E486 | Fred Destin, Stride: Living a Meaningful Life in Tech (EUVC Summit 2025)

0:00We now have Fred coming up. Fred, we made a movie for, but it didn't feel right. We gave Fred free reigns. Do whatever you want when you come up here. We trust you. Let me just say why I love Fred as much as I do. There is an ecosystem point here to be made. We've all been to thousands of events. Every single time, the same thing happens. End of the night, the best talks arise. Typically, someone is almost on the brink of crying. Because you end up talking about what's going on at home. You end up talking about the stuff you've had to do, the things you have founders go through, the things you can't solve.

0:42It's a tough world out there. For that reason, we at EUVC, you know, it dawned on me, oh my God, why are we putting on these posturing events? We've got to do something. Part of what we do is our tracks. You saw that movie earlier. It's really about connecting. It's about getting into nature with other people that do and go through all the same things as you do. We also do deep work retreats where it gets to a point I was at it. I cried for four days. Great experience. I say to everyone and anyone, first and foremost, the work for yourself that you can get done in four days, you cannot imagine.

1:20Second part, even if you're not ready to do that work, I would say go and do it because you'll never see anything more beautiful. like you could not go and see the pyramids or the great wall anything that's as beautiful as seeing people dealing with their shit and getting to terms with it so even as a tourist at a retreat i think it's pretty cool yeah we've done one of those retreats with fred as well and that's why i've gotten to know fred on a level that you know is sometimes feels closer than even my closest friends because we've spoken about our shit and then my closing words here are so we always talk about founders turned VC.

1:57With Fred, I tend to say it's VC turned guru. And people smile, people laugh, they may be cheeky, what's this fucking thing, existential crisis. Honestly, listen to what the man has to say now, whatever he gets us to do, if he gets us to do something, do it and try and feel it and let it happen.

2:25Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. This is a union of values. Let's start acting. I'm just going to verbalize how this feels. It is a little bit strange to stand in front of my industry and my peers and to talk about what I'm about to talk about. I'm going to try and go into meaning. and what I'd like for you to do maybe is to tune into the agency that you have in the world. You understand the mechanics of the world. You have capital. You have the smarts. You have the network. So we stand collectively in quite a unique position with the way in which we are able to influence what's about to happen in the coming 50 to 100 years.

3:15I don't know about you, but since I was a kid, I always thought of progress as something intimately related to human flourishing, whether it's health and eradicating disease or science and technology. In fact, if you ask me why I do the job of venture, it's because I think there's something profoundly human about creating. And in our age, the way in which we create, if you leave art aside, is by helping founders create companies. And so we are in the cockpit alongside them, helping them create the future. I'm not naive enough to think of technology as inherently moral, but I always felt like progress as sort of a positive arc towards human flourishing.

4:01That sort of got started to get tainted maybe around 2007, 2009. And I think it's when we invented the like and the share and the retweet button. and we started getting into this debacle called social media, which was the war for our attention. And, you know, the valence of progress started to change a little bit. And I'm like, what exactly is going on? And if you think about the poster child that was Twitter, you know, I always thought Twitter was like a tool for freedom. You know, the Arab Spring, better democracy, better knowledge. And then, of course, that turned into a sort of cesspit of outrage.

4:42Now, for me, the Hinge event was October 7th. And I'm not telling you how to feel about October 7th. For me, I think I was at home for three days crying. I'm not even Jewish, right? So it's not like it's my pain to carry. But it sort of somehow landed very deep in my system. And it's the moment when I thought, okay, wow, you know, what is going on here? The Jewish question, by the way, is always sort of the tip of the spear. You know, every time you run into really highly troubled moments, it always hinges somehow around the Jewish question. So, again, I'm not trying to tell you what you think about Israel or Palestine.

5:29I'm just saying for me that landed very deeply. What I got really curious about, though, was the moral confusion around it. You know, we have a group that takes their beloved gay brothers under their arms kindly and then pushes them off the top of buildings. We have a group that goes into a peace festival and shoots people in the face and the genitals for fun. We have a group that uses their own children and mothers as shields. I'm like, without judgment, it's like, why the moral confusion? Where does that come from? And then how does that relate to technology? Historically, we had common narratives.

6:13These common narratives would be driven by things like, if you wanted truth, you could go to religion. They had a convenient set of truth and rules. In the age of enlightenment, scientific principles of inquiry. And then, of course, wisdom through the philosophers. Back in the day, pre-Heidegger, when philosophy is actually something you could use in your everyday life, which I think is why the Stoics are so back in fashion. But in that, there was something that resembled truth. You know, maybe your favorite philosopher is Immanuel Kant. You know, mathematics has an element of truth. I mean, arguably quantum physics and physics as well.

6:52But there was something there we could hang on to. And I'm like, okay, besides the fact that these are all white males, you're representing something about systems of power here, where do we start going wrong in terms of shared narratives? And I want to introduce, I think I don't think we can think about the world we live in without thinking about critical theory. So some of you may know this well, but Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze is the French contingent of the critical theorists. It's always the fault of the French. As a Belgian, And I can say that we're an oppressed minority anyway.

7:30So they had something useful to say about the world. And what they had to say about the world is what constitutes truth and knowledge is often the outcome or the production of structures of power. And that's a useful contribution for us to understand. The problem is they didn't stop there. They deconstructed truth completely. They're like, there is nothing that exists outside of subjective truth and your lived experience. And hence, everything is an expression of power between human groups that are vying for control. And so these guys landed us in a sort of nihilistic landscape where we can only think of the interrelationship between human groups as relationships of power.

8:17And it looks like this. It may, in your mind, have started with the woke movement, which was, again, a positive development that kind of went sideways. You know, if you think about the fact that we said 2 plus 2 equals 5 because math is an element of oppression of the minorities, you know, that's when you know you've probably veered a little bit off-center. But this was not limited to the left. I mean, the right, so in critical theory thinking, there is no such thing as truth, right? So a conspiracy theory is simply a narrative that is not consensus. Alternative facts are simply facts that are not recognized by the majority.

9:04So, you know, you can kind of claim anything you want and kind of create tribes around these alternative facts. we are left in environments that start to look more and more amoral and where all we have is a raw expression of power. It's worth talking for a minute about truth here because truth is important. And information and truth, you might think more information, which of course we generate and distribute through technology, leads to more truth, but the opposite is true. So truth is costly to acquire. if you think about investigative journalism, you have to go interview 1 ,500 people. You have to make sure you're not going to get sued.

9:47You have to make sure your facts are correct. And then, you know, after six months of painstaking work, you push out an article. That's what it takes to produce truth. It's incredibly easy to destroy. All you have to do is assume bad intent on the side of the journalist who did investigative journalism. Information, by contrast, is a great way to flood the truth. If we bring technology into this, the problem we have is algorithmic optimization is going to lead, you know, we're not asking the machine to optimize for outcomes. So the only two outcomes you end up with is completely binary, is either ecstasy or outrage.

10:24And maybe it's the ecstasy of going viral for 15 minutes with your TikTok or your morning routine, you know, goes viral and you go like, wow. And outrage is everything else, right? We can express outrage in four seconds flat by just writing a tweet that goes on to destroy someone's life because it's smart and quippy. So algorithmic optimization was phase one. Now what happens when you bring in AI? AI is amazing. It's like our companion for creativity and productivity and we do so much with it and we're all running, you know, projects on it and it's making us think smarter and challenge the way we write and think and, you know, code and so forth.

11:00What a beautiful tool. We're also kind of staring at it like a cobra or the sun, kind of going, wow, this thing's amazing. Is it intelligent? We don't know if it's intelligent or a stochastic parrot. I mean, more likely a stochastic parrot. Does it have agency? I mean, it's agentic, so maybe it's got agency. Is it conscious? Whilst we're staring at it, this thing is like algorithmically optimizing around us constantly. And if you look at what the mechanistic interpretability team, for example, at Anthropocene, we're you're doing. They don't fucking understand how this thing works. It's evolving biologically faster than we are able to grok it.

11:40So we created a fast evolving new life form that's based on silicon that's evolving faster than we understand what it's doing. So whilst we're staring at it, trying to get it, being fascinated by it, it is gradually kind of occupying our field with sort algorithmic optimization all around us, right? Imagine what happens when perplexity buys Chrome, and now you have your friendly AI chat bot knows where you've been, who you've been to dinner with, and where you'd like to travel to. I mean, hello? So it's interesting to think about. Once you have tech, you can weaponize tech, right? So in 2015, Stephen Bannon became Trump's campaign manager.

12:26And he had an explicit strategy. It was called flood the zone with shit, right? It's verbatim. If I send enough information towards voters at high speed, continuously, they won't know what's going on. The Chinese Communist Party does the same. If you look at how they do censorship these days and propaganda, it's actually a very light touch. What they do is they make it really hard to get to the truth. So the friction is extremely high. You know nothing about their secret prisons. We don't understand how to premiere things anyway because he never gives interviews. We know nothing about what's happening in the Uyghur camps.

13:03And it's really hard to get to even a single picture. So we're making friction extremely high when it comes to getting to the truth. And then they're deciding what kind of narratives they want. And they flood the zone with it. So now, how do you think we're supposed to get back to anything resembling what's actually happening? We have a particularly strong tool in this, which is memetic warfare. You know, this is from the PRC, their campaign to make fun of Trump for the reassuring efforts, right? There was a whole set of memes around it, which are very good. The thing about memetic warfare is we as a species and a society are very badly equipped to deal with it.

13:44The other thing is there is no anti-memetics division. Whilst this is happening, you know, we're not actually seeing what's really happening. In fact, we might even forget that there is an enemy. We're laughing at the meme thing, forgetting that it's the Chinese Communist Party who's playing propaganda, right? The anti-memetics division does not exist. Looking at what Elon does is also interesting because what he's doing is he's constantly testing the boundaries of what's acceptable. So was it that kind of salute? Was it not? We don't know. So he's playing on the ambiguity. From there, like, let's see what I can get away with.

14:25The answer is a lot. And so he's expanding the space of freedom of what's acceptable in terms of discourse. Right? So now we're breaking down norms gradually. Again, this is not limited to the right. How many times, how many times can we see a father laying down dead children on a sidewalk before our empathy machine is destroyed? you're either going to end up in apathy and disconnection or outrage. Like it is not humanly possible to resist the onslaught of messaging. Who's interested in the truth is an interesting question because when you're signaling outrage, maybe you're generally outraged.

15:12Maybe you're signaling within your tribe that you are a person who cares and dares to speak up. So maybe you're seeking status without even realizing it. So you can also come from places of genuine concern, but actually be playing social games that you're not even aware you're playing. And you might be weaponized by the other side, right? Because these narratives are very shifty. If you want to normalize a Nazi salute, the best way to normalize it is to shout really loudly at Elon Musk that he's doing a Nazi salute, which we don't know. Because then the other side goes, great. Are you calling this a Nazi salute?

15:50Let me show you now this salute, which is exactly what happened, right? I'm concerned that we have moved beyond. So this is not some kind of political game. We are in a place where the narrative collapses completely. And, you know, narratives are how we stick together. It's true inside a company. A company has a mission. It's got cultural values. It's got a certain way of doing business. Each of you in your funds, you have a narrative around how you show up in the world and what you stand for. When this narrative starts collapsing at scale, you're what holds us together as a society. It becomes harder and harder.

16:30And then we start having the wrong myth and the wrong stories and the wrong heroes, right? We're trying to make sense of the world in 2015. And it's so complicated that even coming to some form of diagnostic is hard. So we got a bunch of people together on a couple of occasions in my office, which is like, how does it feel? And do we understand what's happening? And we're like, oh, this is really kind of hyper-object. It feels like a fractal. Like, we don't quite know what it is. And one of the guys who were there, Gabe, works in AI safety. And he said, you know what? It feels like a Lovecraftian horror, if any of you are into H.P.

17:07Lovecraft. And we came up with this idea of, like, there's, like, Cthulhu. Cthulhu is this awful godlike creature that moves on the ground and it just fills everybody with a sense of dread. And we're like, okay, you know, technology taken collectively feels a bit like an adaptive fabric. Whatever narrative you think you've got, the narrative's going to shift. Whenever you get upset, it gets recuperated. Your words get taken out of context. They get republished. It's like it's covering you. And it could be positive or negative, right? It could be ecstasy or outrage. Okay, then it goes into like, well, whose fault is it anyway?

17:45And most people point the finger at Trump and go, wow, it's Trump. You know, he's a bad person. Is Trump responsible or is he an artifact? Is he the leader that came into this chaos that we live in? And then we're like, okay, what's a good analog or what's a good story? And the good one, the one I like is Moloch. If any of you used to read Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander's legendary blog, you know, Moloch is like this Etruscan god. And he used to be fed the children of the community by the community because, you know, that's how you kept the beast at bay. And in a way, you know, this constant optimization and hustle and let's go win and let's crush and let's destroy.

18:29By the way, all this nice, like very masculine language around winning and crushing and destroying, you know, is us consuming ourselves. There's almost like no place left that is not a place where we fight for dominance or occupation or some kind of monetization or something. My favorite example is to ask people, hey, do you meditate? And people go, yeah, meditate. Do you use a guided meditation app? And 80 % of people go, yes. So even your meditation space is being occupied by technology and monetization and optimization. We're trying to think to what extent we contribute to what's going on, to what extent we are part of a system that seems to be gradually denying us our humanity to a certain level.

19:17This is not some kind of anti-AI speech, that's not the point. If you look at the theories around what AI might produce, the core one that a lot of people within tech believe is abundance. You know, we have to go all out on artificial intelligence because it will help us solve the polycrisis, so climate, soil, nutrition, health, blah, blah, blah. And if we only accelerate on AI, you know, this will help us generate the solutions that we need on this biosphere that we're in to get out of the trouble that we're in. And it would usher an age of abundance. And sure, we might go through an episode of job destruction that looks like the closure of the mind.

19:54But on the other side of this, we will have beautiful, interesting jobs for everybody that don't involve accounting or claims processing or whatever. Whatever the job you don't like is. On the extreme end of this is the transhumanists. I'm sure a lot of you are well aware of transhumanism. But their idea is that biology is some kind of annoyance, you know, that we need to transcend. So the manifest destiny of mankind may be to take our knowledge and to expand it across the globe, that we are destined to spread intelligence across the globe. And what stands in the way is our own biology. So if only we can upload ourselves to the cloud.

20:38So the mimicry crowd thinks we just need to resemble human intelligence, but on this different substrate, on the silicon substrate. And then we can go travel across space and time. Amazing. And then the biology crowd says, no, no, no, you can't deny biology. We're just going to gradually understand our biology and replace ourselves with machines. But they're sort of both trending towards the same outcome. Now, a lot of people think it's unlikely that the systems will be stable. Hence, you have the domination theories. The domination theories say, you know, some nation state or corporation nation state merged entity will achieve escape velocity around something that resembles AGI, and it's unlikely that the systems are politically stable.

21:21And then you have a bunch of smart people who believe in the extinction part, which I didn't put on the slide to not depress anybody too much. But, you know, Tristan Harris and Schmachtenberger, et cetera, believe that inherently, you know, we're creating a monster. You know, you can then assign your own probabilities to these outcomes. I'm not a futurist. Not in the business of making predictions. Cool. Okay, so what do we do? You know, image of a still lake in the face of this chaos, where do we stand? I like to think of an internal horizon, what's happening inside of you, an external horizon, which is how do we show up in the world.

21:58Internal horizon, if you can recreate some space for your overclocked brain, your brain is being constantly stimulated, so you can't really think or feel. if you can recreate a little bit of room for thinking, the first question is what game is being played? How are you getting caught? And I want to introduce a framework from Buddhism. Buddhism is very interested in suffering and human suffering. And three of the key causes of suffering are attachment, aversion, and ignorance. So you can think of most of the thing that's happening to us under attachment. I need a car. I need status. I need to keep up with the Joneses on Instagram.

22:36aversion, aversion to pain. I will numb my pain by working too hard. I will numb my pain by being on TikTok. And then ignorance is, let's just make sure you don't understand what's going on, right? So if you're capable of going back and looking at when are these things being triggered against me, then you can rise above, get beyond suffering, and start to see things more clearly. And as for the Buddha, the path is one of intelligence and discernment. We just need to relearn to see clearly what's going on. The worst pitch is the pitch of Buddhism and a pitch I want to make to you, which is the only thing we have to do is to sit with the things we don't want to sit with.

23:21Right? Looking at the impact we have in the world, feeling how we feel when we feel lonely, understanding what's going on, we're trying to numb ourselves through TikTok. The way out of the pain is through the pain. And all the great wisdom traditions say the same thing. Now, the good news is once you've offloaded your backpack and you reconnect with your loved ones and with the beauty of the world, beauty of the world is like, oh, I have blood coursing through my veins. That's amazing. We are sitting together as a community. That's amazing. There is a light hitting the wall. That's amazing. And then you find suddenly beauty everywhere.

23:55I think that's where we can land collectively. if we just relearn to look at the present as it is. So my favorite quote by David White, beauty is the harvest of presence. When we are present, we will recognize that beauty is absolutely everywhere. External horizon. How do we show up in the world? And I'll finish on this. A lot of our job is about asking powerful questions. It's actually the best way to be with our founders. It's not to give them advice, but it's to ask powerful questions. So I think a good question is, what is the quality of the conversation we're having? Could be conversation with ourselves.

24:30Could be conversations with others online. Are we contributing to outrage? Are we contributing to truth? And then importantly, in the companies that we back, what's the quality of the conversation we're having with our customers and our clients? Are we really contributing to a future that we would like to see manifest? And I would say, maybe don't tell your LPs that are doing this, but be intentional about making sure that companies you back are generating and creating the kind of future that we want to see. And they're doing this in a way that you can stand behind. I'm joking about not putting it in your investment bank, but impact doesn't sell that well, so I kind of do it by self.

25:13And finally, I was trying to think about, okay, what can I leave people with a little bit? I think we have capital, we have agency, we have the power to influence the world. And we've just been given this incredibly powerful set of technology tools called artificial intelligence. So there's a real question of what we do with it, and hence the idea of stewardship. You know, this is the most powerful tool ever invented by mankind. What the fuck are we doing with it? And really sit with the question. This is not a rehearsal. It's not a game, right? And then the other thing I think is interesting is we're quite in a unique position of actually understanding what's going on, And the world around us is very anxious.

25:58This is bringing a lot of change very quickly. It's breaking the rules of the game. People are going to lose their jobs. And there's a lot of anxiety in the field. And because we sit inside the vortex, we have a capacity to articulate what narratives are correct, what narratives are just around this, so we can help other people sort of try and make sense of this revolution we're going through. So the second aspect of stewardship is what are we telling the world? You know, not something that's self-serving, but something that's true, something that's a contribution. Thank you. Before you go, I just want to give a massive shout out to the partners who made the EUVC Summit and awards possible.

26:40So please do not tune out. We're partnered with these firms because they're great people with offerings that we know from our friends in the ecosystem are truly world class. First up, I want to give a big thanks to HSBC Innovation Banking. They helped us incept the awards in the very beginning. And truly, they are the leading bank for anyone in European venture. There's a reason why everyone knows them. Google Cloud, they were our venue hosted the summit. What a team, what a big effort they put on to help us. We're hugely grateful. Make sure to reach out to Arabella or Oksana at the Google Cloud team to hear how they can help you as well as your portfolio.