How Silicon Valley’s Most Prolific Investor Picks Unicorns | Elad Gil Interview

today we were sitting down with one of these smartest people that's ever been on this podcast his name is eli gill and he is a prolific angel investor he's a guy who is invested in something like forty plus billion dollar companies all at very early stages like airbnb air table and re tool rip link companies that we've all heard of down the tech space he was entrepreneur he got acquired by twitter he was one of the first hundred employees at twitter he was early at google and he's been very early to waves he's he was doing longevity before a longevity was cool he was doing ai investing before chap gp came out so we love talking to people who are like this that are both very brilliant very accomplished and seemed to be skating where the puck is going they sort of know what's coming around corner and they've proven that in their career so we talked to him about how he's been such a good investor what he's looked for and his approach and how it's pretty different than most investors we talked about his ideas so things he wants to see built and projects he's working on right now and then a little bit of life advice at the end where he left us with kind of an amazing tidbit or a nugget about what's made him such an interesting person so enjoy this episode be loud gil i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to at all in in like a days off on a less travel never back the intro for you is basically you're a a super angel investor you've invested a bunch of companies i think you have something like forty plus unicorns of the portfolio and impressively at least twenty or thirty of them were very early states so seed states series a pre seed some somewhere there that's wild as somebody who's invested in i don't know a hundred companies myself i look at what you've done there and that is prolific and so first question it's like you know there's a block of wood and i don't really know how to hack how to how to chop into this so i'll just gonna a swing one blunt swing here how the heck are you doing this why how have you had this this success in angel investing i mean i guess it's it's probably two or three things number one i i was just lucky you know so i think i started investing in a good time when there was a lot to still be done in sas and consumer in a variety of areas now obviously it's also true in ai i think secondly i tend to take more of a market first approach than most early stage people i focused on the market and product market more than the founders and obviously founders are incredibly important i started two companies myself so i hope that founders are incredibly important but i also think that what you're actually building in which market for who matters a lot and i've seen great people crushed by terrible markets and i've seen reasonably mediocre people do really well and then lastly i think i really tried to follow the technology and the changes that are happening in technology and so i got i got involved with a lot of generative ai companies by early you know per complexity and harvey and things like that simply because i was really keen on generative ai and sort of ml related stuff as i started investing in all those things three years ago before chat bt was out and before maturity and before these things really became a trend and so i think sometimes you end up early in some really important areas simply because your kind of technology first your market change first were you just doing your own money at first or did you have a phone from the get go now initially i was investing my own money and then i ran out pretty fast i you know i hadn't made that much money at google and i invested almost all of it i invested like over fifty percent of it and so i just start running out so i start what does that means running out like like i guess you you initially had a wealth from selling your business i guess and then like you just put all of it into private companies how much do you i put a huge amount of my own money into private companies yeah so you know one of my big regrets is somebody ping me on the spacex round when it was like a five hundred million dollar company and i really was excited about it i thought it was such a interesting game and i just i didn't have enough money for the minimum that they had as check sizes and so what'd you do you because you know i i had that point early into silicon valley where i initially had no money so i was like i was helping friends i was like man i can't believe people aren't investing i myself didn't even look at myself like an investor because i just didn't have a bank then i realized why that's too stupid i gotta think like a founder here and get resourceful and figure out how to get money to invest in these companies so where did you go once you deployed your own capital where'd you go to get the money right away yeah you know i started effectively raising small sort of what are known as sp and then that morph into funds and now i kinda have a a term uk of different things where there's like different layers that i can do in terms of personal investments fund investments you know very large things would be fun plus sp so for example i led series d or i call the last two rounds for applied intuition or you know i've go rounds crossroads of companies at this point how many other are there any other partners at your like shop basically or are you the guy you know i've i've recently hired a few people that kind of help me in different ways i think fundamentally what i wanna do is continue to build things work on things think about technology like just take i would to call it almost like the anti bc approach and be builder first and so there's a lot of side projects that i or me and my team are now working on you know we're working for example shane helping me with we're trying to take the the the thousand most important books that are off of copyright and translate them into dozens of languages using ai and then create audio books off of any of all of all of them so people can download the great works of history from anywhere in the world in any language you know we're doing stuff like that and so that also forces us to really use different ai tools and let's look at eleven versus cart versus you know bin ai and let's that's how do you actually translate a long form book with high consistency and how do you that are you doing that because you're like this could be a business or are you doing that because you're thinking to yourself just this is an interesting project in in doing this i will discover interesting things i'm steering because i think it's like cool and societal useful and i mean like there's multiple aspects of why to work on something like this and i think it's a little bit less short term and more like this seems useful and interesting but were you always that way because like i just recently i'm i guess i'm i could say i'm financially secure and it took a few years before i just recently started feeling like i wanna do blank because it's cool i don't really care necessarily if it's good for the world but it seems like you have a little bit of that mindset like this is good for the world are you wealthy and successful because you always had that attitude or do you have that attitude now because you have security do you know what i mean oh i've always been that way and so you know i started off i you know i did decrease in math in biology and i did a phd biology because i thought it was societal useful like you're not gonna make money as a phd biology you know unless something magic happens and so my my driver has always been what is useful societal i think the one other thing i'd say about is it forces you to go deeper than people tend to go on some of these things that they're just kind of oh this is an interesting investment or whatever i think you're actually go to that next extra level of depth than using things hands on and all the rest of it that i think also matters just in terms of gaining real intuition for certain things and i don't think you need to be a practitioner of everything to understand the thing that you're you're a practitioner of but i just think it in some cases it can help out or it really allows you to hone in on what's important and that's true of many businesses usually most businesses have one or two things that are the fundamental aspect of that business that matters and everything else is just noise or check the box or whatever and i think that where people tend to sometimes either start the wrong things as founder or invest in the wrong things as investors as they get too wrapped up and what are the five things that matter for this business and usually there's one maybe two what what's an example of like well i'm not sure which industry you're you're you care about most but what's an example of one of these things where people care about five things but you're like no this is the only thing that matters well i mean i guess early on with stripe there their one insight was how do we just get every developer using this product we're not gonna worry about mid market and enterprise we're not gonna worry about and other things how do we get every early stage technology company that matters on us that that sounds great when you tell that story i'm like yeah i'm on board with that but i own a business now and it's really hard to come up with that insight i think it's hard but i think the the flip of it is that's that's usually the key question and again different types of businesses may have that characteristic or not right and so sometimes it's two things or you know some complex businesses of it may have more you know and invested in and there was a very clear there's kinda like five things i thought a next gen defense tech company had to do in order to become a prime which is you know one of the really big companies in the market and i thought without it you're just not gonna make it and so sometimes it's more complicated but think i think ninety percent of the time plus it's it it boils down to one era of belief or maybe one thing that you just need to see happen in the business to believe that everything else will fall into place it's also like it's also hard now but easy later right if it's hard to figure out what the one thing is okay you take some upfront difficulty to to sort of make a bet or to figure that out but then from there on out your operating philosophy can be a lot simpler because you're now stripe you know who you're focused on you know who you're catering to it and you don't have to have these like devout the the decision tree becomes very very simple later if you may if you did the hard band and it evolves over time the complex day of these businesses often comes later is it become multi product than international and you know all the rest of it and that's that's normal it's just early on usually there's there's a key insight that drives it you said you invest in markets and andrew when it was first started most people still don't have any idea about the about that industry when you're trying to like master a topic like that what is your process yeah with with and you know the main reason i got interested in defense tech was because the big tech companies were running away from it right google a shut on m and i was like well of course we're gonna need national defense whether you're a democrat or a republican like of course you mean like you wanna protect western values there's conflict in the world there's but which back on that i'd be like yeah but there's like i'm i'm ignorant to the industry which is why it's easier for me to push back i would say yeah but there's like ten other companies in that space you know they got covered like how do you how do you learn enough to know that there's like an interesting opportunity yeah i mean guess it's a bunch of stuff one is obviously you just read what you can right two is in some cases you look at market structure and growth rates and that that kind of stuff third is as you look at technology shift i wanna break down that what's your resource for the second one we just go and do the work i mean you look at what are the companies and obviously there's like analyst reports and market research and all this stuff but you can also just ask okay how many players are in the market as it consolidating or not what's the growth rate on it what is the margin structure and the approach that they're taking is a business right so for example the traditional defense type companies are what are known as cost plus which means if you have a million dollar drone they charge five percent so they can't make more than five percent margins they make fifty can drone your and you can sell ten better drones for a million dollars you make fifty percent margin which is traditional hardware margin you make ten times the margin dollars and so one of the things that people don't appreciate about and as a businesses is it's a market cap expansion in the defense world because you have a higher margin higher leverage business right and so you need a different business model which they they've come up with so there's almost a bunch of stuff like that right you yeah how early did you invest andrew i think you were like the first like no it's just the founders yeah and so was it you hear palmer talking about this then you go research the market or had you just independently been curious about this market and then no it's it's back to what i was saying earlier which is google shutdown m then and i was like oh my god the big tech companies are running away from this what a wonderful opportunity for a startup and so actually called one of the people at google that i knew who was working on google cloud which the m team was part of at the time and i said hey did all the people who wanted to do m quit in protest and he was like no was all the people who against me who quit the rest of people are still here so i like okay where do i find somebody who wants to work on this and so i just started poking around and i met i ran into tray at something and we started talking and you mentioned he was working on it i got super excited about it so i invested in their first round or they were i don't enough to let me best in their first round that's way more impressive than meeting palmer like the fact that you came to that a similar you guys were sniffing around the same stuff independently that's pretty impressive well yeah but i'm also you know the best people i get to interact with they sort of have the same laid back approaches as you which is just like i don't know i just kinda do the work i think i was fortunate blah then you start to peel back layers and you're like oh so this thing you called luck was actually you i read that m story too i didn't think to myself wow what a wonderful opportunity i just moved on with my life right so blah you know i don't know you've read the four levels of luck thing but i think number two or three is luck favors the prepared the prepared mind meaning mh because you know what you're looking for you can actually spot luck when it presents itself whereas the average person might see that same thing and not understand what they're looking at and so when you saw that m story you saw the opportunity that wow if the big technology players are running away from defense this huge category that means there's an opportunity for a new technology company in defense and so what you know what i find fascinating is is peeling that back and actually understanding like wow that was incredibly intentional and i get what you're saying that not every one of those rabbit holes you go down leads to an seed round but the fact that it ever did is is remarkable because that's like a career making you know single investment even little on the other forty that you did like that i also wanna go back to like you said something about a you know market first and there's that great quote like when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market only one of them keeps the reputation mh the bad market and so how what's another example from your portfolio that you can think of that drives home this kinda like market first where the market first approach led you to do something that that worked out you know i did a lot of crypto investing in like twenty seventeen ish twenty sixteen through twenty eighteen and that was because there was such a obvious change from an adoption and sort of technology basis there you know the ai stuff is another one you know all the ai companies i invested was a little bit like hey the market's shifting the technology shifting the full side of it is there's lots of things that i invested in that only in hindsight could i come up with a theme right i invested in notion air table and re tool within i don't know two years of each or whatever the time frame was but at the time there was no low code no code kind of thesis it was just these are really interesting founders working in interesting areas and so in hindsight there was a market or at least there was a trend but at the time it's just like these are smart people working on good stuff and so it's a little bit of that how do you balance both of those perspectives and sometimes thesis is driven and sometimes are just like you know what the thousands of great founders out there working on ideas are gonna come with better ones and i am and so you know let let's have a open mind on everything i think it was on the information or something like that they talked about how you had just raised like a billion dollars and that you famously didn't have any employees and sam alt has this or i don't know who said it i thought it was sam alt where he said something like a one or two person billion dollar company is gonna be a thing now because of ai but that's kind of what you've already done you know already existed before that minecraft was like i don't know what three people and microsoft bought it but that's sort of like what you're doing like you've got a pretty huge business with two or three or however many people you have for up until recently i think according to easy these articles you had like two people i mean i think there's a long history of this kind of stuff and if if you look at the world's biggest hedge funds or you look at a lot of later stage firms they tend to have that structure right and so or if you look at a traditional investment firm there's usually one or two people who do most of the good investments i think in general there's this odd collapsing down to a handful of people in many types of endeavors but the reality is there there have been multiple businesses as it have hit enormous scale that have been quite small and i think minecraft craft is really a canonical example of that but again there's also the need to go big sometimes times right sometimes you wanna win the market and you should hire a ton of people and so i think the future of two person companies at least in the medium term is very overstated i think the ai is largely gonna be business as usual and certain types of teams are gonna shrink a lot right i'm an investor in a company called d for example that's working on the customer success side and that's an area where i think there'll be enormous leverage to existing customer success reps but probably there's an overall shrinkage in and just if you look at things like what ar announced around their use of ai and customer success right so i think certain teams will get impacted first versus others through ai i think the two person percent ai company is largely in the future but there are historical precedent of this happening before ai right do you measure i mean obviously you measure but i guess like what is the metric that you keep track of for your own investing so like you know at the top of this we talked about you know number of unicorns but you know you can look at irr you can look at your dpi you can you know i did a deep dive on yc the other day and there's like some insane number i'm gonna because i i don't have it right in front of me but like sam i don't if you know this but like the first ten years of yc they basically turned like something like twelve million dollars into like ten billion dollars of value for them from themselves because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically like the seven percent seven percent but it even diluted down like airbnb bs the dropbox is like even just the even just the the top five companies they let's say they net own like two percent of these when they go public i mean they basically had a you know three hundred and twenty x on their money in that first decade and then a lot of people now think that they're you know maybe have that they've sort of lost their touch or the batch are too big or the valuation is too high and actually like their hit rate has gone up even as the batch has gone up it's pretty pretty wild do you do you have a metric that you look at that you kind of you're proud over that that's the the main metric for you how you've done in terms of the actual money and money out you know the most important thing to me and obviously know i wanna be a do fiduciary for other people's money a lot of my own money is and the funds i invest etcetera so obviously there's there's a financial return aspect it but to me of them as important things are probably twofold fold one is making sure that you founders view me is a useful and positive resource and two is being involved with them most important technologies and technology companies in the world because i think that's how you drive societal impact so i view i view technology as a lever on the world right i'm not an angel mess but you're such a hard person to compete against because you're like you it just you it's very strange at you're investor because you don't see like you're money motivated you know what i mean and that's a really challenging person to compete gets because that's the type of person who wins and a lot of stuff it's the one who's not actually caring about the money but who's caring about missionary versus mercenary type of vibe do you know what i mean yeah i know what i mean i think naval nevada has a great framework on this because you know john do used to ask you know are you a missionary mercenary the founders in the nineties and of course you had to him a missionary right like how could you possibly see your mercenary in the wall stream is is like well of course early in your career at least partially a mercenary otherwise you're never gonna find the opportunity and go in it and then later in your life your missionary right you're not zero sum you're trying to do things for the greater good and then once you've made it in your career should become an artist should be doing it for the love of the craft and now for each person there's a different mix of that over time and i think you know for me the motivator is very much technology technologies a lover on the world right that's why i was trying to do biology that's why i detect that's you know it's like how do you do the important things in the world now if you're working on the most important problems in the world with the best people then probably you end up with a good financial return because you're in the middle of the stuff that matters right but that doesn't have to be the motivating goal and that's why sometimes i know if you've have ever added a dinner which is all it's like really boring because you're surrounded by at least a subset of people who are very money driven and the conversation i'll give you an example one time i was sitting at a friend's wedding dinner and i just happened to get seated at a table where a lot of the other people were his board which meant a lot of investors and i sat next to somebody from a wang un firm and i said hey what are you interested in these days and he said crypto and i said great we can talk about distribute consensus and trust the systems and censorship resilient products and all the stuff and i said that's that's great like what are you excited about in crypto and he looks me the eyes and he says you can make a fucking lot of money at it i was like i thought i was joking right i started laughing i'm like that's so funny no seriously is like no that's that's it that's not a really interesting conversation well one of the things i liked is that on your website you publish some ideas that you're interested or you're working on right now or you want people to come help you pull off i'd love if we could rip through a couple of these let's start with one that caught my i said i wanna do a new chain of k through twelve schools inspired by ancient greece what's that all about yeah i mean i think fundamentally anybody who asked kids realizes that you know there may be certain aspects of the education system that are emphasized and deem emphasized and it feels like there's four or five things that are really useful for kids to learn and i think it'd be great to try and help establish something that could be used broadly across you know cities or regions across the country that would really focus on some of those basic aspects of learning what are the ancient greeks do what are what are the ancient greeks have to do with this is just used as an example really what you need to find is what is the framework that you're gonna use to apply so you have some compass and consistency and there's a sort an emphasis on reasoning and logic and thinking and discourse and debate that i think was was resident in that time there's an emphasis on mathematics there's an emphasis on writing there's was an emphasis on trying basic forms of understanding you know that's when you had arch committees and levers and that's when you had really interesting mathematics emerge and that's when you had great philosophical treaties written so you know i think there's a lot of there that's also when you focus a lot on beauty and art there's a lot of emphasis on the physical and being physically fit and resilient so there's there's a lot of stuff there now i i i remember but i i lived in from twelve to twenty and i think there was a a handful of schools that were started for elementary kids it was alt school one of them and was there a wonder school is that does that ring bell this were more kind of like hey we're gonna use technology etcetera i don't think there's any need for technology i think you just need a couple good teachers and like a reasonable curriculum and so again i i think it's not that that i'm not trying to reinvent the school system i just think you could go back to certain types of basics it's interesting there's a school in san francisco called proof school which i think is fascinating i think their their line or motto is like for kids who love math and have a very strong emphasis on mathematics and their curriculum and you know kids are doing machine learning and like tenth eleventh grade and you know i i find things like that kind of inspiring where they're like okay we're gonna take a different lens on it and our lens just kids who love math and let's find out what's a curriculum for those kids and maybe some of the early literature classes emphasize sci because there's are the types of books they like and maybe the the history we focus on is x y z versus something else and so i just think that's a good example of like a really smart approach to schooling there's a variety of people who've done these differentiated approaches what's your plan with the with this school thing is you're you're looking for a kind of an entrepreneur to spear it what what are you looking for need spear i think you know traditionally there's this directly responsible visual dr problem right it's really easy to come up with ideas and then usually you need help executing them and so you know it's something that i'd be happy to sponsor but i i really would need to find somebody who can drive that sort of thing day to day you know my kids are very happy in the schools that they're currently in so it's more just something that i think would be societal useful to do more broadly and then especially if you can do it as a chain then you end up with some sort of consistency and the ability to bring it to different populations that may not have access to this sort of schooling and other things and so i think there's a really interesting project to be had there what other idea of sean did today i've listed there there's one cool one you you said you i think got a psa biology and you talked about longevity you've looked into a lot of longevity you funded clinical trials and you said something that i was curious about you said there's some exciting things that are going on in longevity you've mentioned a company called bio age and how they have a new drug for muscle okay you have my attention what is the new drug for muscle and generally what's exciting to you about that space yeah i mean bio wage is a company that just went public and is in their quiet period so there probably isn't an town i should say about them i was an early investor there and a board observer and i think i was the first investor in that company actually it's a the the ceos this really exceptional phd and post doc i think she did her post doc at stanford and bio and of aging and you know they now have different drugs in different phases of clinical trials or preclinical work and all that should be in their s one and in their public financial materials that i'd encourage people to go look at but in general i think the aging is an area that's been dramatically under invested in yeah and part of that is because of the structure of big pharma and you know that that industry tends to have very old companies rates sort of driving the agenda which has its own implications and then obviously it's it's highly regulated but also if you just look at it for example the national institutes for aging which is a very small budget relative to the nci for cancer or other parts of the nih and most of that budget just goes to alzheimer's and so actual fundamental research into aging is quite spa we know that aging as a developmental program that can be preserved right i actually worked on that from a phd i worked at the intersection of aging longevity in excuse me longevity cancer an insulin there's certain evolution can serve pathways that if you tweak them you end up with organisms at a little lot longer right you cannot got a gene and all that lives two three times longer for example as a healthy adult and and we know that there's drugs that do that in mice etcetera genes that do that in mice which means you can do drugs i like how you're saying we know as if me or sam know anything we don't know this you use use smart phd people know this and can you explain that layman's from what you just said you said there's like we didn't know that he whole say like a sentence and there's like five things that i'm like wait what yeah five tabs need to open in my browser yeah it's okay cl l again they're living two two x longer you said that aging is a something driven thing i i was just a developmental program so basically there's a few different theories of aging one of the theories of aging is you just accumulate a bunch of damage over time and systems break because of that damage like right mechanical damage type it's just mechanical damage you get hit by sun light and uv and whatever and then there's another view of aging which is this more almost like a developmental program that's regulated by signals in your body just as you know when you go from a baby to a child to an adult or whatever that's just a developmental program and if you look at different organisms different organisms will have different clocks for aging right and so why why can turtles live so long or why why do certain animals die iso so young right and you're like it's just a developmental program they have a set lifespan that's genetically defined and why would it be case like why would we have it off button and you know there's all these theories and who knows i mean i don't i'm you know i don't know the there's theories but i don't know what which theory is right and the the other piece of information that we have is that we know that there's certain drugs that will look extend lifespan in multiple four organisms so you take a drug and or you give a drug to something and that lives longer rap mice soon to be example wherein in mice mice will live ten to thirty percent longer based on actually their sex right so female mice i think will live longer than male mice un rap and then there's knockout outs that you can do in genes and if you knock out a gene or certain organisms will live a lot longer and that means that you can develop a drug for it right that's how the drug industry works you can do a drug that mimics makes a gene knockout or a gene up regulation and you end up with some effect and so we know that you can make things live much longer and there is very little being done in people around that and so the question is why right and imagine if you had another thirty or forty or fifty healthy years and when you say the question is why what's the answer is it that it's not funded enough it's not safe enough there's some other commercial and dis three it's not funded enough for all sorts of reasons second is from a regulatory framework perspective until very recently the fda did not have like a a good definition of of what it means to build a aging drug right because in general this sort of point three and the broader medical world aging is not considered a disease it's considered a natural state and so why would you develop a drug against a natural state and so there's a company called loyal which is doing aging and dogs and they actually defined a series of like endpoints is it kevin rose is it thing kevin rose invested in i think you talked to us about it oh no yeah i that's like my favorite like longevity companies like yeah i forget the humans let's save like i'm all about it let's save the dogs i think it's both gonna have a easier regulatory pathway but also good for society like sure my dog living longer i i i support nothing more than than that does that what have they found is that working i haven't kept up with the like actual science of the company yeah i've been i i i don't know i'm not at an investor though i think the founder is quite good i just haven't been involved there you know as i mentioned one of the main things i've been involved with in that is a company called bio wage which again just went public and there's all sorts of information there in the public domain know about them that is worth looking up you you know the what was that crazy quote it was like what silicon valley nerdy people are doing for fun that's like what everyone else is gonna do in the like ten or fifteen years or something like that nerds do on the weekend hope not because then there's gonna be a lot of vegan which sounds awful well that's why was ask you which is like you you kinda fit that stereotype you have a lot of resources and you're in the know with a lot of like interesting new things are you taking any like interesting pharmaceuticals are you doing metformin what do you think is interesting right now that you think will be a little bit more popular in two three four five years yeah the on the sensors answer i don't know i've i've try to stay away from taking anything chronically unless i think it would have a huge impact and so far there isn't anything in the market that would really map to that you know a lot of it honestly is like do exercise do you sleep do eat well you know there's there's reasonably big good data on rap up my son that people should work with our doctor on and sort of figure out if it but we do know now yeah haven't done anything there so again i've i've tried to ask let me wait until there's something that i feel is big enough impact some people for example in the aging community will take a certain sub class of statins for heart disease and neuro and then they'll take i think a subset was taking some baby aspirin similarly for heart disease so there's some people who who've done some things that again you should talk to your doctor about if if you wanna consider stuff like that i haven't done anything like that because i just don't wanna take things every day wynn sam says that quote about you know what the nerds are are doing on the weekends and what they're tinkering within their spare time is what we'll we'll all be doing you know ten years from now yeah i'm just going straight to hardcore core gene therapy so i'm just gonna just kidding i'm gonna crispr my genome but are you kidding i mean it sounds pretty cool kidding yeah yeah i think a lot of that stuff feels very premature to me there are some people doing self experimentation like that in the public domain i i just don't know that some of those things will work it's it's kinda interesting because i feel like when people talk about gene delivery there's like three or four aspects of it that matter and everybody focuses now as sort of the crispr side of it which is can you modify a gene in a in a cell versus can you target it to the right cells well your immune system target those cells and turn it off like there's all those other stuff that can you hit enough cells for it matter there's all this other stuff that traditionally have been the real issues of gene therapy that honored aren't being addressed as effectively as sort of the crispr has so you you've been interested longevity earlier than i would say like this current current kind of wave of interest you know i think you not not only did you study it in school you it's i saw on your site you said you personally identified at a gene that's involved in a lifespan you funded your own clinical trial at stanford it didn't work but you're like it's okay i'll try i i'm happy to try again i'm curious what do you think of brian johnson and what he's doing you know i've i've never met i haven't looked deeply into what he's doing so i think it's great that people are raising awareness for this kind of stuff but i don't have any specific insider opinion like i just haven't looked into it i'm surprised how come we you haven't looked into it that seems like it's right up your alley i've been busy in terms of just focusing on like hardcore bio pharma for this stuff right like drug development that can benefit society at large that's that's what i go so it's just a different area of focus right what i wanna know is are there any ideas on there that are just they're just cool but not necessarily like a world changing serious thing and like his monuments thing could you talk about the monuments thing i think that's dope oh so one thing again i need i need somebody to come work with me on this and i'd happily fund it is if you look at every society it's sort of its peak they they would build large scale monuments towards progress and it sounds like the seven wonders of the ancient world honestly i don't know if you know the the origins of the eiffel tower but it was built in the late eighteen hundreds for world fair in paris to show off french steel making prowess right it was an o to technology and an o steel making because steel was like modern tech and it was very controversial to the time people and all the stuff right a lot of bridges were were built in america at that period you know with andrew carnegie they were built with that idea of like let's prove so like the eats bridge at saint louis it was the same thing where they would do these they would build these amazing bridges and then they would do like all these funny things like they would get an elephant to walk across it to prove yeah i had to prove that it worked out wrong you know what i mean and but yeah but so like these like flexes like exist there's a there's a flex side of it and there's an inspirational side of it like where are the large scale inspiring pieces of beauty and art in society anymore like where are they gone why aren't we doing those in vegas sphere that's the last one yeah seriously the sphere things think i think that's a real example of large scale societal beauty right well you know what another example that sounds silly is the blue angels and i was having this debate with someone the other day about how much money the american government funds air shows and i was like that's totally worth it because whenever you go to one of these things you definitely feel a sense of patriotism and you're like this is awesome like this is like i'm in awe of this and and same way with going going to the moon you know in the sixties and seventies we've we spent a significant amount of money on this with a lot more than you would argue you could argue that we've on longevity which is actually a shame but we we you know there is a history in america of doing things just cuts you know just to like flex or just to like celebrate but what was the last thing like the that we did it's been decades right it's been decades and i actually find it to be quite sad and and that's actually sort of what you said is once you get to a point where you're financially secure at on a human basis on a human level you do things for our for artistic reasons because it makes your soul feel good i i do wish we did that a little bit more as a country but there was a period between like eighteen seventy right postal civil war up to like nineteen sixties or so right around when jfk passed like where there was this like series in america where we did a bunch of like interesting experiments where you could just say it was just because you know what i mean and i and i really appreciate that yeah and part of that is gonna be regulation and then part of that is this odd post modern cynical thinking right there's a very strong anti progress movement in the us you know basically the idea is you buy land and you construct giant monuments that are inspiring i don't know i mean it's pretty simple minded but imagine if you walked out in san francisco and you looked across you know to the the view with the the golden gate bridge and alcatraz and there's was a giant statue that's puts kind of an o to the future do you have that how how much do these things even cost you know the land it depends on where you do it and it depends on the regulatory framework the land and and major metro tends to be the more expensive part of it actually versus the construction on a ratio basis and let let's walk through an example that's one that you you fantasize about you're like okay what if we did this that would be cool i would be asking was actually an island for sale in the bay that ended up selling a camera for how much i remember the nine dollars or something just we leave it was that up by stockton no it was in the bay it was actually in the in the in the water there's like a little island and you know you you it it was on the market for a while i actually looked at it a couple times in terms of thinking oh maybe this is the thing maybe this is a anchor thing but i just think be so hard to do anything in the bay area right i mean it's it's hard enough to construct a public toilet like are they really gonna let you build a beautiful monument right on any reasonable time frame but there's there's lots of other metro areas that are much more amenable to this and there's a global version of this and there's a us version but often in in major metro it's the land and then the construction actually isn't that bad because really what you're building is a big statue and in some cases you're building out a base or foundation under it that maybe part of a building maybe you wanna build an elevator up if you have a big view of vista but you're not building a large commercial property with all the plumbing and electrical and you know all the extra stuff that goes into it right often these things are kind of like hollow shells with and what would it be of like you know what's our equivalent of the statue of liberty the eiffel tower that's like you for just to demonstrate their their steel prowess like do you think would be the modern equivalent that would have some meaning i think there's lots of stuff you can do i actually think you know one of the things that the the intention around monumental which is what we're calling the project is stalls the solicit ideas from people who live in local and what do they want right what do they view as inspiring and what do they wanna drive their children their children's optimism forward right this is in some sense and owed to progress but more importantly it's a way to encourage the future how do you encourage inspiration and young people right how do you get people jazz about the future and technology and optimism and doing things and building things and building society forward and i think part of this lack of ongoing societal beauty and ongoing great works is a reflection of cy that to your point came in in the sixties and seventies and has really kind of spoiled the well i it well yeah i mean that's my that's one of my favorite errors to read about basically like in the mid sixties malcolm max jfk k r k there's a there's was a series of assassination and like one can argue that that was like the death of in in america and so it's like kind of like an interesting period to to to read about maybe i mean you look at all the stuff that happened in history before that some pretty awful stuff happened roughly a couple of decades right i mean world war two was not a happy time world one was at a happy time the civil war was not you know there's a lot of shit that's going down no feel like maybe the the boomers self internalized things in a different way because they were self absorbed as a generation and so maybe for them it was a big moment but it just seems like there was just a shift there was some mindset shift i and i maybe that is what it was attributed to i don't know what it's attributed to have you ever i don't know if you guys sean you definitely have maybe you have actually sean driving a do do you guys ever remember seeing all these crosses on the side of the highway in the south i bet ari has but like you know there was this guy who was he when he he was old and he had saved up roughly three or four million dollars and he spent all of that money building crosses on the side of the highway now regardless if you were like dig christianity you're not it doesn't matter but i always thought it was so interesting that like this guy dedicated that money to that if you you you guys don't remember seeing this it was like a big deal in the south it would like you would be driving to the south in every fifty or hundred miles you would just see this huge cross and that's all you saw you know or you would see these billboards that says jesus save so you you remember those yeah i that i never understood what that is dude and it has a phone number that you could call and i would call that phone number every once in a while just to see what would happen and and at this point a lot of it goes up dead a dead phone number but it was basically a lot of it came down to this one man who had saved roughly three million dollars and he spent it on that and then other churches started following following it and started doing it and i always thought it was really interesting the idea of just spending money just for this cause and and your logical brain is like that's silly but then like your heart is like that's actually kind of an interesting idea how much of your own money would you spend on doing this monument project i don't know i mean i think it'd be good to try and get the first thing up and running and then you know do it as a joint effort with lots of people because again the hope is you actually feed the needs of local places you know another example where i think there's this sort of cross craftsmanship applied there's a park in oslo where somebody spent i don't know was a decade two decades building statues in this one parker an artist who went in and you just and you go in and it's all this consistent this consists a series of statues from one person right one artist who spent a big chunk of his life making them i think he made something like two hundred sculptures over a few decades right and so there's other forms of this in terms of people trying to contribute works and the question is why aren't again why aren't we doing it like what happened what what happened to us societal to stop doing all this really inspiring amazing stuff yeah i think the good news is it only takes one right like i think elon showed that when when he started doing projects than none of the other entrepreneurs really wanted to do and no investors really wanted to fund and then it created this wave and it just kinda of sparked inspiration where now a bunch of people do right like i think the closest thing we have to that is like tesla and spacex to be honest of mh these like that's our moon mission right it's like wow this guy just bore his entire talent and net worth into these like super high risk low probability you know useful for society hard but awesome projects and he pulled it off and you know that changed the wiring and every founder brain you know it doesn't even matter what you you might be doing some boring insurance company but you still that example still that lives in your brain right yeah and i i think that's that's pretty powerful you're a pretty serious person you you take life serious like you you like you see problems and you're like i wanna solve them is it what do you do just for shits and giggles like this unwind before you have kids offers the things you do that the time goes away for it once we have them but you know i used to do i don't want to call it like intensive travel you know so i'd go to india for two months and do yoga for two months there with a guy who learned from a guy in a cave kind of thing or you know just just different forms of very immersive travel was one thing used to do a lot of if somebody today had the freedom to do that what what would be your what skills guide to that intensive travel what what would you tell what what what was really transformative for you or like azure approach to that yeah i think it's basically spend at least a month in one city and adopt or decide to learn something there and so you know maybe you wanna go learn how to draw or maybe you wanna go to france and learn to to make pastries or maybe you wanna know in my case it was go to india and do this very intensive yoga experience or maybe you know and especially if it's part of a community that you join you get really immersed in interesting ways and not just the topic but also the people around it and the local people right because then you're really forced to be part of something there's was actually a a a person i know it was about to start a company and i convinced him to go do this because he had an extra month or two and he said it was like the best month spent he went down to brazil and enrolled in some classes down the air and you just spend a month doing it and so i i i personally think it's super interesting and often in your life can you actually get a chance to do things like that but also it is a different form of travel than hey i'm going to you know i went on a chinese tour a group of italy once and on these chinese true groups they try to see as many cities as possible in the shorter time as possible that's check the box right okay there's the leaning therapies check we saw it's like you stopped for ten minutes and then you run to the next thing you know that's very different from him just gonna sit him on place for a month or two that's awesome yeah i've i've had great experiences doing that used to go to buenos aires for you know basically four to four to five weeks one live in one city live like a local and everywhere i would go i would do two things that would be play basketball because that was like something i grew up doing so it was like a a a a native fluency i had even if i could speak the language i could always kinda make my way in there but also i would go if i ever traveled with my brother law he loves and i'll never go with him to a class here in the states but ji has this like really intense cam and openness and inclusive openness if you go to so we went to gyms it's spain and if you immediately feel like you're one of the people and you're learning from them and they have actually different techniques and again we're willing to speak to language but man it's like an incredible fast way to bond or get back feel like the digital community is one of the most vibrant ones right now along those lines yeah and to your point is basically you go and anywhere in the world and you plug in that's how this type of yoga i used to do was it was the same thing you just show up and you knew how it worked and everybody was kind of in the same they had the same vibe and they were part of the same kind of crew like you were instantly adopted and my sense is that you did zoom community that good example of that where you just you show up you're instantly part of it they pull you in everybody has a common thing to talk about everybody has common interest in a really positive way even that's a very diverse group around the world right and there aren't that many communities like that and i think there's almost these interesting questions of like how do these form and why did they persist and and all the rest but this is back to my point on doing quite quite a hobby or learning something that it's actually plugging into a community like that i think is important i love that i think of all the things we talked about today that was the most useful surprisingly right i wanted to learn about investing from you but i got a totally different golden nugget out of this where should we find you if they want more i guess they could find me on twitter you know i'm at a lot and then you know just who more people go and build interesting things i think you know there's a lot to do we appreciate you great yeah thanks so much for the time alright well we'll take care i feel like i could rule world and know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel never looking back