Ex-Sequoia Chair, Michael Moritz - on Modern America & His New Book Ausländer

0:00Michael, welcome back to Giant Ideas. Good to be here after a week. We've failed on the continuity. We're still wearing the same clothes a week later. We had a great chat last week about - Time flies. When you're in the dungeon of giant ideas, right? We might never let you out. You better be careful. We're going to talk this week about your new book. The US edition is out today, this week. It tells just an incredibly powerful, pretty shocking story about your family history and the Holocaust. And also speaks very powerfully, I think, to the moment we're in today. But perhaps for people who've not yet read it, could you just describe the story?

0:40For the people who were swept up in the incredible horrors of mid-20th century Europe, whether they're in Russia or Germany or elsewhere around Europe, all the people that were swept up in World War II, civilians and soldiers and airmen and everybody else. I don't know how many people were affected, but maybe 30, 40, 50 million people. Every one of them has a story. And every one of them has a family story of some sort. and obviously the story that resonates with an individual is their family's story. I studied history a long, long time ago and always felt that the way to write about history is through individual stories set against the fabric of the time, set against the background, the tapestry, is a grand sweep of history.

1:47But that is brought to life through talking about the details and the particulars of how decisions made by politicians and war leaders then came to effect three or four people, or in the case of my book, you know, maybe half a dozen principal characters, but then a whole cast of other, other people that were associated in, in, in this case with my family. And what, what was the, I mean, the crux of it was essentially that your, your grandparents were, were murdered. Well, a lot of, so the backdrop was, was, was quite simple. Um, I started writing the book. My mother had died shortly before COVID, and she lived in Wales until the last year of her life.

2:42And then my sister had cleared out the house, and there are maybe four cartons of papers and a few photographs and things that have been – but, you know, this was not the Churchill Archives or the Rothschild Archives. It was four cartons of papers. And I'd never really thought about writing a book about family. But then COVID broke out and I had a ton of time on my hands because I wasn't traveling, wasn't commuting, wasn't doing all. And I started riffling through this stuff and I started to write. And then I got deeper and deeper. And then there were little things that I began to discover and figure out.

3:24And then I started doing deeper, deeper research because you can do so much on the Internet, particularly if you follow, you know, all the little entries at the bottom of Wikipedia entries or on Ancestry.com where there's an obscure reference and then you begin to follow that. And I hired a couple of researchers who helped me because I don't really speak German or read it or understand it, who helped me with documents. And then started being able to, you know, I never really thought about my grandparents' generation or who these people were or how they became who they were and sort of seen some black and white photographs about them.

4:13but I never thought of them as real flesh and blood with brains and emotions.

4:21And so then I got utterly absorbed in it. It must have been quite emotional then.

4:33I don't know because I knew how the story ended. It wasn't a happy end. um but um there are a few things i tripped across a photograph my father was a had been an immigrant he'd been sent by his parents um when he was a 14 year old to britain where he'd got a scholarship into school which was the only way they could get him out of germany And then in 1940, after the Germans had swept through France and the Netherlands and Belgium and Luxembourg, the British in a panic rounded up every, quote, enemy alien who tended to be Italians and Germans. So suddenly the restaurants in Soho closed because they're all Italian waiters and they're all rounded up, irrespective of the fact that they may have spoken pretty good English and have been here for 20 years as being, you know, the close confidence of Benito Mussolini.

5:45And my father was swept up in that dragnet as well, and my uncle and a whole bunch of other family members. And then they were sent to the Isle of Man where they were interned. and the thing that surprised me most in all of this was talk about the obscure back alleys of the internet i found a trove of photographs of all these internees or many of the internees taken on the island man and i of course i'm going through the photographs in a sort of morbid fashion, seeing if I recognize anyone. And then I found two photographs. I said, I know that guy. It was my father as a young man lined up with a whole bunch of prisoners behind barbed wire.

6:34Amazing. And he never talked about it. So. Did either of your parents talk about what happened? And my father began a little bit towards the end of his life. My uncle talked about it much more. He had, after he was interned on the Isle of Man, because the Isle of Man was full of Italians and Germans, and they had to take a load of those people and send them to Canada, which was very, very hazardous undertaking because of the U-boats and all these ships were getting sunk. And so my uncle was, they had to put barbed wire down the middle of the ship that my uncle was on because the British in their zeal hadn't really distinguished between refugee Jews and ardent Nazis.

7:32And there are a whole bunch of ardent Nazis that they'd swept up as well. So they had to separate the two. and my uncle got shipped off to Canada there. And then eventually came back. The book is called Outsider. Yeah, Outslander. Outslander. Outslander, outsider, stranger, foreigner. Because a lot of the book is about being an outsider. Yeah. about coming to a country where enemy alien is put on your passport, even if you're fleeing, or your papers, even if you're fleeing oppression, and then trying to assimilate into a society and never quite being able to do that. And did you retain that sense of being an outsider?

8:25Yeah, very much so. And do you think it helped you? Sure. Well, you know, I grew up in South Wales and South Wales in the 1950s and 1960s, very different to what, and Britain is very different in cultural composition today to what it was way back when. So I think there was one, I don't think there was anybody from India or Pakistan in my school. There was definitely nobody from Asia. I think best as I can tell, there was one black student. And then there were half a dozen, four or five Jews, all of whom were the kids or the sons of boys only school, German or European immigrants. So they all had the same sort of background.

9:16So we were different from everybody else. We weren't called Jones or Smith or Williams or Evans or Edwards. we had these weird names with Zs in the names and Ks and Ys and Xs and Ws and those sorts of things that weren't supposed to be in your name. So, and there was, and we didn't attend because back then there were the school, you know, the religious school assembly. So we were excluded from the school assembly. So we, yeah, people always thought of us as the Jewish boys. And that was uncomfortable. There's a story of you looking in the phone book. Oh, yes. And this is back in the days when, you know, you used to get a big phone book deposited.

10:03And I remember for several years when the new phone book arrived, thumbing through the phone book, going past the, you know, the Edwardses and the Evanses and the Joneses and getting to the M's. and most of the M's were Morris's. And I kept hoping, and we were the only Moritz in the phone book, and I kept hoping fervently that there would be another Moritz in the Cardiff telephone directory so we could at least have a little bit of companionship and company. But that never materialized. Do you ever still feel that in any way?

10:50Michael Moritz:Um...

10:57yeah i i think and i i i'm sure i do um i'm in america living in california living in san francisco particularly in the age of trump i'm far more conscious of empathizing with people who now find themselves in that position, all these people who are being rounded up by ICE in America, all the people who fear a traffic stop by some, you know, ICE agent on one of the main thoroughfares of San Francisco or the knock on the door. So through our foundation, we do a lot of work trying to protect, trying to protect their rights because it's all too easy for the citizenry to turn the other, to look the other way and ignore and pretend it isn't happening.

11:53And, yeah, but, you know, they're, like everything else, I think it's a lot better today than it used to be. But, you know, there were, when I came to America, there were Jewish-only golf clubs. There was, you know, it's not that long ago in the grand scheme of things that Harvard didn't accept Jews. And so I'm not complaining about it. It's just an observation. It's, you know, anti-Semitism is never, will never go away. It flares up and sometimes dies down. Obviously in Britain today is a big topic, but it's always in the air. It's just a fact of life. And to some extent, I suppose I've benefited from it because it's made me stronger.

12:41I want to ask you about Britain, actually. I've got a grandfather with a similar story in a way to yours where I had an Austrian pianist grandfather who was interned in Australia when he arrived in the UK and was sent off also, I think, with some Nazis and some fellow immigrants to Australia. And I've got another grandfather who came from Wynch. He was very lucky. There was a very famous case of a ship getting of, I don't know if he was on this particular ship, of prisoners getting really maltreated by British soldiers on their way to Australia. And the, the soldiers were court-martialed afterwards.

13:23Really? Yeah. I mean, very, very tough, obviously. I've got another grandfather who was from, from the home counties, who was with Field Marshal Montgomery when they liberated Paris. I've got a great photograph of them going through Paris to adoring crowds. I've always felt so proud of that grandfather and so proud of what Britain did, you know, to come to the aid of, all of these people. Now you've been very, I think, bravely outspoken about the UK and some of the problems here with anti-Semitism and some of the attacks that have happened. How do you feel about that? Does it make you feel very sad?

13:58Kind of this country that welcomed your family with open arms is regressing in so many ways on this front? Well, it obviously is regrettable. I don't know what the population is. Maybe 250 ,000 Jews today live in Britain, so it's a tiny proportion of people. And obviously the situation, as we all know, in the Middle East has inflamed everything. But you also know that the breeding ground for a lot of this is in a bunch of places, and it gets into the water supply, and it is in the British water supply today. You've written some great pieces in the FT, I would say, consistently criticizing Trump.

14:45You wrote one before he got reelected that really resonated with me. That was, we should not compromise on character. It was essentially the, in our leaders, was essentially the gist of it. And I think that has proven true. Are you surprised by Silicon Valley's embrace of Trump? I think you've got to be a bit careful or we, and people have got to be a bit careful about saying Silicon Valley's embrace of Trump. What's clear is that there are some people with big megaphones and large social media followings who clearly have embraced Trump. But the majority of people who live in the geography called Silicon Valley are vehemently opposed to the character.

15:26And he did better in the 2024 election than he did in 2020 in Silicon Valley. He got about four percentage points more, maybe five percentage points more. But he still only got about 20%, 22 % of the electorate. So one's got to be a little careful about that. And, you know, I think part of the bump, obviously, was because of the confusion and the chaos of the whole fiasco surrounding Joe Biden. Has it been hard for you, though, with sort of, I don't know, former colleagues or friends or founders or whatever in tech who have supported Trump? Has that been difficult for you with friendships? Oh, it's not that I was close friends with any of these people beforehand anyway.

16:22and

16:27obviously everybody's I try to make the case to as many people as possible that yes you might think government is too big yes you might think China has conducted itself unfairly or NATO doesn't or the European companies don't pay for their fair share Or you don't like the fact that the way the interest rates or the economy is being run. You may have, but you would not hire this individual, any individual with this character and this background and this appalling, abysmal business record, let alone all of his personal peccadillos. you would never consider hiring him. Why would you consider making him the leader of the free world?

17:24It makes no sense to me. Well, they'll say we're a single issue voter. We believe in the economy is the most important thing to us or China or whatever or shrinking government. But I just don't think I'd prefer to live with a – And all of these people, I'm not saying for a moment that any political leader is a perfect character. Everybody has their imperfections, but there's a degree of it. And this guy is clearly the single worst president that the United States and the world has ever had. And he is the king of chaos. and from the White House lawn to the Middle East. Everywhere he goes, everything he touches winds up in chaos.

18:20If you were, there was a fairly well publicized discussion within Sequoia about various political views. If you were running the firm today, how would you manage that? Well, it's changed since I was there. Because at the time that I was there, people weren't allowed to express their political views outside. And, you know, I don't want to judge the way that the leaders have decided to run the place. That's up to them.

18:56I know for a fact that, you know, you see all of these corporate leaders who will show up for the monkey parades or a photo op in the White House or a dinner in the White House. It's the very last place they want to be. They know who they're dealing with. They're dealing with this absurd buffoon who's running a protection racket. But they also are in a very difficult place because they have businesses to run and interests to protect. and when you have a fellow who conducts business in the Oval Office like Tony Soprano used to do outside Satriani's pork butchers in Queens, you have to deal with the mob boss, and that's what they're doing.

19:53They're paying hush money. That's very understanding of you, I think, and I wanted to ask you maybe to close things out, what, having written the book, what would you ask of people who read it in response to, you know, all sorts of bad things happening in the world, whether it's the rise of antisemitism again, whether it's the Trump issues. Is there a sort of core message in there that you wanted to get across to people or was it more just a reflection in the history? I suppose some of the, you know, themes that run through the book are the fragilities of what appear to be stable societies. And one of the things that I remember as a kid with my grandmother when I was a bit older or with my parents, when there'd be some program about political violence somewhere or there'd be a documentary about the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, I would, in my blithe ignorance, say, it can never happen here.

21:02It just can never happen here. And they would always say, if it's happened, it can happen again. And I think that's the message of the book. And to realize how fragile actually everything is, and to be constantly vigilant, because before you know it, outrageous violence and the murders of policemen on the Capitol steps become forgotten. The pardoning of people who've committed all sorts of heinous crimes are forgotten. The self-dealing is forgotten. The persecution of political enemies is forgotten. The list goes on and on. and if you aren't vigilant, it then becomes the society in which you're forced to live.

22:02It's a really powerful message. Thank you so much for sharing it. Thank you. Thanks for having me.