Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #14: Michael Zeisser on the Experience Economy, Conscious Capitalism, and Love as the Next Metric

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#14: Michael Zeisser on the Experience Economy, Conscious Capitalism, and Love as the Next Metric · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  I learned from Jack the expression love quotient.
• 0:04
  This is, of course, way back before AI and this is like 10
• 0:07
  years ago. It'll automate asks that people
• 0:11
  are doing right now. What are the people going to do?
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  What what What does he mean? What's LQ?
• 0:16
  Why now? Why they experience economy now?
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  So it's. Very obvious to me 1015 years
• 0:22
  ago that the data was suggesting to me that there had been an
• 0:28
  ongoing shift, a spending pattern shift in terms of where
• 0:33
  consumers were spending their money.
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  I looked at many, many data points and, and I really became
• 0:41
  convinced that people were shifting their habits and their
• 0:46
  spending towards experiences. And then the question I asked
• 0:49
  myself 10 years ago was, well, if more money is going to be
• 0:53
  spent on experiences, then where is the Amazon of experiences?
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  Or maybe there'd be 5 Amazons of different types of experiences.
• 1:03
  And where is the Nike of experiences?
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  Where's the Warner Brother of experiences?
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  I think the Maslow hierarchy is a framework that was helpful to
• 1:12
  me to crystallize an opportunity.
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  But I agree with you, there's clearly a shift in consciousness
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  that is going on. That the reality that we live in
• 1:25
  is actually deeply rooted in love, and that's the highest
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  vibratory force in the universe. Yeah, I do think we are.
• 1:32
  First of all, humankind is always evolving, so it's not
• 1:37
  surprising. Hey everyone, welcome back to
• 1:42
  the Love Conquers Fear podcast. I hope you enjoyed that episode
• 1:46
  with Tarot, we got into a lot of deep spiritual topics and we're
• 1:51
  going to touch on spirituality in today's episode.
• 1:54
  But first, I wanted to just double click a little bit more
• 1:57
  on the book that I mentioned at the end of that episode, Zen and
• 2:02
  the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
• 2:04
  There's a really fascinating history around that book and I
• 2:08
  can tell you that on Audible, it's the best production book
• 2:12
  I've listened to you. I mean literally is better than
• 2:15
  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in terms of the production value
• 2:20
  of the book. There's lots of voice actors.
• 2:23
  It really places you in the scene of the protagonist, who is
• 2:29
  on a motorcycle with his son Chris, and he's having all of
• 2:35
  these deep conversations about the nature of a reality as he's
• 2:39
  going through this really kind of rough terrain in Montana.
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  I would just say remote terrain. And it's a very interesting book
• 2:51
  about him starting to have a recommunion with his soul.
• 2:57
  And there's lots of metaphors and I've done a lot of research
• 3:01
  on that book after reading it on ChatGPT.
• 3:05
  Lot of research reports and the history is fascinating.
• 3:09
  I don't want to spoil any of that for you because you should
• 3:11
  go and do the research yourself. And I would just really
• 3:16
  recommend reading that book. It's about a 2 1/2 hour listen
• 3:21
  on Audible, so it's a fast one, but it's really profound.
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  And I can tell you that if you've enjoyed the reading list
• 3:29
  I've been sharing with you on this podcast today, you're going
• 3:34
  to like this one a lot. And you know the title, Zen,
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  it'll make you think of Zen Buddhism, but it goes way beyond
• 3:42
  that. And remember that spirituality,
• 3:44
  it all sinks at the root. Religious dogma is different
• 3:49
  than spirituality. We all started from the same
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  place where we're all grasping in the dark at different parts
• 3:57
  of God, almost like having a blindfold on and grasping at the
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  elephant and trying to figure out what's going on.
• 4:02
  And I'll never profess to you to understand the true nature of
• 4:06
  God or consciousness or source or whatever you would like to
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  refer to it as. But I will tell you that my
• 4:15
  understanding of it and my knowing of it and in, you know,
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  both meditation as well as psychedelic journeys is that
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  it's deeply, deeply rooted in love.
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  And once you realize that our actual reality is rooted in
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  love, it really transforms the way you live your life as
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  opposed to this kind of notion of you only live once and, you
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  know, take all you can and make all you can.
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  And you know, there's nothing beyond this.
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  So the way that that syncs with Gary Zhukov and his book The
• 4:48
  Seed of the Soul, which Oprah Winfrey credited as one of the
• 4:51
  most transformative books of her life, is that essentially a lot
• 4:57
  of our suffering comes from the five sensory human perspective
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  that there's nothing beyond. And once you start to have that
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  communion with with heaven or source and your soul, it really
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  transforms the way you live your life.
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  And if more people had that type of communion, no matter how they
• 5:17
  got there, then we would have a lot more global unity and a lot
• 5:24
  more love in this world. Because that love that we're
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  actually rooted in would become much more manifest in this
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  lifetime for all of us. And that is exactly what the
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  world needs for us to make it to the age of abundance for all so
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  that we don't destroy ourselves and continue to suffer in the
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  only 5 sensory world. So anyways, dive into both of
• 5:50
  those books. I've mentioned The Seed of the
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  Soul many times before, but I just want to give another shout
• 5:56
  out to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
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  So today I'm really, really excited to have a very good
• 6:04
  friend. I've known him for a long time.
• 6:05
  Michael Zeiser on this podcast. For those of you that have seen
• 6:11
  episode 4 with Ethan Holland. I originally met Ethan through
• 6:16
  the shop, that org Community and that is in fact How I Met
• 6:21
  Michael Zeiser. I'll never forget when I met
• 6:24
  him. I think I was, I think I was
• 6:25
  like 26 years old at that point. I'm 53 now and I was super
• 6:30
  impressed with him back then. And he reached out to me a
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  couple of years ago and asked if Deborah and I would become
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  investors in his fund, FMZ Ventures, which is all about the
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  experience economy. And we're going to dig into
• 6:46
  that. What is the experience economy
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  means? Why is this now the right time
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  for the experience economy? I'm really, really bullish on
• 6:54
  this fund and very excited to be an investor in it.
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  But yeah, why don't we won't we dive in and just start out with
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  a bit about your background, like where did you grow up and
• 7:07
  how did your career get to this amazing point, this kind of
• 7:11
  pinnacle of this fun that I think is going to be one of the
• 7:14
  all time best funds? Well, I'd start even before that
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  by just saying thank you for having me.
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  On. Thank you.
• 7:23
  Yeah. Thanks for our friendship.
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  I really cherish it. It's been a long time, yeah.
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  Like I think I'm very proud, like 25 year friendship, it's
• 7:32
  very meaningful. Me too.
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  And. I feel the same.
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  Yeah, I admire what you're doing now and obviously feel very
• 7:42
  blessed for our friendship, our partnership.
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  So yeah, I'm delighted to be here.
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  Well, the beginning is as you can tell, some people say they
• 7:55
  can hear a slight accent. I say that about me too.
• 7:59
  Is that right? Times?
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  People are like, oh, you sound a little bit Texan.
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  So I sound a little bit French, right?
• 8:06
  Yeah. So I was born over there in the
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  old world, come from a loving family, but very modest family.
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  And I am that person in the family who's the 1st to go to
• 8:25
  college. And yeah, yeah, my, my parents
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  didn't even finish high school. Wow, I never knew that.
• 8:36
  Martin Yeah, Yeah, I know. So, I mean, you know, I'm that
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  type of person, basically. And I discovered America when I
• 8:47
  went to Business School at Kellogg.
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  I know you went to Wharton. Yeah.
• 8:52
  I did. I did tour Kellogg.
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  You know, for me, Kellogg was so extroverted.
• 8:57
  I'm kind of Myers Briggs type. I'm a, I'm barely more even.
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  I and Kellogg felt very E, but it was an amazing, amazing
• 9:06
  campus and program and I know it's fantastic.
• 9:10
  Did it feel very extroverted to do?
• 9:11
  I I wanted to be in marketing like when I was a kid back in
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  France, I was reading all of the biographies of David Ogilvy and
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  the great marketers and the admin of the 50s.
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  And I thought, this is what I want to do.
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  I want to build brands. And so at the time, Kellogg was
• 9:35
  the school to study marketing. I was lucky because obviously I
• 9:40
  couldn't afford it. And Procter and Gamble, a
• 9:43
  company to which I will be forever grateful, basically paid
• 9:48
  for me. They had a scholarship for
• 9:57
  academic, good academic performance.
• 9:59
  They picked 2 internationals every year.
• 10:02
  And you know, I was lucky to. Did you know you and I have this
• 10:06
  in common? So Deloitte Consulting.
• 10:08
  Paid for yours. Paid for mine but I never went
• 10:11
  back. So the way it worked is I had to
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  go back for three years for them to forgive the loan.
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  I begged them. I literally never went back.
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  I begged. Procter and Gamble to take me
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  and I said I would be delighted to come to Cincinnati and work
• 10:31
  for PNG and I really would have been.
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  I mean, I went to McKinsey instead, but at the time PNG had
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  this policy that internationals needed to start their career
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  with PNG in their home country. Yeah, and I think that's
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  phenomenal. And one of the things I wanted
• 10:52
  to say is, like, I loved Deloitte.
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  I really honor them a lot, actually.
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  Bob Campbell, who created the federal practice there, wrote
• 11:00
  the afterword for my first book, Entrepreneurs Essentials.
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  And so me not coming back was not a reflection on them.
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  It was just a reflection that I found my footing as an
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  entrepreneur actually at Worden, which is the reason I went.
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  And I would have never gotten my MBA had it not been for delay,
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  because nobody in my family had ever gotten their MBA.
• 11:19
  Lots had gotten their college degrees, but I didn't even know
• 11:23
  what an MBA was. Yeah, yeah.
• 11:25
  The delight, Tom. Tom Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  Well, basically McKinsey found me and I didn't know what
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  consulting was and then I joined McKinsey in New York, became a
• 11:41
  partner fairly quickly and ended up staying at McKinsey 12 years
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  in New York. And this was mid late 90s
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  through the early 2000s. So the rise of the Internet,
• 11:54
  really, you'll remember, 'cause you were there first.
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  The boss to the boss which was. Painful, yes, but first public
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  IPO of an Internet company, Netscape 1995.
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  SI think you and I are among that generation of executives
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  who've quite literally been there since the beginning.
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  Yeah, so and did a lot of work with media companies, travel
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  companies, financial services companies because they are in
• 12:27
  New York and always on consumer type services and products.
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  So I've spent my entire career working with.
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  Consumer oriented companies and and tell me about working with
• 12:41
  John Malone, because one of the things that I was lucky enough
• 12:44
  to get invited to by you, that's where I met Rich Barden of
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  Zillow and a bunch of other amazing people.
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  I mean, he also started Expedia was it was like the liberty
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  media net eaters, net leaders. OK, yes, I did forgotten the
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  name, but that was an incredible event and it was really cool to
• 13:06
  see John Malone and you speak at that.
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  But I'm, I'm, I'm just curious, how did you meet him?
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  I mean, you know, not many people have worked for someone
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  like that. And he, you could tell how much
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  he thought very well of you. And it was a really interesting
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  time 'cause he was buying a lot of these Internet companies.
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  Yeah, so I, he was my client. He was a McKinsey client.
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  And I had so, so much admiration.
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  And I still do. I have so much admiration for
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  this man. I think he's a role model.
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  I think he's a, he's a Great American.
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  He's a great businessman. He's probably the most brilliant
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  person I know. And yeah, it's been a privilege
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  to work for him for about 10 years.
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  I worked for him and we're still close and he's also a partner in
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  FMZ and we do see each other regularly.
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  And yeah, I think the world of of John.
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  What would be the if you could say 3 lessons you learn from
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  John Malone, What would the three lessons?
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  Be, you know, saying that a lot of people use now is first
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  principles and really what you learn working with someone like
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  John is what that really means to apply first principles.
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  So I'm an investor and so it's very easy sometimes to get
• 14:44
  caught up in a momentum. Where is a first principle
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  approach to an investment would be to ask the fundamental
• 14:53
  question, what is the quality of the service or the product that
• 15:01
  this company actually produces? Do the buyers of this company's
• 15:08
  goods or services love what the company produces and not get
• 15:17
  lulled or seduced by metrics that I mean, you've been in
• 15:24
  business for a long time to core metrics, right?
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  Your core metrics, but you, but you know, a savvy entrepreneur
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  can do a lot of things with metrics.
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  And so I would say asking the fundamental questions.
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  And then of course, the biggest lesson, which is the lesson that
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  he says he learned and he teaches the people who work with
• 15:48
  them is to always remember to ask the question.
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  And what if not? So when we make an investment or
• 15:59
  we make a business decision, we all tend to believe it'll work
• 16:03
  out and we're all in. And John reminds us to never
• 16:09
  forget to ask the question. Well, if it doesn't work out,
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  then what? Does it wipe you out?
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  Are you dead? And if that's the answer, then
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  you should probably rethink the decision.
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  Yeah, that's a Charlie Munger ISM.
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  I'm not surprised. Charlie Munger talks about
• 16:28
  inversion. Totally.
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  You invert the problem. Yeah.
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  So in terms of the best investment, you made it?
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  So, so then, so then I actually only left Liberty Media because
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  I was appointed chairman of the investment organizations for
• 16:51
  Alibaba Group. And actually Jack Ma, the
• 16:55
  founder of Alibaba Group, literally hired me to build out,
• 17:03
  set up an international investment organization, not
• 17:06
  covering Asia, but covering what the Chinese call the West and
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  set up a corporate office and prepare Alibaba's a bit before
• 17:17
  the the IPO. So I had, I sometimes joke this
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  like you can't make this up, that the French guy from the
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  countryside in France is basically running the corporate
• 17:41
  office of the biggest Chinese Internet company on the planet
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  out of Silicon Valley. You can't make that stuff up,
• 17:53
  right? It's unbelievable.
• 17:54
  Yeah. And he came from very Jack Ma,
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  came from very modest roots. Very modest roots, but just an
• 18:00
  extraordinarily aspiring person and someone who had human
• 18:08
  insights that still stay with me.
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  And I, I, I'm very lucky in the sense that I've had the good
• 18:18
  fortune, the privilege to work with remarkable teachers and to
• 18:27
  have learned from different things.
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  But you have learned throughout from from all of them.
• 18:36
  And. Curiosity, I think, is a really
• 18:40
  important quality. Yeah.
• 18:42
  What did you, what were some of the top lessons you learned from
• 18:45
  Jack Ma? Well.
• 18:48
  What you're, I think building on Jack Ma and Alibaba Group had 18
• 18:54
  founders. Like how many companies, how
• 18:57
  many tech companies do you know, Brett, that have 18 founders
• 19:03
  and. He actually, I don't know of
• 19:05
  another one. Yeah, it's remarkable.
• 19:07
  Just going to say. Right now it's it's, it's quite
• 19:09
  remarkable. And I never felt this way, but
• 19:15
  some people have mention the word cult in association with
• 19:23
  Alibaba Group maybe in the early days.
• 19:25
  And there was a, a camaraderie, a spirit in that company that
• 19:31
  was just amazing, which I thought was a reflection of the
• 19:36
  inspiration that Jack himself was able to inculcate throughout
• 19:41
  the organization. You know, a sense of mission,
• 19:46
  helping China and Alibaba come out of the shadows using this
• 19:53
  new technology that was the Internet.
• 19:55
  It was. Yeah, it was very interesting.
• 19:58
  And this was the period of time when we thought that we could
• 20:04
  build bridges between the number one and the number 2 economies
• 20:08
  on the planet, of course, China and the US And, you know, things
• 20:13
  change. It's the only constant and
• 20:17
  unfortunately today we're not exactly in a place where we're
• 20:23
  building bridges and there seems to be more of a decoupling for,
• 20:29
  I don't know how long that'll last, probably a few decades,
• 20:32
  but. Yeah, let's get into that later
• 20:34
  'cause I want to ask you about that 'cause there was a piece in
• 20:38
  the New York Times Co written by Craig Mundy that Thomas Friedman
• 20:43
  put out saying the one thing that the US and China must
• 20:48
  collaborate on and actually syncs very well with the the
• 20:51
  book I'm writing. Love Conquers Fear, Humanity, AI
• 20:54
  and the age of abundance for all.
• 20:57
  In that they could not afford to not collaborate on AI.
• 21:03
  That Thomas Friedman and Craig Money were like this is the one
• 21:06
  thing they must actually work together on and it is my most
• 21:14
  concerning part of the trajectory we're on is that we
• 21:18
  have to overcome this fear based 0 sum mindset that that is
• 21:26
  innately in humanity. But part of it is also just the
• 21:30
  programming that we receive that makes us think that all the
• 21:34
  time. So I would, I'd love to dig in,
• 21:37
  dig into that as we, as we get into the path to the age of
• 21:40
  abundance for all and how, how do you think we're going to make
• 21:42
  it? But going back to, to Jack Ma
• 21:45
  and and John Malone, what were the investments that you helped
• 21:52
  them make that really stood out in your career that you look
• 21:56
  back on and you're like, why? I can't believe we did that.
• 21:59
  I mean as you witnessed at the time, we built under Liberty
• 22:05
  Media a large, I would say group of vertical e-commerce companies
• 22:16
  that I think most people would say was a very successful
• 22:21
  so-called roll up in our industry.
• 22:23
  That worked very well and that would probably be the most
• 22:30
  meaningful thing that I invested in that I created.
• 22:34
  I was a very early Red Envelope customer.
• 22:37
  I loved gifting things to my wife from Red Envelope back in
• 22:40
  the day and then with Jack Ma. Well, the idea of making
• 22:48
  investments for Alibaba was really to try to build bridges
• 22:54
  between the economies and help build beach heads in the West.
• 23:01
  So we made some very interesting investments.
• 23:06
  I'll highlight one. We invested in Emblem
• 23:11
  Entertainment for example, which is Steven Spielberg's production
• 23:15
  company and Alibaba is very big company like Amazon many ways
• 23:22
  also has a big media division. And so that was an example of an
• 23:26
  investment whereby we could really bring a lot of that
• 23:31
  production to China basically and provide resources to the
• 23:37
  production company to create it's craft.
• 23:40
  Yeah, very cool. One of one of the one of my very
• 23:44
  close friends who's actually my most successful self-made
• 23:48
  friend. He manages over 5 billion of
• 23:51
  capital now is Mitchell Green of lead Edge capital?
• 23:53
  I'm going to have him on the podcast.
• 23:56
  But Mitchell, when he got started with lead edge, he
• 24:02
  worked with Scott Booth of Eastern Advisors, who knows Jack
• 24:06
  and was an early advisor in Alibaba and he started lead
• 24:12
  Edge. I actually just served as a
• 24:14
  reference for for a new fund that he started lead edge with
• 24:20
  bizarre voice as the first investment my and it was the
• 24:24
  first IPO. Guess what the second IPO was
• 24:28
  given the premise of the question, Yeah.
• 24:31
  And so a little bit bigger other than IPO, bizarre voice went
• 24:34
  public and we're over a billion dollar market cap.
• 24:37
  I can't remember the market cap that Alibaba went public, but it
• 24:40
  was just a juggernaut. It is just a juggernaut.
• 24:43
  We we raised. 25 billion, $25 billion, Yeah, Yeah, I mean it
• 24:47
  really. He really is like the Jeff Bezos
• 24:52
  of China. And one of the things that I
• 24:57
  just want to validate with you because I don't personally know
• 25:01
  him, but it seems like he's deeply rooted in love.
• 25:04
  Oh yeah. And he must have been
• 25:07
  manifesting that with this. Oh yeah.
• 25:11
  And one of the one of the experiences I had recently,
• 25:14
  because I want to talk about the experience economy, is on Friday
• 25:18
  night there was the ACL taping, Austin City Limits of Jon
• 25:23
  Batiste. I'm actually going to another
• 25:25
  Austin City Limits tape in tonight.
• 25:27
  This band I've never heard of called Role Model, but Jon
• 25:30
  Batiste, Oh my gosh, I love Jon Batiste and he was manifesting
• 25:38
  so much love from the bandmates. And it was a big band.
• 25:43
  They're like probably about 18 artists actually.
• 25:48
  And in the people we brought that you could feel it like it
• 25:53
  created this field of love that is very unusual.
• 25:58
  It reminded me of the Joshua Tree tour back when I was, I
• 26:03
  think, 18. And the way Bono did that in the
• 26:07
  audience, it felt like a religious experience.
• 26:10
  I don't know how to say it any other way.
• 26:12
  Just just a experience where you could feel the connection with
• 26:16
  everybody in the audience. So it sounds like Jack Mal is
• 26:21
  very good at that. Actually I'll share 1 anecdote I
• 26:26
  learned from Jack, the expression love quotient LQ.
• 26:35
  I went to many events where he would speak with him and often,
• 26:43
  and this is back. This is of course way back
• 26:46
  before AI and this is like 10 years ago.
• 26:51
  And often people would ask a version of the question, hey,
• 26:57
  Jack, we see technology is becoming more powerful, can do
• 27:02
  more things. It'll automate tasks that people
• 27:07
  are doing right now. What are the people going to do?
• 27:10
  And he would always say LQ. And the audience would be kind
• 27:16
  of rattled. What what, what does he mean?
• 27:19
  What's LQ? And then he would explain.
• 27:22
  He would say, well, you know about IQ and EQ and what humans
• 27:30
  are going to do more of is LQ, because as the robots will do
• 27:39
  the things that the robots can do better than the humans, the
• 27:44
  humans will tend to do the things that the humans can do
• 27:49
  better than the robots in that is to manifest love and to do
• 27:55
  tasks and activities that require love.
• 27:58
  And so I thought that was very like profound actually, and
• 28:02
  prescient too, relative to where we are today and even the sort
• 28:09
  of subject matter I think. Yeah, absolutely.
• 28:11
  That the reality that we live in is actually deeply rooted in
• 28:16
  love, and that's the highest vibratory force in the universe.
• 28:20
  I I had never heard a senior industry person talk about LQ or
• 28:29
  love and so and for him it was like the most natural thing to
• 28:34
  say and there's plenty of clips on YouTube with him where he
• 28:39
  actually mentions that. That's that's, that's
• 28:41
  incredible. I mean, it's and it's really an
• 28:44
  incredible background for him to go from a school teacher to that
• 28:47
  to such an incredible. And the reality is this is
• 28:50
  probably who who who knows, right?
• 28:52
  Steve Jobs talks about the bread crumbs and you never really know
• 28:55
  sort of why you get somewhere, but when you turn around, you
• 28:59
  see all the bread crumbs that got you to the place.
• 29:02
  And so when I had this inspiration really to create the
• 29:07
  funds and dedicate the fund to the experience economy, I I am
• 29:12
  sure hearing Jack talk about LQ was one of the bread crumbs that
• 29:19
  just helped me click and focus on.
• 29:23
  This yeah, that's that's really cool.
• 29:25
  Well, let's let's go into F&Z Ventures and why now?
• 29:31
  Why they experience economy now? Well, I've been a student of
• 29:38
  consumers, as I said, for let's call it 25 years.
• 29:45
  And maybe as a good Frenchman, I certainly like to think I'm
• 29:51
  quite Cartesian and quite analytical and is a student of
• 29:59
  business and consumers is very obvious to me 1015 years ago
• 30:05
  that the data was suggesting to me that there had been an
• 30:12
  ongoing shift, a spending pattern shift in terms of where
• 30:18
  consumers were spending their money.
• 30:20
  And the shift was from things to experiences.
• 30:25
  And I found that very intriguing because as humans we are
• 30:29
  creatures of habits and we don't tend to change our habits.
• 30:37
  And yet the data was telling me our habits were changing.
• 30:41
  So this is an anomaly. And I was very curious about
• 30:48
  that anomaly. And for the longest time I tried
• 30:51
  to make sense of it. Now, why is this happening?
• 30:54
  What is going on? And I looked at many, many data
• 31:01
  points, and I really became convinced that people were
• 31:08
  shifting their habits and their spending towards experiences
• 31:13
  because of the Maslow hierarchy of needs.
• 31:18
  I went back to that framework, which I'm sure you know well.
• 31:22
  And the aha moment, if I can call it that, that I had maybe
• 31:28
  10 years ago was when I realized that the way we as consumers
• 31:35
  meet the needs in the lower levels of that pyramid, I remind
• 31:41
  you those needs are food and safety and shelter.
• 31:45
  Where is the highest level need is self actualization.
• 31:50
  So the need to feel good about the life we're living and other
• 31:55
  high level needs are love and belonging.
• 31:58
  The thing that really struck me was that we meet the lower level
• 32:05
  needs with things right? We buy groceries for food, we
• 32:09
  buy homes for shelter, we buy fences or guns for safety.
• 32:15
  But we cannot meet the higher level needs with things, right
• 32:20
  if we have someone who's not feeling good about where they
• 32:24
  are in life and going out and buying the fancy car or the
• 32:29
  fancy watch is not going to make them feel better about where
• 32:33
  they are in life. Instead, they might take time
• 32:41
  and they might travel. Because as you know,
• 32:45
  paradoxically, part of why we travel is to find ourselves,
• 32:51
  right? We go far away in the world to
• 32:56
  find our place in it or the person who's not feeling good
• 33:03
  about where she is. My go to therapy, of which I'm a
• 33:09
  huge proponent and for certainly the Gen.
• 33:15
  Z generation of our children is completely destigmatized
• 33:21
  relative to certainly our generation and older
• 33:24
  generations. And of course travel and therapy
• 33:29
  are experiences, not things. And so I abstracted from these
• 33:35
  anecdotes sort of a general principle of experiences are are
• 33:42
  the solutions that people employ to address their higher level
• 33:49
  needs in the Maslow hierarchy. And to me, that was a perfectly
• 33:56
  plausible and reasonable explanation for why is the
• 34:01
  spending shifting? Well, the spending shifting
• 34:04
  because by and large, the lower level needs, the one we meet
• 34:08
  with things are are addressed and resolved.
• 34:12
  And therefore, as Maslow predicted, these needs are
• 34:16
  progressive. Once you've met the lower level
• 34:20
  needs, you tend to the higher level needs.
• 34:22
  And if you're able to accept my simple idea that we meet the
• 34:26
  higher level needs with experiences, it's perfectly
• 34:30
  plausible. That's why we're seeing spending
• 34:32
  patterns shift. And then the question I asked
• 34:35
  myself 10 years ago was, well, if more money is going to be
• 34:40
  spent on experiences, then where is the Amazon of experiences?
• 34:45
  Or maybe there'd be 5 Amazons of different types of experiences.
• 34:50
  And where is the Nike of experiences?
• 34:53
  Where's the Warner Brother of experiences?
• 34:56
  And to me, it felt obvious that these companies would be formed,
• 35:03
  and I thought I could add value by helping the founders who had
• 35:12
  those visions for those companies with a little bit of
• 35:17
  capital, a lot of goodwill, network and relationships and
• 35:25
  counsel. And that's really the essence
• 35:28
  and the genesis for FMZ Ventures.
• 35:32
  And today, I mean, I love that. And I wanna ask you some
• 35:38
  questions about specifically why you think this is happening.
• 35:43
  But first of all, just what, what portfolio companies today
• 35:47
  are companies that people would recognize?
• 35:51
  Yeah. So I use the anecdotes of
• 35:55
  travel. So I have a lot of investments
• 35:58
  in travel so people might know. Get Your Guide, which is the
• 36:03
  largest marketplace to book tours and activities.
• 36:06
  If you go to Rome and you want to do a tour of the Vatican,
• 36:10
  chances are you're going to buy your tickets on Get Your Guide.
• 36:14
  It's a Unicorn company based in Germany.
• 36:16
  Very large company. Another one is called Fever.
• 36:19
  It's also a marketplace for urban activities.
• 36:22
  Also Unicorn. I told you I had a fever
• 36:25
  experience recently. Exactly.
• 36:26
  Yeah, exactly. Which you said was a nice
• 36:29
  experience. Right.
• 36:30
  Kindle like concerts. Yeah, People may know of
• 36:34
  Headspace, of course, the meditation, mental health,
• 36:38
  mental health is a big area of interest.
• 36:41
  I've invested in a number of next generation mental health
• 36:45
  autism companies. I was lucky to invest relatively
• 36:51
  early in Reddit, which I always saw as a platform for belonging
• 36:58
  for community. This is also the word that Steve
• 37:01
  Hoffman, the Co founder of and now CEO of Reddit, would use to
• 37:06
  describe Reddit. I see it as a platform for
• 37:10
  belonging. But yeah, like everyone will
• 37:12
  know Reddit, for example. Yeah.
• 37:14
  So I've been very lucky to have invested in quite a few of these
• 37:19
  companies that have emerged as quite large and quite
• 37:24
  significant in what I call the experience economy.
• 37:27
  Yeah, I took, I took Scott Galloway's advice on Reddit and
• 37:31
  I did buy an IPO. Good.
• 37:34
  And it's been a very good return.
• 37:36
  Well, we haven't sold any, but if we sold, it would be a very
• 37:39
  good return. We continue to hold, but.
• 37:43
  Some some of the other themes that are very interesting to me
• 37:46
  are learning is very interesting to me.
• 37:50
  Obviously very disrupted by AI right now.
• 37:56
  Enhanced really, right? Yeah, enhanced creates more
• 37:59
  opportunity. Yeah, I think it's going to be a
• 38:02
  massive savior for education, honestly.
• 38:04
  It's so, it's so funny because our youngest child was the very
• 38:10
  first to tell her school about ChatGPT, like within a week or
• 38:17
  two when it came out and they immediately banned it.
• 38:20
  And then her graduation speech from middle school was please
• 38:25
  don't regulate us to the stone ages.
• 38:27
  Oh, interesting. And I, I think I've motivated
• 38:32
  me. It made me angry enough to write
• 38:36
  a three-part series on how AI is going to remake education.
• 38:40
  And now, you know, here in Austin, we have alpha school and
• 38:43
  Alpha school is expanding nationwide.
• 38:46
  And Joe Lamont, one of our famous billionaires in town, is
• 38:49
  going all in with Alpha School and and it's all being remade
• 38:54
  around the AI. I think it's wonderful.
• 38:55
  Yeah. So I think about several
• 38:58
  categories. Kinetic experiences, so real
• 39:02
  world, atomic world experiences. That's the world of travel and
• 39:06
  festivals and music. And, you know, we fed an
• 39:10
  explosion of festivals. You guys are famous here for
• 39:15
  music. But right now, culinary
• 39:17
  festivals are all over the place.
• 39:22
  Kinetic experiences, psychotherapeutic experiences,
• 39:25
  which I mentioned, Headspace. As you know, I've mentioned this
• 39:30
  to you. My interest in psychotherapeutic
• 39:33
  experiences has led me to investigate the world of
• 39:37
  psychedelics now from an investor perspective.
• 39:42
  Another category is what I call functional experiences.
• 39:44
  So that includes learning that we just talked about longevity.
• 39:49
  Generally speaking, I'm very interested in legacy that
• 39:53
  includes death care. I think our society's
• 39:57
  relationship with death is changing.
• 39:59
  I find that very interesting from a, from a frankly
• 40:03
  investment perspective. And then virtual and augmented
• 40:08
  reality. Which I know we're in a winter.
• 40:14
  I like very much as an investor to invest in the winter.
• 40:18
  So I think that is an area that is going to offer a lot of
• 40:24
  interesting opportunities for people and for investors.
• 40:27
  But those would be the four broad categories of experiences.
• 40:32
  Yeah, I'm interested in you. So why?
• 40:33
  Why do you think this is happening outside of the Maslow
• 40:38
  hierarchy? Like I think, I think I think
• 40:40
  there's a bigger reason that it's happening than that that
• 40:44
  we're just climbing the the baseline hierarchy and having
• 40:46
  this self actualization. Like we, we talked about this
• 40:51
  before, but I think there's a consciousness awakening underway
• 40:55
  and that leads to people wanting to have more experiences
• 41:01
  together versus just accumulate things in the world of farm.
• 41:04
  You never in you never are happy in just accumulation.
• 41:09
  Absolutely. I as a matter of fact, you can
• 41:11
  get owned by your accumulations. And I know, I know people that
• 41:14
  are billionaires that are literally owned by their
• 41:17
  accumulations. They you can feel poor as a
• 41:20
  billionaire, believe it or not, because you could have like so
• 41:23
  many things that you can barely afford as a billionaire that you
• 41:28
  are owned by your material world.
• 41:30
  I think there's this. I think it's Warren Buffett who
• 41:32
  has the quote. You know, first you own the
• 41:34
  house and then the house owns you, right?
• 41:36
  And he's on the same house, I think for like 5750 years.
• 41:40
  You know, I visited him actually in Omaha.
• 41:43
  It was amazing. I'll never forget this
• 41:45
  experience. I got to spend 4 hours with him
• 41:47
  and we took Ollie the trolley to his house and his house.
• 41:54
  It's like $450,000 is what it's worth today.
• 41:59
  And it was really shocking to me to see one of the wealthiest
• 42:03
  people in the world walk out of his home, which is much more
• 42:09
  modest than my home or most of the homes in Austin.
• 42:13
  I actually felt a little bit embarrassed to be honest with
• 42:16
  you, just being totally, totally honest and the way he manifests
• 42:23
  love. I've seen him now at the
• 42:24
  Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, thanks to Phil Terry,
• 42:28
  who I also met shopped at our community that it's unbelievable
• 42:34
  to see him walk the floor to talk with all of the companies
• 42:39
  that they own like Brooks, you know, my favorite running shoes
• 42:44
  and he is just like a dolphin and water filled with joy like
• 42:50
  he loves. Being with he manifests it
• 42:52
  really I go to. I have a lot of friends and
• 42:57
  partners in the community of Berkshire Investors, so I've
• 43:03
  been going to I go every year to that.
• 43:05
  Meeting, it's amazing. I was, I've been going like
• 43:07
  whatever, 2015 to 20 times. Yeah, it was there last.
• 43:11
  Year Marley has passed away. But it was like Socrates and
• 43:15
  Plato, but they're capitalist. Yeah.
• 43:17
  Like seeing them on stage. Yeah.
• 43:19
  Yeah, they're philosopher kings. Yes, they're philosopher kings.
• 43:22
  Yeah, they're amazing role models, I think.
• 43:24
  They really are. I almost think of it without
• 43:27
  being black as famous is a pilgrimage to me.
• 43:30
  It's like my annual pilgrimage. It is to go to, I don't know,
• 43:35
  some some kind of source of wisdom and truth and.
• 43:39
  Temple of Capitalism and it's everything, in my opinion, that
• 43:43
  is beautiful and loving about capitalism.
• 43:46
  Yeah, I because they really care about their people.
• 43:48
  I I don't think that capitalism needs to be the enemy of where
• 43:55
  human. Evolution is definitely with you
• 43:57
  on that. So you, you, I think the Maslow
• 44:00
  hierarchy is a framework that was helpful to me to crystallize
• 44:04
  an opportunity. But I agree with you, there's
• 44:09
  clearly a shift in consciousness that is going on.
• 44:16
  And some of the reference points or the proof points.
• 44:21
  You mentioned Oprah. I think Oprah is amazing and
• 44:28
  what she has done to you mentioned Gary Zukov, as you
• 44:33
  know, right? He is one of her favorite
• 44:37
  authors and she has had him on many times.
• 44:43
  As you may know, she has done this series with Eckhart Tolle.
• 44:49
  His books by the. Way New Earth is a wonderful
• 44:51
  book, like wonderful book. I think everyone who has
• 44:54
  curiosity or you know, might listen to this and be a little
• 45:00
  bit like, why are why are these guys talking about this?
• 45:02
  Kind of weird to hear these hardcore whatever business
• 45:06
  people talk about consciousness and love.
• 45:10
  I think reading New Earth is so easy to start with.
• 45:16
  It's. Easy to start with, but it must
• 45:18
  be red slow. It is deeply profound.
• 45:20
  Deep, deeply profound. And I was just giving credit to
• 45:23
  Oprah for having used her influence to share Eckart Toley
• 45:36
  with a broader public. And I see these individual
• 45:43
  occurrences breath. And to me, they form a pattern.
• 45:52
  As a student, I in an observer, I have to say, wow, this is
• 45:58
  happening and that is happening. And that other thing, there's
• 46:03
  something going on here. And yeah, I do think we are.
• 46:09
  First of all, humankind is always evolving, always
• 46:16
  evolving, all the evolving. So it's not surprising how are
• 46:20
  we evolving now? Where are we going towards?
• 46:27
  To me, it's obvious there is a shift in consciousness.
• 46:31
  Consciousness is arising. It's slow, boy.
• 46:36
  There's a long way to go to get to what do you call it, the age
• 46:42
  of abundance, the the age of abundance.
• 46:44
  But you know what, you have to start.
• 46:48
  And I, I think we've definitely started.
• 46:54
  I am a little surprised. I started the fund and I started
• 46:59
  this focus on experiences and notably before COVID.
• 47:05
  Obviously COVID was a huge accelerant.
• 47:11
  Personally, I am. I was more hopeful that the
• 47:16
  world would evolve more after COVID.
• 47:20
  I I was too. We lost we no one really knows.
• 47:24
  We lost 20 to 40 million people in COVID.
• 47:30
  Like awho they that's the estimate.
• 47:34
  Who the hell knows? You know, that's almost as many
• 47:38
  people as died in World War 2. So it's meaningful.
• 47:44
  Of course, we're bigger now and so forth, but I think it shook a
• 47:48
  lot of people to the core. And I do think we are seeing
• 47:53
  changes in behavior and changes in attitude and an opening of
• 48:00
  mindset of a lot of people coming out of COVID.
• 48:05
  Personally, I wish the opening and the change in mindset and
• 48:10
  attitudes were deeper, but that is definitely an accelerant.
• 48:17
  And of course, I think AI will be another huge accelerant of
• 48:24
  this. I think of it as a progression
• 48:30
  of humanity towards higher consciousness.
• 48:35
  And I think companies that stage distribute or enable
• 48:42
  experiences, be they kinetic or functional or psychotherapeutic
• 48:48
  or virtual, can all be catalytic in this evolution.
• 48:54
  And so I'm, I'm optimistic like you, and I'm really very excited
• 49:01
  about what I do because I think it's good.
• 49:04
  Like I think what I do and who I try to help and how I try to
• 49:09
  help them is fundamentally aligned with the sort of big
• 49:14
  picture, right? That, that that's why I went,
• 49:17
  you know, in my way. You, you talk a lot about being
• 49:20
  all in on the field and sort of I'm doing it in a different way,
• 49:25
  but I think we're maybe walking in a similar direction.
• 49:29
  Oh, we're definitely walking in a similar direction.
• 49:31
  I mean, that's, that's why I wanted to have you on because
• 49:34
  you're bringing a very different perspective than I am.
• 49:38
  But it's all the same thing. We're we're all trying to help
• 49:42
  humanity transcend into this beautiful age, you know, this
• 49:47
  metaphorical or mystical age of heaven and earth merging.
• 49:51
  And I view it as both metaphorical and mystical.
• 49:55
  Yes, yes, I'm also trying to make some money doing of course.
• 49:59
  And there's, and there's nothing wrong with that.
• 50:01
  I mean, money is energy and the best use of money outside of
• 50:07
  meeting your needs to live, you know, have food, water,
• 50:12
  etcetera. Shelter is to use it to have
• 50:16
  amazing experiences together that you'll never forget and to
• 50:20
  manifest love with each other and deep, deep connection.
• 50:24
  And you know, one of the books that I'm reading right now, I
• 50:27
  always read multiple books at the same time, but this one is
• 50:32
  really, really good. It really struck me because, you
• 50:35
  know, today is the 2nd anniversary of October 7th.
• 50:40
  This will air later. And it was deeply shattering to
• 50:46
  me as a Jewish guy that that day, you know, the worst day
• 50:50
  since the Holocaust for, for, for Jews and for Israel in
• 50:57
  particular. And just, you know, I had
• 51:00
  nightmares for months afterwards.
• 51:04
  So, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's,
• 51:06
  it's hard because, you know, we as a Jewish population, we're
• 51:10
  16,000,000 today. That is the same population we
• 51:14
  had pre Holocaust. Like a lot of people don't
• 51:16
  realize that. And we're in a very challenging
• 51:19
  time for Judaism overall. But I was really struck on Rosh
• 51:24
  Hashanah with a sermon by Rabbi Brouse.
• 51:30
  A friend sent it to me and she's very clear eyed about the
• 51:34
  situation in Israel and Gaza. And it's a great, great sermon.
• 51:39
  I can add it to the show notes for people that want to listen
• 51:43
  to it. But it turned me on to, well,
• 51:46
  actually her book was suggested to me before, but it made me
• 51:49
  start to prioritize reading her book.
• 51:51
  And it's called The Amen Effect. And one of the things that Rabbi
• 51:55
  Brouse talks about in the Amman Fact is that that period of
• 52:00
  COVID was such a dark place of suffering for so many people
• 52:06
  because we isolated ourselves from each other.
• 52:09
  And we did that for good reason, right?
• 52:11
  We saw the body bags lined up in, you know, in Italy and
• 52:16
  Wuhan. I mean, literally lined up
• 52:18
  waiting to be, you know, like putting in freezers.
• 52:22
  I mean, horrific. You know, I think the first
• 52:25
  strain of COVID was really bad. I, I was at a wedding, my, my
• 52:30
  wife and I were at a wedding here in Austin in December,
• 52:33
  right before COVID started 19 with, with a very famous person.
• 52:38
  I probably shouldn't mention their name, but someone that is
• 52:43
  as fit as you and I am right now.
• 52:46
  Well, thanks for calling us. Fit, you are fit.
• 52:48
  And, and he got the first wave of COVID and he almost died.
• 52:54
  He was in the hospital with a ventilator.
• 52:57
  And I, it really shook me strongly because I was like,
• 53:00
  wow, if he could get it, you know, it doesn't matter how
• 53:04
  physically fit. And I know that we found out
• 53:06
  later through data there were these comorbidities, etcetera.
• 53:10
  But that doesn't excuse it. We're still talking about human
• 53:12
  beings. No, and that's why, that's why I
• 53:14
  said I think COVID was a transform, A traumatic,
• 53:19
  transformational event. I mentioned the count of death,
• 53:24
  yes, earlier, to highlight the magnitude.
• 53:29
  But yes, that's exactly what a lot of people experience, the
• 53:33
  isolation, the fact that really, life really is quite ephemeral,
• 53:40
  and we don't have a control. And we forget to tell our loved
• 53:45
  ones how much we love them because we're kind of in this
• 53:49
  rut all the time. And I do think a lot of people
• 53:53
  were shaken up by this, Yeah. Shaken up and almost like a
• 53:59
  pattern interrupt to remind us of what actually matters the
• 54:04
  most in life is the connection and love that we express with
• 54:08
  each other. That it all connects to the
• 54:11
  books I've read, which is essentially led me to this place
• 54:17
  as well as my psychedelic journeys.
• 54:19
  That we are in an earth school right now, and our actual
• 54:24
  reality, whether you want to call that heaven or source or
• 54:27
  wherever our souls are, is deeply rooted in love.
• 54:32
  And that we are here to manifest that expansion of consciousness,
• 54:38
  that expansion of love and that expansion of connection with
• 54:43
  each other. And I think there's a greater
• 54:46
  purpose behind you doing this fund for FMZ.
• 54:54
  And there's nothing at all wrong with capitalism in terms of in
• 54:58
  terms of manifesting great returns, etcetera.
• 55:03
  But there's a deeper purpose I think that you're working
• 55:06
  towards which which I think is beautiful and it makes me even
• 55:09
  more proud to be involved. I was thank you for Yeah,
• 55:12
  thanks. For as if you can make money and
• 55:13
  do good, Yeah, that's an incredible combination.
• 55:16
  And and you know, it's going to transform society.
• 55:19
  Yeah. And, and, and then for me
• 55:21
  personally, to feel like this is in alignment with who I am, my
• 55:29
  calling, You know, I would never dare compare myself in any way
• 55:35
  to Warren Buffett's, but I, I too like run to work, so to
• 55:41
  speak, every day. I'm super happy to be doing what
• 55:44
  I'm doing. I can feel the energy that stems
• 55:49
  from this alignment. Well, I will tell you that the
• 55:53
  most attractive thing to me with Warren Buffett, there's actually
• 55:58
  a, a story I told on Carla Sublett's podcast, which we re
• 56:03
  aired here for episode 7. And I'll just never forget this
• 56:09
  story. And I'll tell you 2 quick
• 56:11
  stories about him because I want to be as much like him as
• 56:14
  possible. I'll just say, and it's because
• 56:17
  of how rooted he is in love. Story number one.
• 56:20
  Do you remember Sam Taylor and the shopped over?
• 56:22
  Of course. OK, so Sam Taylor very
• 56:24
  tragically passed away from brain cancer.
• 56:27
  Beautiful, beautiful family. I served on the board of
• 56:30
  directors with him of shop.org. He was an amazing person.
• 56:34
  Like Phil Terry and I both agree, Sam, that's one of the
• 56:37
  greatest guys to ever live. I'm at the Berkshire Hathaway
• 56:40
  shareholders meeting. Phil was hosting a group of
• 56:46
  leaders, including me, to learn from the CEOs, and one of them
• 56:51
  was Sam Taylor and his company. Oriental Trading had been bought
• 56:57
  by Warren Buffett just recently, and I asked Sam, who had talked
• 57:04
  about the transition from private equity to Warren Buffett
• 57:08
  ownership, ownership by Berkshire Hathaway.
• 57:11
  I asked him for more detail on how that felt for him and his
• 57:16
  employees, and he started crying.
• 57:18
  I'll never forget it. And I thought, Oh no, what have
• 57:21
  I done, right? Because it's men, like we're not
• 57:23
  supposed to cry, right? I thought, Oh no, like I'm
• 57:25
  getting one of my best friends. Here in public.
• 57:28
  To cry in front of like 80 people.
• 57:31
  And I thought, and I felt like this shame, you know, like, but
• 57:36
  it was really beautiful. I'm actually tearing up just
• 57:38
  telling us, remembering this because he was such a beautiful
• 57:41
  soul. And he said, I want you to know,
• 57:45
  he said we were really suffering and under private equity, like
• 57:49
  really suffering, like they did not care about any of our
• 57:51
  employees at all. Yeah, I know the story.
• 57:54
  And he? Said Warren.
• 57:57
  When he bought the company, he would come and visit us so often
• 58:04
  and honestly would just manifest deep love and connection for
• 58:08
  every employee at Ormo Trading and it just lifted everybody up
• 58:13
  and Sam Taylor was the definition of love for sure.
• 58:16
  I mean Sam would manifest love. He was like a just flowing
• 58:20
  around shopped at org just maybe is extroverted is the most
• 58:25
  extroverted a Kellogg right And and he was just he was just
• 58:29
  manifesting that second story. I'm, I'm with him for, you know,
• 58:36
  for this event I was telling you about where we picked him up and
• 58:40
  went to a Country Club and spent 4 hours with him.
• 58:44
  And he had this time during the financial crisis where this was
• 58:51
  in 2008, 2009 and Lehman Brothers had gone out of
• 58:55
  business. You remember this period very
• 58:57
  well and it looked like capitalism was about to go off a
• 59:00
  Cliff. In a bad.
• 59:01
  Place we were about to go into another Great Depression if
• 59:05
  something didn't happen to save it and.
• 59:11
  He. Gets a call from the CEO of
• 59:13
  Goldman Sachs. He's at Dairy Queen with I think
• 59:17
  it was his granddaughter or maybe great granddaughter.
• 59:20
  And he says, I know why you're calling.
• 59:24
  I'm at Dairy Queen right now having ice cream with her and
• 59:30
  I'll call you back in 20 minutes.
• 59:32
  He finishes up the ice cream. He takes his time.
• 59:36
  He but he does call him back at the 20 minute mark.
• 59:40
  He calls him back and he agrees to do a $10 billion loan for
• 59:44
  Goldman Sachs and it takes him about 10 minutes to make the
• 59:47
  decision. Now, why is that possible?
• 59:49
  OK, first of all, he reads for over 4 hours every day.
• 59:55
  So I already knows the numbers. He knows why the CEO is calling.
• 1:00:00
  Secondly, he knows their capabilities and he believes in
• 1:00:03
  America. He knows that this is going to
• 1:00:05
  turn out really well. Third, he's has the presence to
• 1:00:10
  continue to spend the time with his great granddaughter.
• 1:00:13
  I mean, how many people do that? Like they would, you know, maybe
• 1:00:16
  just interrupt, leave their family, sorry, this is more
• 1:00:19
  important, etcetera. Like he, he knows what actually
• 1:00:23
  matters. And he, he, he's, I mean, it's
• 1:00:26
  just an incredible story. So it tells you everything you
• 1:00:29
  need to know. He's deeply rooted in love.
• 1:00:31
  He knows what matters. He's prepared.
• 1:00:34
  And then the very interesting thing after he did that deal was
• 1:00:38
  to see how much he was mocked on CNBC.
• 1:00:41
  He was mocked all over the place.
• 1:00:43
  Like people are like the old man has literally lost his mind.
• 1:00:46
  Like he's off his rocker. And he during that period and
• 1:00:51
  Jamie Dimon were my two favorite people because you may remember
• 1:00:54
  Jamie Dimon was on, you know, the CEO of JP Morgan, long time
• 1:00:59
  now. He was on CNBC and these other
• 1:01:02
  places saying get out of the bunker, go and visit your
• 1:01:05
  customers, go and do capitalism. And they both deeply believed in
• 1:01:11
  America and in hindsight, like Warren Buffett, helped save
• 1:01:15
  capitalism. For sure.
• 1:01:17
  But he still had his ice cream with yeah yeah of.
• 1:01:19
  Course no, I said it's a wonderful story.
• 1:01:21
  The only thing I would say is I would have been this guy who
• 1:01:26
  might have told my daughter, you know what?
• 1:01:30
  I have this really important call and I'm going to step out
• 1:01:33
  into the parking lot. Why don't you finish the ice
• 1:01:36
  cream? So.
• 1:01:37
  Right. No, I, I agree and, and, and
• 1:01:39
  like, I, I understand that and I agree.
• 1:01:43
  And there have been times in my life where I have been that
• 1:01:45
  person. You would have walked into the
• 1:01:47
  parking. And I, I'm not proud of that.
• 1:01:51
  I'm saying that I would aspire to always be like him.
• 1:01:54
  I think I am more of that person today than I was.
• 1:01:57
  But but I I I mean what a role model?
• 1:02:01
  But I think, Brett, that's part of the Earth School, no?
• 1:02:05
  It's. That is part of the evolution.
• 1:02:08
  It is that you are a better person today for having at some
• 1:02:14
  point walked into the parking lot and then at some other point
• 1:02:19
  reflected on the experience and learned from it and grown from
• 1:02:25
  it, right? Yeah, no, totally.
• 1:02:27
  And that's that's the journey. That's that is the journey.
• 1:02:30
  That is the journey, that's the journey.
• 1:02:32
  I mean, I had to, I became the CEO so young.
• 1:02:35
  I became the CEO at age 24 that when I watched that TV show
• 1:02:40
  Silicon Valley with my wife, I was Richard Hendricks.
• 1:02:43
  I was throwing up in the trash can.
• 1:02:45
  Like I really did not know what I was doing at all.
• 1:02:47
  I was like reading hundreds, literally hundreds of books on
• 1:02:51
  management and leadership, just trying to like stay above water.
• 1:02:56
  And that was where I really found my leadership style.
• 1:03:00
  And I decided that I wasn't going to lead by fear, that I
• 1:03:02
  was going to be lead by love. And it was an explicit choice
• 1:03:07
  because both work, but leading by fear creates a lot of
• 1:03:12
  toxicity and you and other people.
• 1:03:14
  And it is actually antithetical to the what we talked about the
• 1:03:18
  most important vibratory force in the universe to really honor
• 1:03:23
  that the reality we're in is deeply rooted in love.
• 1:03:26
  And so to fight that and then use fear to try to scare people
• 1:03:31
  is antithetical to our actual reality and will actually cause
• 1:03:36
  a leader to suffer. I totally agree.
• 1:03:38
  I actually think a lot about inspiration and curiosity.
• 1:03:45
  You may know, what is it that Socrates said wonder is the
• 1:03:50
  beginning of wisdom. And I think a lot about my
• 1:03:57
  companies. I think a lot about experiences,
• 1:04:00
  of course, and how can experiences add value to people.
• 1:04:06
  And I think a lot about inspiration, actually, I think a
• 1:04:11
  lot about inspiration, connection and agency.
• 1:04:16
  So I really look for companies that create one of those three
• 1:04:25
  benefits, inspiration, connections or agency for
• 1:04:31
  people. And I think that's fundamental.
• 1:04:34
  And if I find companies that achieve that kind of benefits
• 1:04:39
  with their users, I find that very intriguing.
• 1:04:44
  I think fundamentally that's what people are looking for
• 1:04:48
  right now, at least here in the Western world where you talk
• 1:04:52
  about your driver from Chads at every episodes and obviously the
• 1:05:00
  tragedy that's occurring in the Ukraine right now or the Middle
• 1:05:05
  East. They're not looking for
• 1:05:08
  inspiration, connection and agency right now.
• 1:05:12
  They're looking for survival. But, but in our Western
• 1:05:16
  developed societies, you know, where the companies I'm looking
• 1:05:21
  for and I'm investing in exists, I think that those are the
• 1:05:25
  things that people are are really looking for.
• 1:05:27
  And I think that's the path to progression, to human
• 1:05:32
  progression and to more shifts in consciousness, actually.
• 1:05:39
  So, so I want to shift, let's let's shift to really the whole
• 1:05:46
  thesis of this podcast is around humanity making it to this age
• 1:05:54
  of abundance for all. And I view this as God's final
• 1:05:59
  exam for humanity. I know that sounds very heavy
• 1:06:02
  and it sounds like I'm operating from a place of fear, but I'm
• 1:06:05
  really not. I'm operating from the deep
• 1:06:06
  place of love for all of humanity.
• 1:06:09
  We're genetically 99.9% the same and the biggest risk in the
• 1:06:17
  acceleration underway with AI, quantum computing, robotics,
• 1:06:22
  brain computer interfaces, I mean, technologies that
• 1:06:25
  literally we grew up watching Star Trek and they're happening
• 1:06:28
  now that, you know, are mind blowing that, you know, every
• 1:06:31
  week of tech progress to me right now feels like a year of
• 1:06:36
  tech progress a decade ago. I mean, it's just very hard to
• 1:06:40
  even keep up with. And I'm sure 10 years from now,
• 1:06:43
  like an hour or two is going to feel like a week.
• 1:06:45
  Today feels like a year, 10 years ago.
• 1:06:48
  And it's amazing time for you and I to be alive to see this
• 1:06:52
  for everyone, for everybody. And, and I do mean abundance for
• 1:06:57
  all. Like the story I've told many
• 1:06:59
  times about Chad, that what hope does a place like Chad have that
• 1:07:05
  is at $660.00 of GDP per person? It has to be AI and robots
• 1:07:11
  because capitalistically, nobody is going to go into a place like
• 1:07:19
  Chad. I mean, they have someone like
• 1:07:20
  Bill Gates go in and he's doing a lot to cure malaria, and
• 1:07:24
  that's great. But really for for the people of
• 1:07:28
  Chad to have an Oasis, it's going to take something much
• 1:07:32
  more profound. And that profoundness, I think
• 1:07:38
  is the ability for us to manifest energy from the sun and
• 1:07:43
  the material sciences breakthrough.
• 1:07:45
  We talked about the Maslow hierarchy.
• 1:07:48
  My friend Pablos Holman, who's going to be on this podcast,
• 1:07:51
  came out with an amazing book called Deep Future.
• 1:07:55
  Recently. I wrote a very long review and
• 1:07:57
  distillation of that on my Substack and Medium.
• 1:08:01
  And he says, actually you should put energy at the very bottom of
• 1:08:06
  before food. It's all it all starts with
• 1:08:09
  energy. And you know, 18 seconds of the
• 1:08:13
  sun's energy fair power of the world fair for for years, right.
• 1:08:17
  And so I'm just curious as you think about the acceleration
• 1:08:22
  underway, which is the most pronounced in our lifetime and
• 1:08:26
  is only going to get more and more pronounced if you believe
• 1:08:30
  that we can reach this age of abundance for all?
• 1:08:36
  I do believe that we can reach an age of abundance.
• 1:08:42
  I do think it's going to take longer than you think and I do
• 1:08:48
  think it's going to be very bumpy at different times.
• 1:08:54
  And I I am a little concerned it's going to be pretty bumpy in
• 1:09:01
  the short term. Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  And I, I am too. And I'm writing about that in in
• 1:09:09
  my third book here about how bumpy it can because people
• 1:09:15
  right now are just freaking out on the fact that there's this
• 1:09:21
  real focus on efficiency and that's going to lead to job
• 1:09:25
  loss. But you know, you can never
• 1:09:29
  predict like all the jobs that are going to be created out of
• 1:09:32
  anything. Like when the Internet came
• 1:09:35
  along, nobody could have invented all the new jobs that
• 1:09:38
  would be created as a result. And part of my thesis is there's
• 1:09:42
  going to be billions of new products and services that are
• 1:09:47
  personalized that we can't imagine today.
• 1:09:49
  True. I mean, I think that the barrier
• 1:09:51
  to creativity is shattering right now.
• 1:09:54
  The and I agree with that, but if I would put this against the
• 1:09:59
  time scale, we're 30 years into the Internet.
• 1:10:03
  So, and as you alluded to earlier, we had a huge bump
• 1:10:10
  maybe whatever 5810 years into the Internet in 2000 and 2001.
• 1:10:17
  So everything is going faster, everything is accelerating.
• 1:10:22
  So maybe we'll have this bump or this the first bump here sooner
• 1:10:29
  than we had it back then. But it takes a long time and
• 1:10:37
  human nature really does not change quickly and easily.
• 1:10:43
  So that's why I think overall it'll take longer I think to get
• 1:10:50
  the benefits for all. Yeah, I mean, human nature, I
• 1:10:56
  think needs catalyst along the way.
• 1:10:59
  And you know, we touched on the Holocaust and the Holocaust was
• 1:11:03
  horrible. I never won a Holocaust, but it
• 1:11:07
  was a catalyst. It was a catalyst for people
• 1:11:12
  becoming, you know, it's taught all over the world as a never
• 1:11:15
  again. It was a catalyst for us to
• 1:11:19
  realize how bad it could get with authoritarian figures.
• 1:11:23
  And it's taught many times as this is what can happen.
• 1:11:28
  And who knows how much it prevented since in terms of
• 1:11:35
  people getting to a similar. For sure.
• 1:11:38
  But but I will, I will tell you, you know, if I called it, you
• 1:11:41
  know, one of the things guilty as charged about me as an
• 1:11:44
  entrepreneur is I have always been able to envision the future
• 1:11:49
  faster than it's happened. I mean, and that comes from
• 1:11:52
  something I share with a lot of my entrepreneurial friends, you
• 1:11:56
  know, fellow CEO's that we all grew up reading sci-fi and we
• 1:12:01
  all could see, you know, that this was a future that was going
• 1:12:03
  to happen. And I really favor people more
• 1:12:06
  like Asimov that we're talking more about positive visions of
• 1:12:09
  the future versus the dystopian narrative, which which I think
• 1:12:14
  that dystopian narrative in sci-fi largely comes from
• 1:12:18
  science fiction writers who were completely captured in the world
• 1:12:21
  of form and probably very atheistic as well.
• 1:12:25
  But, but I will tell you one thing.
• 1:12:29
  I actually think this time my timeline might be right because
• 1:12:37
  the acceleration is so pronounced.
• 1:12:40
  I mean, it's so pronounced as of this recording, Open AI just had
• 1:12:45
  their development day. The what they're now manifesting
• 1:12:51
  in terms of development speed is unprecedented.
• 1:12:54
  And they haven't even hit the three-year anniversary of Chachi
• 1:12:57
  Petit. That's November 30th of this
• 1:13:00
  year that it'll be three years since ChatGPT launched.
• 1:13:05
  I've never seen anything like that.
• 1:13:07
  No, I, I, I I totally agree. It's like whatever 21st version,
• 1:13:12
  forgive me, 21st century version of electricity power of 10
• 1:13:16
  basically and much accelerated. Yeah, so and I agree with the
• 1:13:21
  idea of catalytic events to change trajectories, which is
• 1:13:27
  why I said I'm surprised that COVID has not had more of an
• 1:13:32
  impact. You remember back in 2021 how
• 1:13:39
  many thousands of companies had let go of their offices and
• 1:13:45
  we're basically declaring the new era.
• 1:13:48
  And now it's remote work from forever.
• 1:13:51
  And basically none of that, or very, very little of that
• 1:13:56
  remains. It's just one anecdote of
• 1:13:59
  something that we thought would be a big change, right?
• 1:14:02
  And then human nature is such that, no, it's basically
• 1:14:08
  reverted to trend lines. So yeah.
• 1:14:11
  Yeah. I think that that's a very good
• 1:14:15
  point and that I think that's a good thing by the way, because
• 1:14:19
  in that case too, I, I think that that is weak.
• 1:14:24
  We needed to stop isolating. I mean, we need to get to a
• 1:14:27
  point where we have the vaccines, etcetera, but we need
• 1:14:29
  to, we need to get back to being human.
• 1:14:32
  Like what you and I are doing here is way better than if you
• 1:14:35
  and I were on a zoom right now. You know, it's like it's it's
• 1:14:39
  it's a much, much higher fidelity experience And you
• 1:14:42
  know, it's a sensory experience. And it's like the concert I went
• 1:14:47
  to the ACL taping of Jon Batiste, like watching that
• 1:14:50
  versus being there. It's just totally different ball
• 1:14:54
  game. So it sounds like you're pretty
• 1:14:57
  positive we make it just longer time?
• 1:15:00
  And I do, I sincerely believe in this idea of the emergence of a
• 1:15:06
  new economic sector, which of course I call the experience
• 1:15:11
  economy. And when I agree, of course the
• 1:15:16
  data says whenever we have had a technology shift, a lot of jobs
• 1:15:23
  have been lost and more jobs have been created.
• 1:15:27
  Of course that is true. It's not clear what these new
• 1:15:33
  jobs will be that will be created when the people on the
• 1:15:38
  factory floor replaced by robots and all of the lower level
• 1:15:42
  service people are replaced by algorithms.
• 1:15:46
  So I'm not sure that new jobs will be created in those
• 1:15:51
  sectors. But I am a big believer that new
• 1:15:54
  jobs will be created in what I call the experience economy,
• 1:15:59
  where humans can find some of the solutions that they are
• 1:16:06
  looking to address this new category of needs that Maslow
• 1:16:13
  captures at the top of his pyramid or I capture when I talk
• 1:16:18
  about inspiration, connection and agency.
• 1:16:21
  So, but I I may be wrong by the way, but I am a believer in and
• 1:16:28
  I believe that it's this new sector that is going to create
• 1:16:33
  the jobs. Yeah, I completely agree.
• 1:16:36
  Because because with with complete abundance, when I when,
• 1:16:41
  when I'm talking about we've cracked energy at that point,
• 1:16:46
  the main thing humanity cares about is experiences.
• 1:16:49
  I mean, I think if you and I could teleport to 100 years from
• 1:16:55
  now, we'd do it. Well, I, I would definitely do
• 1:16:59
  it for sure. I would do it to like see what's
• 1:17:01
  going on. I mean, you'd, you'd want to
• 1:17:03
  have a return ticket. Yes, I'd want to have a return
• 1:17:05
  ticket. But, but, but I, I, I believe we
• 1:17:08
  would look at those people as gods today.
• 1:17:11
  I really do. I think we, if we could go 100
• 1:17:13
  years in the future, they would have unbelievable superpowers
• 1:17:18
  that you and I couldn't even fathom, couldn't even fathom.
• 1:17:22
  And they probably would have conquered faster and lightspeed
• 1:17:25
  travel. They would know what the 96% of
• 1:17:29
  the universe is that we call dark energy and dark matter.
• 1:17:32
  They would know how to navigate that.
• 1:17:34
  They would probably be able to manifest, you know, the creation
• 1:17:37
  of objects. Like it would look like it was
• 1:17:40
  magic to you. All technology looks like magic
• 1:17:43
  at the beginning. It might even be simpler than
• 1:17:46
  that. Brett, I, you know Naval
• 1:17:53
  Ravikantan, He has I. Don't personally know him but.
• 1:17:56
  Yeah, I don't know him well, I know him a little bit, but he
• 1:17:58
  has this wonderful saying. Founder of Angelus.
• 1:18:02
  Yes, exactly. And now kind of a whatever tech
• 1:18:05
  philosopher. He is a philosopher.
• 1:18:07
  Yeah. He's, he's a great philosopher,
• 1:18:08
  actually. And he talks about three things
• 1:18:14
  that have to be earned right and cannot be acquired.
• 1:18:20
  He talks about I will get the exact words wrong, but Peace of
• 1:18:27
  Mind, a healthy body and loving house are three things that can
• 1:18:35
  only be earned. And I think about this and I
• 1:18:41
  think about your concept of the Earth school and I think about
• 1:18:48
  is people, us in this post AI world, what might we strive for?
• 1:19:00
  That sounds pretty good to me. Peace of Mind, a loving house, a
• 1:19:05
  healthy body. And since it can only be earned,
• 1:19:10
  what are the activities that people will engage in to earn
• 1:19:17
  these benefits? And so this is much more, I
• 1:19:22
  think in the here and now and not about necessarily having
• 1:19:28
  amazing new technological opportunities like teleportation
• 1:19:35
  and time travel and so forth, Peace of Mind, loving house,
• 1:19:42
  healthy body, like who wouldn't want this?
• 1:19:45
  And most of us don't have that. And so if the experience economy
• 1:19:51
  and the companies and the experience economy and the
• 1:19:53
  people who are going to be retrained to apply their craft
• 1:19:59
  and the experience economy help the rest of us achieve these
• 1:20:05
  kinds of benefits, I think that. 'D be wonderful.
• 1:20:08
  Yeah, I think that's going to happen.
• 1:20:09
  And one of the most instructive books on this, and I just want
• 1:20:14
  to preface it because I preface this in episode 1 that I would
• 1:20:16
  never do what I'm about to say, but it is.
• 1:20:21
  It's this book called LSD in the Mind of the Universe, and it's
• 1:20:24
  by this guy Chris Bosh, and he, you can think of him like the
• 1:20:29
  people that open up the Drake Pack passage.
• 1:20:31
  That's that's the guy who took 600 milligrams for over. 20
• 1:20:35
  years micrograms, micrograms D, which is the most you can take.
• 1:20:39
  It's like a complete ego dissolution.
• 1:20:41
  You just merge into consciousness.
• 1:20:44
  You see that there's the unity of all things.
• 1:20:46
  Everything's deeply rooted in love.
• 1:20:49
  John Mackey talks about it, actually in the first chapter of
• 1:20:53
  his book, The whole story, his tell all.
• 1:20:56
  And it was what allowed him to get over his fear to launch
• 1:20:59
  Whole Foods. He's one of one of my best
• 1:21:02
  friends and wrote the Ford to my book, The Entrepreneurs
• 1:21:05
  Essentials. And Chris Bosh did this for 20
• 1:21:10
  years in secret. He did.
• 1:21:12
  Yeah, in secret. He was a professor, and he said
• 1:21:14
  he felt like a fraud because his students were having different
• 1:21:19
  psychedelic experiences and telling him, hey, I've seen this
• 1:21:23
  reality and I want to talk with you about it.
• 1:21:25
  And he's like acting like he's doesn't know anything about
• 1:21:28
  that. So he said that was the worst
• 1:21:30
  part about it for him is that he couldn't be authentic with his
• 1:21:34
  own students. But he did this for 20 years and
• 1:21:38
  he did 73 journeys because he was willing to die for the
• 1:21:44
  answer of what is our reality. And one of the things he saw
• 1:21:48
  this is in chapters 9 through 11 of the book.
• 1:21:51
  I've reread these chapters like 3 times at this point.
• 1:21:55
  I've read the whole book. I highly recommend the whole
• 1:21:57
  book is that we're in an evolutionary shift and actually
• 1:22:02
  the birth of the future human is he saw it.
• 1:22:06
  And the diamond soul is that we become our physical vessels
• 1:22:11
  become much more embodied, not just with are knowings and
• 1:22:18
  learnings of this lifetime in Earth school that all the
• 1:22:21
  learnings that our soul has had across all lifetimes.
• 1:22:26
  And that that gives us this transcendent ability, which also
• 1:22:30
  sounds really good because we're talking about each person having
• 1:22:37
  intimate knowledge about all the lessons they've learned across
• 1:22:40
  all their lifetimes. And then the way that they care
• 1:22:45
  much more about the planet, they care much more about each other.
• 1:22:49
  They're then body meant in of more love.
• 1:22:53
  And the more embodied you get in your fiscal vessel with your
• 1:22:57
  soul, the more loving you actually naturally become.
• 1:23:01
  So maybe that's the future. You know, we'll we'll we'll
• 1:23:05
  we'll see that it's but it's amazing that it's happening in
• 1:23:08
  this lifetime. What are the risk that you worry
• 1:23:10
  about to us making it well in the short term, the bombs?
• 1:23:16
  Are going to be, I think significant job losses.
• 1:23:23
  And we already as a society speaking at least for North
• 1:23:29
  America are at I think historically record high rates
• 1:23:35
  of anxiety and depression. And I think that's going to get
• 1:23:40
  worse before it gets better. And obviously we have meaningful
• 1:23:48
  polarization and people being very angry at one another and
• 1:23:56
  political divisiveness. So we may go or have to go
• 1:24:05
  through a period first, which I think could be quite a few years
• 1:24:11
  where it gets worse before it gets better.
• 1:24:15
  That would be that would be my my fear.
• 1:24:19
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and you know, one of the
• 1:24:21
  ways that I'm kind of putting. One foot in, you know, out and
• 1:24:27
  then another foot and trying to walk the path myself on this
• 1:24:30
  front is a part of the reason I think that that fear is so
• 1:24:36
  manifest right now is because of tools like social media.
• 1:24:42
  I think that Tristan Harris had it right in The Social Dilemma.
• 1:24:45
  It is both a utopia and a dystopia, but the algorithms are
• 1:24:50
  very dystopian because they're trying to hijack our amygdala
• 1:24:55
  all the time. So one of the companies I'm
• 1:24:57
  involved with is Lincoln Brown's company, which I talked with you
• 1:25:00
  about. And it really is algorithmically
• 1:25:06
  seeking deep human. Connection and happiness.
• 1:25:10
  Versus trying to hijack the amygdala.
• 1:25:13
  And I think that that's part of light right that there are new
• 1:25:18
  business models that have been created to challenge be
• 1:25:22
  challengers to the fact that we're manifesting more suffering
• 1:25:28
  to as Jason Karp would say in episode 3, put, you know,
• 1:25:33
  profits over people like we are all people.
• 1:25:37
  We're having a an experience as humanity and we want that deep
• 1:25:41
  connection and we have the free will to either create the
• 1:25:48
  matrix. You know, the Matrix movie is,
• 1:25:52
  is not, I don't believe that's our reality at all, but the self
• 1:25:56
  created prison that we've created around social media, the
• 1:26:02
  regular media. And this is not a critique of
• 1:26:03
  the Free Press. It's a critique of the
• 1:26:05
  algorithmic manipulation of our amygdala.
• 1:26:08
  If I just sat back and I and I just received the news, it would
• 1:26:12
  be pushing dystopia to me. It would be talent trying to
• 1:26:16
  enrage me all the time because that is going to get more clicks
• 1:26:19
  than if they push the latest potential climate change
• 1:26:23
  breakthrough. I mean, my opinion is 50 or so
• 1:26:27
  years from now. People will look back at our
• 1:26:31
  time in the past 10 years and they will say we cannot believe
• 1:26:36
  how reckless they were back then in terms of consuming this,
• 1:26:42
  letting their kids consume this, not having the guardrails or any
• 1:26:48
  guardrails around this. So I for sure agree with your
• 1:26:54
  analysis of social media and yeah, what it's done.
• 1:26:59
  Yeah, yeah. And I, I, you know, I typically
• 1:27:01
  ask people what are they doing to make?
• 1:27:04
  Sure, we make it, but I think it's pretty obvious with your
• 1:27:06
  fund, you know, I think, I think it's pretty obvious that you're
• 1:27:10
  really helping us make it by putting a lot more attention
• 1:27:16
  into experiences which create deep human connection and love.
• 1:27:20
  It's the three things I mentioned.
• 1:27:22
  Inspiration, connection. And agency.
• 1:27:27
  I'm really big on personal agency.
• 1:27:32
  I do think part of personal growth is to accept
• 1:27:37
  responsibility for your actions, for what happens to you, for how
• 1:27:41
  you react to what happens to you, and get out of the
• 1:27:46
  victimhood mindsets. So that's all part of what
• 1:27:53
  someone needs to be inspired to do, like earning these three
• 1:28:00
  things that Naval talks about, the healthy body, the Peace of
• 1:28:06
  Mind, and the loving house. You have to work at it.
• 1:28:11
  Like, you know, you don't deserve this.
• 1:28:14
  It'd be nice. No, you're not entitled to it.
• 1:28:16
  No, if you don't have it, it's not because the world is unfair
• 1:28:20
  to you. No, that's the whole point,
• 1:28:23
  which is why I like your idea of Earth school.
• 1:28:25
  You have, you have to earn it. How are you going to change?
• 1:28:30
  You know, I don't know who said if you want to change the world,
• 1:28:33
  change yourself. That's a lesson in and of
• 1:28:36
  itself. Like how many people understand
• 1:28:40
  if I want to change the world, I need to change myself, you know,
• 1:28:43
  the meaning of this and so forth.
• 1:28:45
  So yeah, those are, I think, important lessons.
• 1:28:53
  And if we can create companies and founders who stage or
• 1:28:59
  distribute experiences that inspire people to do this, like
• 1:29:05
  the podcast where you're doing here with your time, there's
• 1:29:08
  plenty of other things you could be doing.
• 1:29:10
  But you are trying to interest people to open their curiosity
• 1:29:20
  and say, oh, I kind of hear this and something catches my
• 1:29:24
  attention in what is said in this or in the other podcasts.
• 1:29:29
  And hopefully people will be inspired to dig a little deeper
• 1:29:37
  and learn a little bit more. Right.
• 1:29:39
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:29:39
  I mean, that's how it works. I mean, that's how change.
• 1:29:43
  Happens. Which is why I believe that
• 1:29:47
  it'll take time. You know, we talk about a shift
• 1:29:51
  in consciousness. We talk about the impact on the
• 1:29:57
  mass market that someone like Oprah has.
• 1:30:01
  But still, you know, how many people is it?
• 1:30:06
  So we have a ways to go before it's whatever, 80% before we
• 1:30:11
  reach the tipping point. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 1:30:14
  I mean, Oprah is now openly. Talking about psychedelics, I
• 1:30:18
  don't know if you knew that. I did not.
• 1:30:19
  And so. So is Mel Robbins.
• 1:30:20
  Yeah, actually, which Mel Robbins is has had a massive
• 1:30:24
  take off. I mean her popularity, you know,
• 1:30:27
  with the let them theory, etcetera.
• 1:30:30
  I mean she is becoming one of the most popular of all time.
• 1:30:36
  Let's let's talk about spirituality.
• 1:30:38
  If you mind if we talk about spirituality, tell me a bit
• 1:30:41
  about your your spirituality and your belief and what what is
• 1:30:47
  this reality that we're in? Well, I.
• 1:30:52
  Do think I'm a very intuitive person and I feel like I've had
• 1:31:01
  a spiritual calling for a very long time.
• 1:31:06
  And I don't know about organized religions, but I definitely
• 1:31:16
  believe that there is one consciousness.
• 1:31:22
  And I definitely believe that there is a oneness among all of
• 1:31:29
  us, frankly. So I believe there is a
• 1:31:33
  universe. I believe we have purpose.
• 1:31:37
  And I think that this is something that transcends
• 1:31:47
  organized religion. Yeah.
• 1:31:50
  And one of the things that we talked.
• 1:31:52
  About a bit before this at launch is that the roots of all
• 1:31:57
  of the religions actually have really good synchronicity exact
• 1:32:01
  whether it's Bhagavad Gita, whether it's the DAW de Ching,
• 1:32:05
  whether it's Buddhism or Hinduism or the you know, I mean
• 1:32:10
  I'm Jewish like or Kabbalah or ancient Christianity, the
• 1:32:15
  Christian Mystics, it all synchronizes.
• 1:32:19
  And then there's a bunch of primarily man made scaffolding
• 1:32:24
  that was built on top of it. Like I've talked with a lot of
• 1:32:27
  my Indian American friends, which actually in all the, the
• 1:32:32
  different minorities in America, those are the most successful
• 1:32:35
  financially. The most successful minorities
• 1:32:38
  are actually Indian Americans. And I say, you know, I love the
• 1:32:43
  Gita, but it starts with the caste system.
• 1:32:46
  And there's no way that that is there is something that would be
• 1:32:49
  rooted in love like that. Sorry, Michael, You're born in
• 1:32:52
  this cast and you can't. Too bad.
• 1:32:54
  Yeah, Too bad, right? All these scaffoldings are
• 1:32:58
  largely power structures and. They are, I think, a
• 1:33:02
  manifestation, unfortunately, of human nature at its level of
• 1:33:09
  maturity at the time, basically. So, yeah, Well, that that's part
• 1:33:15
  of the reason I actually think that.
• 1:33:18
  There is a spiritual awakening or consciousness awakening, both
• 1:33:22
  of the same, that is under way in the world because this time
• 1:33:30
  really. Matters like we're.
• 1:33:32
  Dealing It's one of those times where with great power comes
• 1:33:35
  great responsibility and the ability for us to manifest in
• 1:33:40
  age of abundance, which literally is for everyone versus
• 1:33:46
  destroy ourselves has never been more pronounced that it's then
• 1:33:49
  it's going to be we're going to have super tools that we can't
• 1:33:52
  even imagine today and every tool can be used for good or
• 1:33:55
  bad. Like when we discovered fire, we
• 1:33:57
  could use it to cook our food and warm our homes or we could
• 1:34:00
  use it to burn down villages and and we've done both and we have
• 1:34:04
  done both. I agree with you the.
• 1:34:07
  Data is very clear. There is.
• 1:34:08
  Clearly. A religious revival going on.
• 1:34:12
  And what's I think inspiring about it is it's young people,
• 1:34:21
  Gen. Z, are actually going back to
• 1:34:25
  synagogue, are going back to churches in large numbers.
• 1:34:31
  And it's quite remarkable, and no one has an easy explanation.
• 1:34:40
  I mean, you and I probably have the most plausible explanation,
• 1:34:44
  which is shifting consciousness. People are looking for more
• 1:34:50
  spiritual nourishment, and these are these observations of
• 1:34:59
  religious renewal, frankly, psychedelic renaissance.
• 1:35:06
  They're all bread crumbs, as we said earlier, that kind of seem
• 1:35:10
  to indicate a pattern going in the same direction.
• 1:35:15
  This should make us quite optimistic.
• 1:35:18
  Yeah, I can tell you on the psychedelic front that when I.
• 1:35:22
  Had dinner with Governor Perry when he was our governor at the
• 1:35:26
  mansion, at the governor's mansion.
• 1:35:28
  I'm sitting right next to him and I would have never thought
• 1:35:31
  in a million years that I'd be hosting him at our home for the
• 1:35:35
  Americans for Ibogaine initiative.
• 1:35:38
  But it's incredible that he's become this avatar for this
• 1:35:44
  suffering of veterans, which the statistics are pretty shocking.
• 1:35:51
  We just fact checked this for the book because I've always
• 1:35:54
  said that we lose more veterans to to suicide than we do to
• 1:35:59
  combat. It's actually over a period of
• 1:36:02
  time since 9:11, it's 4 to 1. We've lost four times as many
• 1:36:08
  vets to suicide. That's tragic as we have to
• 1:36:10
  combat. And this, this plant, the Boga
• 1:36:15
  plant, which was in West Africa, literally is a miracle cure for
• 1:36:19
  someone who has that level of suffering.
• 1:36:22
  Ibogaine is the chemical composition.
• 1:36:24
  The reason it's important to have the chemical composition is
• 1:36:28
  that dosing is very important with it.
• 1:36:31
  I've never taken ibogaine. I don't have the, the type of
• 1:36:36
  PTSD that that would require something like that.
• 1:36:40
  But the fact that it cures an opiate addict or cures an
• 1:36:43
  alcoholic or cure someone that's suicidal is amazing.
• 1:36:46
  I mean, and the the fact that it works that way and that we
• 1:36:50
  should have the scientific curiosity to understand why does
• 1:36:54
  this reset button, why is this even exist compared to the
• 1:36:58
  efficacy of something like a depression medicine?
• 1:37:01
  I am very interested in this. Psychedelic renaissance from a
• 1:37:07
  investor perspective, there's obviously, I mean, first of all,
• 1:37:13
  as you know, most of these compounds today are schedule 1.
• 1:37:16
  So they're basically illegal except for in clinical trials.
• 1:37:21
  But the profession already talks about this in calls it
• 1:37:25
  experiential medicine. So of course the guy who's
• 1:37:29
  interested in the experience economy pays attention to
• 1:37:33
  experiential medicine. And I mean, it's obvious and
• 1:37:37
  clear, self-evident how the delivery mechanism of this
• 1:37:42
  experiential medicine is very different from the delivery
• 1:37:48
  mechanism of traditional medicine.
• 1:37:50
  Right here is a prescription, go to the pharmacy or here's a
• 1:37:54
  pill. This is very different.
• 1:37:55
  So we need different facilities, we need different technologies.
• 1:38:00
  We need a lot of new things to enable this experiential
• 1:38:07
  medicine or these experiential medicine treatments that new
• 1:38:12
  companies, potentially venture backed companies are being
• 1:38:18
  created to provide and so forth. And one of the things that I
• 1:38:23
  believe in terms of. This consciousness awakening and
• 1:38:27
  this root of spirituality and the commonality is that these
• 1:38:32
  are actually some of the oldest technologies.
• 1:38:35
  These have been around for many. They've been used for many
• 1:38:38
  thousands of years. And again, for people watching
• 1:38:42
  this, if they have a curiosity, they should watch how to change
• 1:38:45
  your mind on Netflix or read Michael Pollan's book.
• 1:38:49
  It's really amazing. Like to understand the history
• 1:38:52
  of why did these get classified as schedule one in the first
• 1:38:55
  place is a really fascinating history.
• 1:38:58
  It's actually really interesting to watch.
• 1:39:00
  It's a very interesting. It's a four part.
• 1:39:02
  Documentary very relatively short, but it's really
• 1:39:08
  interesting to watch. Yeah.
• 1:39:10
  Yeah, it really is. Well, hey, I really, really
• 1:39:12
  appreciate this. My friend, I really appreciate
• 1:39:16
  and and honor our friendship and thank you so much for allowing
• 1:39:20
  me to be in your fund. I think it's it's going to do
• 1:39:25
  incredibly well. I mean, it's it's on thesis for
• 1:39:29
  all the reasons you said that I actually think it's the
• 1:39:33
  manifestation of this consciousness awakening too.
• 1:39:37
  It's part of it. It very much aligned with it and
• 1:39:40
  part of it. And thanks for.
• 1:39:42
  Having me and I'm grateful for I didn't realize this is a 25 year
• 1:39:48
  old friendship. Yeah.
• 1:39:50
  And so it's wonderful. I we're we're so lucky to have
• 1:39:53
  that yeah, I have less hair, but looks like you have the same
• 1:39:57
  amount of hair. Thank you even back.
• 1:39:58
  Then I have I have good hair. Well, I really appreciate our
• 1:40:02
  friendship. Thank you.
• 1:40:03
  Thanks so much. Great to see you.
• 1:40:05
  So thanks everybody for tuning in to another episode of Love
• 1:40:10
  Conquers Fear. The next episode is also with an
• 1:40:15
  incredible investor. I'm recording that coming up
• 1:40:19
  here. And then the podcast is actually
• 1:40:23
  hitting the road. So I'm going to be in New York
• 1:40:25
  City. I'm speaking at the Principled
• 1:40:28
  Business Summit, which by the time you see this, I'll have
• 1:40:31
  already done that. But I'm going to have lots of
• 1:40:34
  people on the podcast in New York City.
• 1:40:37
  Then I'm going to San Francisco and I'll be at Ted AI, and we'll
• 1:40:42
  have a number of incredible people, including one of my
• 1:40:46
  favorite investors on the podcast out there.
• 1:40:50
  Thanks again for tuning in and keep the comments flowing in.
• 1:40:55
  It's really lifting my spirit seeing all the amazing feedback
• 1:40:59
  you have about the podcast. It's pretty unique.
• 1:41:02
  I don't know any other AI podcast which is talking about
• 1:41:05
  spirituality and consciousness, and I'm just living my truth and
• 1:41:10
  walking my path to really try the best way I can to help
• 1:41:16
  humanity make it to this new age that I think we all deserve to
• 1:41:20
  be a part of. So thank you and I really
• 1:41:24
  appreciate all the support.