I've written about this a bunch online myself, but in both in business and policy, there's these really important dialectics that you need to constantly be understanding them and then using them to move forward to craft the answer. So as dark and divisive and the addest things are right now,

I mean, 200 plus thousand dead Americans, economic shutdown, all the stuff that's happened in the world. As a biotech investor, someone who's sort of seeing what people actually are doing in the medical space, are you optimistic, pessimistic, you have anything that we should be optimistic about? Oh, yes. Well, I'm a diehard optimist, so I'm obviously somewhat distraught at a lot of tough things going on the world right now. But there's, I mean, we invest across the board in technology and

there's a renaissance in biology going on. It's about a third of what 8VC does these days. You know, one of the ways to think about it maybe that be really excited, I'll give you two things really quick. One is, you know, the cell has become a unit of therapeutics. And so if you think it used to be all the best chemists in the world would be in pharma in 1940s, 50s, 60s, on, and there's molecules they were creating drugs with. And then you had something called biologics where rather than use a cell, you're using parts of cells,

like peptides or antibodies in the 1980s, which are nentek and et cetera. And that became the unit. And now in the 2010s, you're actually taking cells. A cell is like, you know, a million times the size of a, you know, a billion times the size of a molecule, of course, is a much bigger, bigger thing. It's like a skyscraper, whereas the peptides like a pencil, right? And so suddenly you're programming these giant skyscrapers inside the body to be these

machines to go around and perform things. And this is not just science fiction. You've already saved, and you know, there's two companies sold for $10 billion each, like four years ago, Kite and Juno, that were saving, late stage cancer patients who were supposed to be dead. They take out the right blood cells, they reprogram them, they send them back in,

and suddenly you're able to target the cancer and keep people alive and live for years, years longer even, and so there's always really cool new cell therapies coming that are very exciting. And then on top of that, there's a noble prize in biology, one, you know, by Yamann Naka, I believe, or I don't know if he got the prize yet, but he will, he hasn't, for figuring out 15 years ago how you can trip a certain part of cells genome and it turns it back into a chloropodent stem cell age zero. So you're suddenly basically like learning how

to take cells and put them back to be very very young again with the information in them and we're using this right now in the lab to reprogram white blood cells all of a sudden be back to stem cells that be really young white blood cells and they kill the cancer. And there's all sorts of other longevity things coming where we're learning how to take the epigenetic information in cells and turn it back to age zero. So there's just, these are those are just two examples. But there's so many things happening right now with with the systems and biology that we're you know turning in information systems and using to help cure diseases. So very, very bullish on curing disease in next 20, 20 years as long as we allow us to keep putting billions of dollars into this space allow the market forces to work along with the scientific research forces as long as we don't break capitalism and we keep things going, we're going to say if so many lives.

So, do you feel like what's happening right now is a cloud over what should be a medium to long-term positive outlook? We should be excited, but instead we're too blinded by the top you know, the, well, the, the, the, the, what's happening, the tough thing is happening right now is that the, the least well off are not doing nearly as well as they should, because there's all sorts of cost disease and health care and education, or criminal justice systems broken, housing costs away too much. So there's all these reasons why you have these people coming out and being,

you know, for, for the socialist candidates because they're frustrated. And, and they probably don't understand how all capitalism works, but they do understand that they're being screwed. And so I think the number one job we have as a society is how we help the working class, like not want socialism. How do we help them participate in the market economy? And how do you know, it'd be very easy with good policy to cut the costs that are lives in half. Like these people could be were living way better lives for the value that they're already creating. So I think there's a lot of reason these people

are frustrated, a lot of reason the cost that their lives are tough. So I think we have to help them. Because if we don't help them, they're not going to want to keep capital as some markets. If we don't keep capital as a market, we're not going to be able to achieve all these amazing

things with biology and a bunch of other areas going on right now that are very exciting for everyone for the next decades. I think the Stoics and Cicero would have certainly liked this symmetry of just how very similar the pressing problems of our time were to roam around the turn of the millennium. Agreed, agreed. Anyway, we encourage some leadership.

We encourage some leadership. Yes, and courage, most of all. Courage, most of all. Joe, thank you so much. This was awesome. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it. See you soon.

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