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Michael Broukhim: Why AI Is a National Security Issue l Trailblazers Podcast Episode 57 · Trailblazers by Erica Wenger

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Today on the show, I am so excited to be joined by Michael Brookine.
0:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael is a general partner at Deep 33, the Deep Tech Venture Fund backing front-to-your-founders across quantum computing, advanced energy, AI infrastructure, and robotics, betting on the moment artificial intelligence moves from experiment to industrial scale deployment.
0:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But most people know Michael from what he built before venture.
0:20
[SPEAKER_00]: He co-founded FabFitFun and served as its co-CEO, growing it into one of the best known multi-categories subscription membership platforms in the country.
0:28
[SPEAKER_00]: that operators resume shapes how he invests.
0:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than writing checks and stepping back, Michael brings a joint venture mindset, meaning on the audience building and membership expertise he owned at FabFit Fund, helped founders grow through real distribution partnerships and hands-on support.
0:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Before FabFit Fund, he co-founded Charlie, a digital strategy firm whose clients range from Samuel L. Jackson, Pfizer, to the Golden Globes.
0:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's been an active early stage angel with early bets on companies like Ring, Reformation, Chao Now, and Meandies.
0:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Born and raised in Los Angeles to Iranian immigrant parents, Michael graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned his JD from Sanford Love.
1:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He's also spent time as an agent professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts, teaching at the intersection of film and business.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's welcome Michael.
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: What a bio!
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You've done a lot of things!
1:13
[SPEAKER_01]: sound is good, I don't know who wrote that, but it sounds amazing.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a combination of LA, a little bit of my assistant, a little bit of your team, you know.
1:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice little inaugumation.
1:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, thank you very much.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.
1:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to be here.
1:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so before we get into it, we like to start with an icebreaker.
1:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
1:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be a hardball question.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
1:36
[SPEAKER_00]: What is a time in your life that almost broke you?
1:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be personal, it could be professional.
1:41
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going straight into it.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We go into it.
1:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I like to get to the heart of it because I find if I start with a layup, like, tell me about your child.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:49
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I had a, I had a, a crucible period.
1:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's, tell me more.
1:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the, the full crum of it was my wedding, which, which was the, the best day of my life in it, you know, and the, I'll, I'll describe it like this.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: My wedding was on March 7th, 2020, which was the last weddings, anyone who had their wedding that weekend, it was the last weddings of the world.
2:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me and my friends, I was the me and my wife, we were the closing party, essentially.
2:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And leading up to it, and in the draft aftermath of it, I truly felt like I was going through the birth canal
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: the, you know, the birth pains of coming out as a couple.
2:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so what happened, leading up to it, first we had our first ever challenges in business up until that point, business for me and frankly, most of my professional life academics, et cetera, was just up into the right, like a straight line.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of looked at something and put my mind
3:12
[SPEAKER_01]: We had our first, you know, we had some real supply chain issues that came up with the growth that we were having at Fab that Fund, a product fell out.
3:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We couldn't put it in the box that had a bunch of ripple effects.
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And before I knew it, we had reached the point that about a month before my wedding, we had to fire lay off 100 people.
3:33
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a significant chunk of the company.
3:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So this was pre-COVID.
3:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is like February of 2022.
3:39
[SPEAKER_01]: This is February.
3:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
3:40
[SPEAKER_01]: COVID was a story day.
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was like a it was a rumor and people were aware of it and your smarter friends were already planning and prepping.
3:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we had this overlay of COVID coming.
3:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I had my first kind of business hiccups.
3:59
[SPEAKER_01]: One small other thing, my father-in-law two weeks before tore his AC, tore his Achilles.
4:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So walking down the aisle became a question.
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: We had the wedding, which was a beautiful day.
4:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And then six weeks after it,
4:20
[SPEAKER_01]: my brother was diagnosed with cancer.
4:22
[SPEAKER_01]: My brother is my best friend.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We started fact that fun together.
4:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We were co-CEOs.
4:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had this strong sense where I remember the question that came coming up for me in 2020 was essentially who's in control because I, you know, up until that point I said,
4:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in control if you know I have agency I can make things happen and still live life with a lot of agency but realize that between the kind of the business challenges, the supply chain hiccups and then obviously and health is kind of the ultimate designer in that where you're like totally out of my hands and again my brother, my co-founder, my best friend were 13 months apart, we grew up very, very close.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, not only was he out of commission, but he was out in a pretty harsh and substantial way to go through six months of chemo, and it was a very, very difficult time, and you have the overlay of COVID over all of that.
5:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we were, and it was my first year of marriage, too.
5:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we were in this hyper-hyper-hyper-isolated situation.
5:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We had to look at my brother receiving treatments through a glass window, because we couldn't go in.
5:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's so compromised too with COVID.
5:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like in particular, he has to be isolated.
5:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And then maximal confusion, right?
5:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you don't know what's the interaction between these two, you know, that obviously establish research on cancer and going through it, et cetera.
5:56
[SPEAKER_01]: How does COVID impact and how do you have to conduct yourself in that environment already people are isolating themselves?
6:02
[SPEAKER_01]: We were I mean we had the the most lockdown quarantine of anyone So so that year that year was a really transformative year for me It sounds really really really really hard and I appreciate you sharing all that with me most importantly How was your brother doing now?
6:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank god he's 100% he's doing great and
6:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But I look back now and I say, that was the best of your in my life because I had this kind of mythology about myself and very much had to kind of strip it down.
6:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And
6:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Bill back, what does it say, Bill back better?
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Kind of brick by brick, right?
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, what did you realize about who has control and like, what do you do now differently?
6:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I mean, you look at your resume.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the Harvard Stanford, the starting two successful businesses.
6:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You get to work with your family.
6:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You found the love of your life.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Like all these things sound good and incredible.
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the thing now that you operate differently with after that crazy year?
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I really, you know, this is not something that is normally, maybe maybe not language that people use on a business podcast, but I think I put kind of God at the center of my life, and it wasn't an idea that I had grown up with.
7:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt connected to this idea of a higher power, but in a more real sense, you know, I'm Jewish and I had a
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's call it like the cultural rapings of Judaism, very present in my life, but the idea of actually thinking about what does it mean to be in service of a higher authority and to rely on that higher authority to kind of be your partner in your endeavors, your life creation.
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't something that had,
7:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I had never really put much thought into it.
7:54
[SPEAKER_01]: There were little bread crumbs leading up to that.
7:58
[SPEAKER_01]: My wife actually was a history major at Harvard.
8:03
[SPEAKER_01]: We went on our first date in 2017.
8:05
[SPEAKER_01]: This is feeling a lot less like a business podcast.
8:07
[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of how he goes.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, yeah.
8:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing it right.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing it right.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing it right.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing good.
8:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Good.
8:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So we went on our first date in 2017.
8:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, she was actually a undergrad at Harvard.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And I graduated about a decade before.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: and she did not meet in school.
8:29
[SPEAKER_01]: We met on a dating gap.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Of it.
8:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And she was telling me how much she hated Harvard.
8:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was supremely confused.
8:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I said,
8:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I loved it.
8:42
[SPEAKER_01]: What's going on there?
8:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And she said, well, I started taking this history class intro to the Middle East.
8:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And the professor was telling us how the Middle East was this peaceful place and then a bunch of apartheid colonialists showed up and created their apartheid state of Israel.
8:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlotte is a New York State debate champion, so she went into it with the professor, and eventually was given a bad grade, and encouraged to leave the department and left them became a comparative religion major in the Divinity School, and so she had started kind of
9:19
[SPEAKER_01]: exploring religion, exploring studying with some rabbis, but also she was kind of became an expert in early medieval Christianity.
9:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we had this kind of like this kind of breadgrum breadcrumb backdrop of these ideas floating around.
9:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was something to kind of grab onto.
9:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
9:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So one thing I've learned at talking to GPs on the show, and in my own experience as a GP, is that your back office is a signal.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: How fast you close deals, how clean the LP experiences, how your K1s land, investors notice all of it.
9:50
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9:53
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9:55
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10:03
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10:07
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10:11
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10:14
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10:16
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10:19
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10:22
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10:26
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10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sounds like she's someone too who was so educated in the history.
10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think that that's something that has had to become more relevant or even should become more relevant now is learning the actual history, learning the things that have happened so that you are rooted in truth as much as you can be when you have these kinds of conversations.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, everyone has their own version of truth, but I think it's really powerful to study history and study where religions come from so that when we do have conversations that might
11:06
[SPEAKER_00]: are very debate heavy, sounds like in her case, it comes from a place of knowledge versus emotion.
11:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and it's more complicated than ever because you could study and you could go to a great university like Harvard and still the person that's teaching you might be totally wrong.
11:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was actually her experience.
11:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, this is the world we're living in now, we're living in a world of
11:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You could call them hoaxes or information ops or siops, but it's a real thing.
11:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that I went deep down the rabbit hole and eventually taught a class at USC on kind of media literacy.
11:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we have an open information system in the United States, which with the biggest privileges in the world is that we have freedom of speech.
11:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other side of the coin of freedom of speech is not only are we free to say anything,
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: people can blend in and say anything, and we have effectively a digitally borderless environment, and there's a lot of people who'd like to see the United States not do well.
12:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of people who would like to see capitalism struggle, and
12:24
[SPEAKER_01]: One great, very effective way of doing that is kind of undermining our information security, our information ecosystem.
12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's a lot of these kind of experiences that have talked a little about, send me down a rabbit hole of learning about that environment.
12:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, but we'll definitely part of my growth in the last five, 10 years.
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, me as well, I see the same things.
12:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's the, that is the struggle when things are borderless.
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we get a lot of, sometimes we get a lot of great technology, whether it's social media or it's cryptocurrency, which is a whole their conversation.
12:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But the downside is that it is so borderless and it is so open.
13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk to you about just quickly, you're like academia-stint.
13:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So I see the U.S.C.
13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: teaching.
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I personally have struggled a lot with academia and not always feeling so aligned with my point of view
13:16
[SPEAKER_00]: feeling similarly to probably how your wife feels that there's a lot of people that maybe I don't agree with that are in charge in a lot of these universities.
13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But you said, I'm gonna go back anyway.
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna teach a class.
13:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna like meet this issue where it's at.
13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me what made you want to go back and teach at USC and I see that it's under the film school.
13:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is an interesting choice.
13:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have obviously expect this to be like a martial class, business class.
13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me a
13:46
[SPEAKER_01]: one of my best friends in the world, my childhood best friend got involved in the film school.
13:50
[SPEAKER_01]: He asked me to come and guess lecture initially in a class that he was teaching and eventually we kind of hit it off and built it from there.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Is he an entertainment like his career or what's his- No, he's an entrepreneur.
14:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an entrepreneur.
14:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an entrepreneur.
14:06
[SPEAKER_01]: He is named Diego Berdack, and he started a company called, initially called Cloud Kitchens.
14:11
[SPEAKER_01]: It's now called Atoms, he's part of it.
14:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I've heard of it.
14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Really, thank you.
14:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
14:17
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a small company.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But stepping back for a second, I think, he, myself, a handful of others, I think we look at the world is something that we want to project great things into.
14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And entrepreneurship is one form of that.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Working within institutions is something that's in this capable.
14:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean these institutions kind of shape the world Whether it's USC or Harvard or wherever else, and so He saw there was this
14:47
[SPEAKER_01]: white space, essentially, for teaching initially just genuine entrepreneurship to kids that the U.S. is known for a lot of things, which has quite an incredible film, so when these kids are very, very talented.
15:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was both a push-and-pull, the film school said, we have a lot of kids graduating, they don't know what to do other than to go into the mail room at WME and become
15:12
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of go up this this agency track and meanwhile there's all these new platforms there's YouTube and Instagram and X and there's all this entrepreneurship that's possible in this new media environment and so they wanted they wanted a class on entrepreneurship in the film school and Diego and I brought that to the table we think again we think of ourselves as almost kind of part of this rebel alliance where we're injecting we didn't we had good academic
15:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish there was a class like the one we taught, which we were bringing in the Travis Calenix of the world, Evan Spiegel and other folks who were in LA at the time and doing guest lectures and just telling authentic stories about how they built their companies.
15:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is, you know, we're in the age of podcasts, but when we started teaching this, this was like very inaccessible and there's also versions of stories that people will tell
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: under kind of a confidential environment where you get this kind of unvarnished truth and I think our students really benefit from them.
16:12
[SPEAKER_01]: We actually have some pretty insane success stories.
16:17
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my alums is running a 12 billion dollar public company already.
16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, which company?
16:23
[SPEAKER_01]: A company called HATE.
16:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I think I've heard of it.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
16:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's an AI infrastructure company.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: The data standard build.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you guys invest?
16:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I did invest.
16:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And you did, okay, okay.
16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's also like a nice pipeline for Dio Flow, you know?
16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm like your best investment.
16:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't what I was expecting, but also, yeah, that's one of the beautiful things about being in the University of Environment, having really top students and talent.
16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: young people have to figure out what to do in life and often the best opportunities are at the frontier and this gets, you know, to my kind of investing thesis in general, but you want to go where to the edge of innovation, that's where the most interesting things are happening and certainly students have the most motivation to go find what those edges are.
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: and they're in an environment where that's all anyone is doing.
17:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't have the distractions often of life.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just like, let's do the passion, let's do the school, let's just obsess over the things we like.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so I want to talk about on the business side, FabFit Fund had some struggles in early 2020.
17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you had mentioned supply chain stuff.
17:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I actually randomly was building a subscription business during that time, too.
17:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like right there with you.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, I get it.
17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really hard.
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, there were a lot of hold-ups at the ports and, uh, a lot of everything was in flux.
17:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom, talk to you about your transition with FabFitFun into more of an investing role now.
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So I know you invested a lot of your family office, now you have a new venture fund which we'll get into.
17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But at what point did you maybe step back a little bit from the day-to-day FabFitFun and put on your investing hat a little bit more?
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So the roots of the investing was not even a step back who's kind of a step in, right?
18:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The we would see just incredible opportunities all the time in innovative entrepreneurs, et cetera.
18:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And we did quite a bit of investing through FabFit Fund and taking equity stakes in brands and helping them with joint ventures, et cetera.
18:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was kind of one natural extension.
18:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Eventually there were things that really sat outside of the world.
18:22
[SPEAKER_01]: the lines at FabFit Fund, our payment processor was Stripe.
18:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a good friend who was a very senior executive at Stripe and was lucky enough to invest in them in 2015.
18:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Instrape.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
18:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
18:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And gradually I just saw that being an entrepreneur having
18:41
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of founder friends, a lot of people around me who were starting companies, etc.
18:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just naturally started investing in friends.
18:47
[SPEAKER_01]: My early co-founder at FabFitFun took a complete turn in life and is a similar way that I've gotten into these new areas.
18:55
[SPEAKER_01]: He actually became Elon Musk's chief of staff around that period.
18:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So that put me in a place where I was following his trajectory and seeing what SpaceX was doing, what Tesla was doing, I was lucky enough to invest in SpaceX in 2017.
19:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And from there, just because I became this kind of, you know, initially a hobby and then over time realized that I had some great access, some great people around me and how do I kind of formalize that structure and what do I actually believe in from an investing standpoint that I can't do just as an angel investor and that's where Deep 33 was born out of.
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: that's super exciting.
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And so tell me about Deep 33, why you started it, and how is it going?
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, from the looks of it on the internet, I know it's still, you know, you're still a stealth-ish.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a couple of funding announcements that you've shared with the world, but tell me about Deep 33.
19:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, it's been going amazingly well.
19:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Most importantly, we are just seeing incredible talent, incredible entrepreneurs.
19:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the number one thing.
19:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, some ways VCs, you know, you could dress it up in a lot of ways, but it's kind of collecting money from people and then giving it to other people.
20:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And you just want to transform that capital into something that's doing very, very useful things in the world.
20:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And for us, where we knew we wanted to be at the frontier, I also spent a lot of time kind of in this post October 7th world in the Israel landscape and really understanding that ecosystem.
20:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I saw was that, you know,
20:30
[SPEAKER_01]: As an American, this relationship between these two ecosystems was really, really key in terms of winning not only the AI race, but just frontier technologies in general because there aren't that many places in the world where you can do true frontier innovation.
20:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Essentially, if you think of the AI stack and what's required to innovate and across these different types of bottlenecks,
20:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You have this confluence of ingredients of defense industry which kind of creates the pressure and the scale and the money to innovate in the physical world, at the institutions of higher learning, R.R.
21:12
[SPEAKER_01]: industry, optics industry, silicon industry, all in one type geographic region.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Silicon Valley looks like that.
21:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's pockets of China that look like that, and Israel looks like that.
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's basically nowhere else in the world.
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to me, there wasn't this essentially kind of like hard tech, deep tech, focused,
21:31
[SPEAKER_01]: venture capital firm that looked at the israel ecosystem in that way and served essentially as a bridge between these two ecosystems so me and my partner came together and we put the 33 sort of at the center of that thesis.
21:43
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22:36
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22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to be a compulsive note taker.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Every meeting, I'd be half listening and half scribbling.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And still leaving with gaps on deck steps, details that were shared and more.
22:46
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22:49
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22:54
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23:00
[SPEAKER_00]: During the call, I jot down whatever notes stand out, a key word, a decision, a quick thought, and then granola handles the rest.
23:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It literally fills in and transcribes the background and turns my rough notes into clean structure takeaways the second we hang up.
23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no bots joining calls, it just works in the background.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I use granola for several things.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: If I finish a meeting with the potential investor in my fund, I'll ask granola what I could have done better to get my point across.
23:24
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23:30
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23:35
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23:38
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23:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Super exciting.
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to ask you the obvious question of FabFit Fund is your background, which has a certain flavor.
23:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
23:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Consumer, subscription, and fluency.
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one flavor.
24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Deep 33, I would say, has a very different flavor.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess in a lot of ways, they're both like products, that you're pushing and you're investing in, but they've different flavors.
24:14
[SPEAKER_00]: What gave you the confidence to launch something so different than your background?
24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say, in addition, the USC was a media focus, Charlie was a media focus.
24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You have this like media consumer background,
24:31
[SPEAKER_00]: hard tech deep tech frontier AI is real like these are all very new, very global, very infrastructure heavy plays.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there any struggle there in terms of the confidence or the like public perception even because your brand was associated with a different flavor previously?
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, look first to me if you're not growing your dying.
24:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
24:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this was like a deeply intentional, deeply authentic decision for me, and this is where my head was naturally gravitating towards.
25:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It was these types of companies to learn about them, to meet the founders, to see what they were building, to understand them, even in public market settings.
25:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And
25:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, thankfully, I got to build a fabulous fun over quite a long period of time.
25:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We started the brand in 2010, and there was time to start exploring, you know, at the peripheries, uh, initially through investing, and I think investing frankly gave me the confidence.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw what my investor friends were doing.
25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw what I was doing and I thought I had this kind of differentiated understanding, this differentiated opportunities and that I could actually be helpful to these companies.
25:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So take Hadeh, this was a student of mine.
25:53
[SPEAKER_01]: He had actually just an incredible entrepreneurship, his name is Ashory Gunut and he would
26:02
[SPEAKER_01]: both in in class and then year after year after class come to him with different ideas.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And in a similar way, actually, some of them were like kind of consumer ideas that were like COVID-related ideas.
26:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And then one year he said, I'm starting this bit quite mining company.
26:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And,
26:20
[SPEAKER_01]: sat with him understood it and said you know he he was more encouraging of this one he said you know this one I think is really special and it's going to work and so decided to invest him and and kind of went up the learning curve with him and the reality is there's a there's a huge benefit in entrepreneurship to having a bit of a novel mindset
26:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, there's a way in which if you're too much of an expert in certain areas, you can have these kind of blinders to where the white spaces and opportunities are.
26:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I see that in the consumer space that I've found, and so I kind of have this kind of pattern mapping to entrepreneurship in other areas as well.
27:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And the second thing I'll just say is that the fund is insanely complex business.
27:09
[SPEAKER_01]: like it's a box of products, how complicated it could be.
27:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is, you know, we've always been in the world of atoms, not bits.
27:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we're as much as we want to be culturally, kind of move fast and break things in certain areas.
27:25
[SPEAKER_01]: When you're dealing with supply chains, you have to be, you know, measure twice and cut once in order to to not mess up.
27:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have inventory, you have coordination amongst a huge number of suppliers.
27:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And what shows up to the customers is a beautiful box.
27:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But we operate a 650,000 square foot facility in Chino, which I think is one of the most complex kidding operations in the world, frankly, to output what we do at Fabiphone.
27:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's behind that is also a global network of suppliers around the world that's constantly shifting.
27:58
[SPEAKER_01]: because Fab5 Funds is not about actually refining one supply chain just one time.
28:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about constantly rebuilding our supply chain and at scale delivering a different set of products four times a year.
28:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of complexity to Fab5 Fund.
28:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it made me comfortable with complexity in general.
28:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it was up for the challenge and so far so good.
28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
28:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I totally hear you, and I think in general, this concept of having a new product every quarter is actually very novel, because like you said, most folks, I mean, think of like Apple, which we think is like the quintessential hardware business, like, and product business, it's kind of the same thing.
28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just refining, as opposed to net new, which I hear you.
28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So talk to me about this concept of sovereign AI.
28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've been scrolling back through some of your content to stick it to flavor for like how you're approaching Deep 33.
28:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And you talk a lot about sovereign AI and the importance of it.
28:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, what is your take there on sort of like open systems versus close systems and what is like deep three three philosophy on what you want to see of more of in the world?
29:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so You know, there's and this is very kind of of the moment, you know, I don't know when we will be we'll be dropping this, but um We'll drop it in like a month
29:14
[SPEAKER_01]: in a month okay so hopefully it'll still be timely and it'll be interesting to see how this plays out but you you kind of have this this story with a company like Enthropic where there's almost this kind of projecting out from where where they started to where they hope to end up where you know I think even Dario's suggested you maybe will be the only company in the world or will you know completely dominate
29:36
[SPEAKER_01]: the economy, and maybe there's a good version of that, but it sounds somewhat dystopian in a lot of ways, and so if
29:48
[SPEAKER_01]: If we're building a new AI super intelligence demigod, maybe that's one version of the world.
29:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not the version of the world that frankly, I'm involved in building or I don't know if there's much to do other than to wait and see how that develops.
30:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, you have this other version of AI where it's...
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's say it's taking the Steve Jobs analogy, he used to say you mentioned Apple, he used to say that the computer is like a bicycle for the mind, it lets you just kind of go faster.
30:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think AI is essentially like a rocket ship for the mind, right?
30:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's this extension of capability that, you know, adds several zeros.
30:42
[SPEAKER_01]: can you own that capability, whether you're a person as an individual in some meaningful sense or as a company or as a government?
30:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And so with Deep33 we take that, we think that's the version of the world that people will want, that's the version of the world, that individuals will want, that companies will want, and governments will want.
31:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're investing behind that theme, essentially, that AI as a partner, where you are truly, you know, whether you want to say the sovereign individual is a famous book or sovereign as a country.
31:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And Israel is this incredibly interesting experiment in that because it has an incredible partnership with the United States.
31:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, it has to have some level of its own technology infrastructure.
31:26
[SPEAKER_01]: You could see one of the kind of regulatory responses in order to control and froppic.
31:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to say control, but maybe that's the right word.
31:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the other.
31:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
31:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the new word these days.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And what was the tool that the US government used?
31:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It was export controls.
31:52
[SPEAKER_01]: compel and throw up it back into what the United States needed and throw up it to do or be.
31:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you start looking at the world in terms of how these export controls might play out, how else they might be used, etc.
32:06
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of questions that come up for all the other countries of the world.
32:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to have this world of freedom-seeking countries in a kind of alliance, where is that innovation going to come from?
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of it's
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33:30
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33:36
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33:39
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33:45
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33:57
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34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: What I love most too is that it perfectly matches my style.
34:07
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34:15
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34:18
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34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I totally hear you, and I think it's really exciting.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you think about changing political parties and elections?
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think, especially when it comes to all things AI and I'm being very broad with this.
34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: But...
34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: these export controls being one example like it does fluctuate a little bit based on who's in power so how do you as an investor hedge against that because I think that it's a it's a tricky thing because we are early stage investors it's a tenure time horizon we're talking about you know how does the world look in 2036 but there's a lot of variables in the meantime totally politics being a big one so how do you think about it?
35:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you gotta stay close to it.
35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you gotta have real leads as a company you have to think about.
35:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that, you know, ultimately, people talk about motor law, I think the best mode is getting out in front, getting a big lead and then compounding that lead.
35:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And,
35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And the politics you're going to go through cycles, I mean, you know, the United States has seen incredible cycles, incredible polarity, and to think that, you know, one, one camp is just going to be at the top the whole time as is definitely not right.
35:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where I think about the right network of alliances is so vital to the United States because it kind of creates some level of stability.
36:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to change that so quickly over time and supporting the right alliances.
36:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I think is incredibly important for the United States for the future of the free world.
36:19
[SPEAKER_01]: In a lot of ways, I think there's this kind of this big geopolitical rivalry between the US and China,
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very, very hopeful that the United States not only prevails, but does so in a pretty spectacular way that makes life for freedom-loving people and countries abundant and exciting and adventurous.
36:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we're on a good track overall.
36:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's, again, there's people who'd like the US to slow down, who'd like to see the US fall behind.
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes that manifests itself in our politics as domestic actors.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the only thing you can do is just kind of look at the playing field at any given point and say, you know, where are the opportunities?
37:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to always look for opportunities.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's very easy to think that the world is kind of fixed.
37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's not.
37:11
[SPEAKER_01]: You are a player in the world.
37:13
[SPEAKER_01]: You get to put your own pieces on the chessboard.
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And those pieces can have their own characteristics and abilities and superpowers.
37:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And those pieces can be companies.
37:26
[SPEAKER_01]: They can be ideas.
37:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They can be
37:31
[SPEAKER_01]: different types of organizations and initiatives and yeah I increasingly look at entrepreneurship in business as a way to project
37:46
[SPEAKER_01]: project a future that you believe in.
37:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, what else could it be?
37:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's I think that's the highest form of creativity is to look at the world, see where the opportunities are, come up with an idea, build it out and then see it flourish.
38:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
38:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We're team agency over here.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with you.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And it brings it back kind of full circle of time out at the beginning of the conversation that you've lived your life with such agency that's gotten you to this point.
38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you a sort of challenging question.
38:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of young people now here, AI.
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: and they will see me post this podcast and they're going to say, oh, everything is no AI.
38:21
[SPEAKER_00]: When I go and tick talk these days, there's a lot of like anything AI is a hard now.
38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, data centers are bad, any kind of AI, you know, using or abusing artists or musicians or actors all bad.
38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything with AI is bad.
38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's definitely been, again, this is going to air a little bit after, but there's a big doomsday cloud over the past week.
38:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, just in terms of in the news, there's been a lot of people coming out of these big anthropics open AIs saying, you know.
38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: human extinctions on the horizon.
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of doomsday fears.
38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your advice for a young person that sees AI, hears AI, feels scared, thinks that it's all bad, thinks that it's killing the planet, thinks that it's going to take all the jobs, it's maybe going to make humans extinct.
39:11
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your advice to them?
39:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel really passionately about this.
39:15
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why I asked you.
39:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I might even look into the camera like you're looking at the camera and give you advice.
39:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You can bring the fourth wall.
39:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
39:21
[SPEAKER_01]: do not be afraid of AI.
39:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You have this moment of incredible world transformation and find a way to use AI to project your ideas, your vision for the world into reality.
39:37
[SPEAKER_01]: That is your opportunity as a young person.
39:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to go after it.
39:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You are very likely being subjected to
39:48
[SPEAKER_01]: poison in your media to confuse you because it really sets the United States back for us to have this kind of hesitation around AI.
39:57
[SPEAKER_01]: For young people to have this hesitation, there's no reason that the average person should have such a passionate view about data centers.
40:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of nuts.
40:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the
40:10
[SPEAKER_01]: The data centers are going to be built.
40:12
[SPEAKER_01]: They are going to be built, no matter what.
40:13
[SPEAKER_01]: The question is, are they going to be built in the right places and for the right people to take advantage of them?
40:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you're, there are valid legitimate concerns.
40:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to be thoughtful about how we build this out.
40:28
[SPEAKER_01]: What we can't stutter step, hesitate, and essentially seed the world to people with much more dystopian views of what the future should look like.
40:40
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, jump on the bull, ride it, help, help figure out how this should look, come up with your own productive solutions, use AI to create beautiful things in the world, and get after it.
40:52
[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of my advice, I think.
40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll say this because I kept time myself, I should write this piece somehow.
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned media, for a few years, I changed my class at USC from entrepreneurship to class on media literacy, because it's topic was so fascinating to me, and I mentioned our open information environments.
41:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually think that data center thing is one of the funniest versions, manifestations of this, because there are literally, you know, in
41:29
[SPEAKER_01]: suburban rural America just protests around data centers in this highly emotional way and it makes no sense whatsoever.
41:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Data centers and the AI revolution are driving incredible GDP growth, incredible job creation, incredible productivity.
41:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There will be eventually and there is already but so far it's only done good things in terms of how do we divide the pie.
41:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually led to almost like the reindustrialization of American in a really positive way.
42:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And we got to get that right, but the fact that people are up in arms about it, I think I think there's a question of how did they get up in arms?
42:12
[SPEAKER_01]: What is in their street?
42:13
[SPEAKER_01]: What is in their feeds?
42:14
[SPEAKER_01]: What's where is this coming from?
42:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I keep telling myself, you know, I studied the history of kind of the, the, the, the, the Israel moment that we have, where we're living in and maybe it's even, I would say it's even in some ways maybe past peak now because data centers is, is a, is a bigger and better wedge to divide Americans.
42:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh,
42:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But when it comes to our geopolitical rivals, Israel is a great one, it's a great wedge, it's such an important ally and it's such a massive potential tip factor in terms of America having
42:53
[SPEAKER_01]: influence in not only a key region of the world, but also technological supremacy in the world.
42:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And so Israel was a really good one for people who want to see America slow down and for America to struggle to pick on because it also has this second kind of benefit of not only harming America geopolitically, but it's you're also harming America from a human capital perspective because you have anti-Semitism locally in the United States and
43:22
[SPEAKER_01]: group of people and start having questions around how and where and what their motivations are and how they can build etc.
43:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a this is poison in the veins of American society and it was a good selection from people who want to see America be harmed and slow down to create these types of issues.
43:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny to see data centers where you have this kind of like free Palestine movement and they're also protesting data centers.
43:49
[SPEAKER_01]: What do these things have to do with each other?
43:51
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing they have in common is that they are
43:55
[SPEAKER_01]: issues that harm America, and so, you know, it's this wild thing where, you know, sitting with them, I was shocked, I couldn't believe my cousin, someone, you know, he even took my class and he's telling me this is very skeptical of data centers for water, environment, et cetera.
44:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, have you actually gone and looked into it?
44:16
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no like raising electricity prices.
44:19
[SPEAKER_01]: We data centers are paying their own way for electricity, water is recycled in the data center.
44:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Like on a fundamental level, these aren't real, real, real environmental issues.
44:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, whatever pollution's happening in China isn't staying in China.
44:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever the environmental issues are, they don't stay localized.
44:36
[SPEAKER_01]: They, these are like, you know, we have one Earth, one environment.
44:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there is this way in which I think,
44:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoever wants to see the United States struggle is certainly making data centers an issue.
44:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny to kind of like compare that to how they made Israel an issue and to just think about what that means for our information environment.
44:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a really interesting thing.
44:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I would try to, you know, maybe do some more deliberate work and unpack that further.
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's a problem I hear constantly from operators.
45:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The data exists, and the answers are somewhere in there, but getting to them, actually pulling a useful insight without bugging the data team or learning SQL takes too long or just does not happen.
45:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Hex solves that.
45:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Hex is an AI analytics platform where anyone on your team can ask data questions in plain English and get real answers backed by your actual business context.
45:25
[SPEAKER_00]: No SQL required.
45:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And the best part is that Hex shows you exactly how it's set at Agents think, so you can see where the logic comes from and trust the output.
45:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The more your team uses it, the smarter it gets.
45:36
[SPEAKER_00]: From seed stage founders running lean to larger orgs dealing with serious data complexity, Hex is built to scale with you.
45:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's game-changing for people like me in particular who want to understand what's going on under the hood, but are not the real data experts.
45:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny too because I feel like every time I look over my operator friend's shoulders, whether they're in product or marketing or ops, they often have a hex dashboard pulled up.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Trailblazers listeners get an exclusive 30-day free trial at hex.ai slash trailblazers.
46:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That's HEX.ai slash trailblazers.
46:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you should absolutely put something together on this and share it.
46:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's funny.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: As you're talking, you keep talking about selection and I almost
46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: like evil selection committee, that's like, what's the next thing that we should pick?
46:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a lot of our geopolitical rivals, as you know.
46:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I appreciate you articulating that.
46:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is these are the kinds of conversations that a lot of folks are not having, and they are not hearing, and it's why I love our world so much, because we're able to question the status quo, and we're able to look at the data, and we're able to think thoughtfully about what, what are these concerns that people have about data?
46:48
[SPEAKER_01]: People will think these are kind of conspiratorial world views, but the reality is because the average person doesn't sit there and catch schemes.
46:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just not like you're living your life, you want to enjoy your family or go out, have a drink, have fun, and do good work.
47:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like what the average person wants, but the reality is that there are
47:13
[SPEAKER_01]: geopolitical rivalries and, you know, countries have the resources, state actors have the resources to put a lot of thought and intention behind what will, what will give me an edge.
47:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, you know, you see it ultimately in the ultimate expression of that is a war, right?
47:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But why fight a war when you can, when you can win, win the minds, you know, and that's a, that's a lot of what's been happening in, in, in our information ecosystem.
47:41
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so much of it.
47:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that is where the war is happening today.
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm going to have a request for you and then we're going to wrap.
47:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You have such a unique background in media and you understand it and the work you're doing now with your firm is so important.
47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to encourage you to try to do more media with all this stuff you're doing because I think, unfortunately, there isn't enough media around geopolitics and investing.
48:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a we have a hardcore American dynamism push right now, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, stand by it tremendously and the team there will only say the best things David Catherine all of them, especially in Dresen and obviously there's a bunch of other firms popping up Luxes doing some great work to, but I think it's really focused on just America and it isn't focused enough on.
48:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Geopolitically, there really are kind of like two sides and then there's like a bunch of sort of like neutral parties I kind of fall in line with wherever the wind's going and so I'm gonna make over quest that you maybe think about What your firm's role could be when it comes to media?
48:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond just American dynamism.
48:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm gonna say a couple things first of all.
48:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I take you up on your request and thank you You know, maybe you're putting me on the map here but That is
48:55
[SPEAKER_01]: a significant part of our thesis as a firm, which is to say, I'm American, I'm deeply, deeply, deeply patriotic, but we are not going to win this alone.
49:05
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an alliance of freedom loving people, and it's hard to just pin it on even an alliance amongst democracies.
49:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I go one level lower where it's just freedom loving people, because there are democracies that
49:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, have lost their orientation, have lost their kind of core value, understanding of what it was to defend, protect, and extend democracy within their own countries and hopefully, you know, be a light on to other countries.
49:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We've, there are American dynamism movement, I think, is rooted in that, that that that idea to express it.
49:48
[SPEAKER_01]: As we said earlier, you know, the political landscape here domestically will have its ups and downs.
49:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, where's our, you know, where's our, where's our like, like our, our, you know, think of it like the Moses basket, right?
50:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Like where's the, where are these hopefully pockets of freedom that we sprinkle around the world that can help us if we're struggling?
50:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Because there have been moments that's very clear that America can go through periods of struggle.
50:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, whether it was like a Winston Churchill who helped, you know, kind of awaken this kind of American impulse to help make sure that, you know, we're, we're defeating Naziism at that time and, you know, all the other kind of terrible ideologies in the world.
50:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We very much, you know, one we think as well as that type of partner, but there's a web of these types of partners.
50:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we think about technology investing, it's across this kind of spectrum of alliances and those opportunities we think are massive.
50:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I totally hear you, and I think it's even a name beyond American dynamism.
50:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you've to, you've to create what that name is.
51:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I have, I actually have a domain, but I'm not ready to.
51:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, we can talk up on you, but I do think that there's, I think that, that name also works for what they're doing, but I agree with you.
51:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I think sometimes America goes through waves, and I think the other is just freedom-loving pockets that we have to come up with some terminology that sort of gives us, like, a North story.
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So our enemies have terminologies.
51:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so like I had the very exactly, I mean, think about communism, right?
51:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Communism is not local to a country, right?
51:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not one country, it's a global movement.
51:27
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's other versions of that.
51:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so, so many of you.
51:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
51:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael, thanks for being here.
51:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate it.
51:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So much fun.
51:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
51:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Trailblazers.
51:37
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51:42
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51:44
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51:47
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51:51
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51:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, keep traveling.