#689: The Brothers Who Live One Life — The Incredible Adventures of David and Daniil Liberman

26:03Like Roblox. Instead of Doom. We were very excited about this, but had to play only overnight because of dial-up connection and the phone was for everyone in the apartment, for us at night. That's why we actually wanted the better internet all the time. And that's how the ISP started. So then when we decided to build such game, at that moment, this idea was really not popular. You even can find some quotes from CEO of Electronic Arts, who would say, like, online games is just a niche market. It will never be big. No one can play online games and all this stuff. He actually officially admitted he was wrong.

26:47So that's very, I mean, that's very, I suppose, honest. A lot of people don't own those things. He was super cool on this. He was like, I said that, I was wrong. Like, now we are in the game. so and we tried to launch several um one time failed our own uh savings spent all of our own savings um was out soon but then world of warcraft was released and we were the only ones who were for years trying to raise money for such type of the project and that's how we got all that attention at this moment and uh we raised our first so world of warcraft comes out it proves it's a proof of concept yes for what you are also trying to pursue anyway not only proof of concept it was the first game ever netting one billion dollar of profit a year i think people outside of games also today do not realize how big the numbers are like the opening weekend for the new Call of Duty compared to like every Hollywood blockbuster for a six-month period or something like that.

27:56The numbers are astronomical. This market was really for years larger than the movie market. But 15 years ago, it wasn't really... Not as obvious. Yes. But it was already obvious that it can make lots of money. So we were able to convince some of the investors. Investors tend to like that. And we got a lot of attention, grew pretty fast to 150 to 100 in place in different times. But then 2008 crisis came and just it's all. And we were not ready. I mean, World of Warcraft, it took Blizzard, the top game development studio in the world. That's what we didn't realize when we started. It took them like five, six years to build the game.

28:41It's quite complicated. With an army. With an army. and unlimited resources. And us, we're like, we can do it with a couple million dollars. Okay, we were miserable in this case. But honestly, in this experience, we realized that we can be cool in developing, sort of hacking our way through the challenges, inventing new stuff, inventing how we can build new type of processes and technologies, etc. And even though we bankrupt the company in 2009, I remember March 2009, I had to fire everyone, like 150 people in one day. Sounds fun. Super fun. The most challenging experience of our life. The most challenging experience of our life.

29:23And then three, four months later, we already started an animation studio and used all of the ideas which came to our mind during this period. Like, we can actually do this and this and that. We wouldn't do this in the games, but we can do this in the animation process. So you're able to take things from the failed gaming studio and transfer them over into the... In terms of experience. Mostly the experience of like, lesson was learned. We knew how to do stuff better as we were progressing from knowing nothing when we started to basically having like a pretty sophisticated production process. We immediately reinvented the animation process.

30:07So we basically took the guy who was experienced in producing 3D graphics and was like, okay, why don't we change it all? Why don't we take what you know and then try to figure out how to make it much more efficient? How did you decide on that? It was a super challenging time. The company was bankrupt. By that time, we actually already were quite successful in different stuff. Already had a venture firm raised$30 million to the venture firm. But this venture forum was took over. By our investors of the gaming studio. So it's like a Russian type of situation. It's Russian style. Like people with the guns on the cars.

30:46Literally people on the security people from the persons arrived to the office, took us in the black cars, driving us to the underground of the office building in the middle of Moscow. And then threatening us that they will kill us and our family because they know where everyone lives unless we'll return the money. So this type of business experience. This type of business experience. Hardline, strict investors. In that moment, we knew that we need to, with a new project, we need to do something fast because we still had some obligations in place, which we just fired because we haven't paid the salary for the last month.

31:22Okay, right. So you had outstanding debt to the employees. The outstanding debt was like half a million dollars. And we were still living with our parents. So we knew that we don't want to have investors anymore. and all this experience which we had. We wanted to do something which can generate cash right away, not like a development for... Enough apartment building basements. You know enough. A friend of ours who is a famous actress in Russia, she told the CEO, the president of Channel One, which is like NBC of Russia, like the largest network. Or like one of the BBC channels in the UK 20 years ago.

32:01Exactly, exactly. That we can do magic with graphics. She told him that we can do magic with the computer graphics. How did you become friends with the actors? Friends of France introduced us, and we basically become super cool friends. We were writing scripts together for the future movies and stuff. In reality, I'm not sure that she really knew that we can do that. But she was very confident in selling it. She knew that we fixed her internet. Many times. It goes a long way, keeping somebody online. So she tells the head of this primary channel that you guys can work magic with graphics. We work magic with graphics.

32:41And we actually were doing magic with graphics, but for games. And he wanted to create a political satire show, which would be based on the last week events, which is impossible. Animation, usual production cycle is 9 to 12 months. South Park is actually like 3-4 months, but then they leave this several minutes for something topical, which they can produce over a couple of weeks, right before the episode is released, like they're doing this trick. And that's South Park. They're the fastest. They're the fastest, exactly. And we invented the production process, which allowed us to produce half-hour animated show 3D graphics in one week.

33:19How did you do that? The interesting part was we just basically disassembled the entire process on smaller pieces and parallelized them. This idea of decentralization and parallelization was like, we couldn't leave it. So rather than an assembly line type of production, you're like, how many of these can we have running in parallel? And we found out... Were you able to borrow resources from the channel to work on those parallels? No, we actually at the time were able to borrow resources from IBM. Okay, how's that work? A friend of ours was the president of IBM of Russia. And we agreed that they were a DJ in the club during the weekends.

33:57That's how we knew the guy. So during the... Moral of the story, you never know who's DJing at the club. Make friends. The DJing at night during the weekends and then being in a suit, like a serious president of IBM during the weekdays. That's crazy. That's crazy. And the guy was like, I fucking love what you're doing. So I'm sorry, can I say this? Oh, yeah. And he was like, yes, I'll give you the equipment. And they gave us like a, I don't know, what was it? It was around like a million dollars worth of servers. With the idea that they will give us this equipment, not permanently, but for some time for free, in exchange that IBM will use the fact that this show was created.

34:42The most innovative show was created using IBM equipment. They gave us equipment, but IBM decided that it's too political. They had office IBM. And they never even used it. Because the show was political satire in Russia. So the headquarter in the United States was like, no, no, no. That does not sound low risk. They allowed us to use the equipment, but never put the logger in there. Okay. So they allow you to use the equipment. And then was the president just like, look, we're going to forget it's there for a while. You guys can use it? Yes. Yes. It was exactly like that. Very helpful, DJ. We made the first season using that equipment.

35:19The Channel One paid us like$3 million for the first season. And with that money, we were able to buy all the equipment we needed. Because you owed like half a million to the employees. Yes. It was advanced payments. So we came to channel one and said, we need advanced payment. They're like, why? It was like the processes. And we basically paid the debts. Wow. Okay. Okay. So what happens then? You have this parallel processing that's working with your semi-permanently borrowed IBM machines from the DJ. You make three million. You manage to negotiate prepayments. So you satisfy your outstanding debts to paying the ex-employees.

35:57And then what? This was the first time when we actually start to earn enough of our own funds. And we return to, first we return to our ideas that we need to think about. How to fight the corruption. How to fight the corruption. What type of technologies can be created to. Were you guys not afraid? Honestly, the part of us not being afraid probably somehow was related to our debt. was never afraid of whoever was challenging him. But at the same time, back in 2000, as we finished the school, we knew that if we have all these ideas of changing the world, it's going to be impossible if we just stay home, play computer games and stuff.

36:37So we decided that we would go to some business trainings, personal development trainings, fear trainings. We started challenging ourselves in developing ourselves. And by 2005, we spent like four years developing our own internal equanimity. So let's talk about this equanimity for a second, because this is super important. And it's sort of the enabler or the handicapper, the lack of it being a handicapper in so many different capacities. And I would say a lot of the people listening to this are from the U.S. and fortunately for them, they've never had the experience of being under a political regime where people disappear.

37:20But I've spent a lot of time in South America, or poisoned, or fill in the blank. Yeah, disappears in quotation marks. But what you realize is there are political regimes all around the world, very common, where people routinely are killed, poisoned, or otherwise made to disappear. So the risks were very real for you. And these are not conspiracy theories, like there are actual threats. So was the lack of fear a lack of fear of death? Or was it a belief that you could extricate yourself or avoid any type of really significant consequence or something else? There are three answers to that. A, yes, we don't be afraid to die.

38:01Somehow don't. I mean, this is like, you die, that's it. Whatever. B, somehow, and it actually really helped with the bandits in 2009 when they came to ask for all of their money invested in the game back. We knew that it's their way of threatening you and they want you to be afraid. They want you to fear. And that's how you're on the hook. As soon as you show the fear, that's when they hook you and you owe them forever. And we showed them that, like, fuck, kill us, whatever. I mean, like, you will never get your money back. And the other case, like, we can probably work it out somehow. Lawrence has this experience that actually, if you don't show this here, it's much safer than if you show.

38:45It's a little bit like with lions. Blood in the water. Yes. Blood in the water. But then the third one, the third one is when it comes to the political systems, let's say particularly the Russian political system, for the KGB people who were actually running the country at that time, like Putin is ex-head of KGB that's the only thing which we all should understand that's a country run by KGB people. Yes they call themselves FSB but who's a give a shit it's KGB, it's the same guys who were just basically killing people 60-50 years before that in Russia after the war, before the war so when it comes to them they see two type of people who are playing against them.

39:28It's either enemies or idiots fools enemies or idiots spies your eyes work for CIA or you're an idiot who was convinced by CIA to fight against them and you're just like fool you're a pawn so we played the pawn card we're like let's show ourselves as if we're stupid and we were completely transparent about all of our ideas from the very beginning, saying they will just see us as fools. Town lunatics. This strategy worked at a particular time. It was just so rare that they're like, oh, these guys are just crazy. Because we made it transparently. If you're a CIA agent, you will try to hide. But if you transfer money to the biggest opposition you're like, you probably need to.

40:20Hiding in plain sight. Hiding in plain sight. And they're like, oh, idiots. They spend their money. Okay, whatever. We'll just steal this money from the opposition you're anyway. So fools. That was the situation. So for us, the shield for all those years was like, they believe we're just idiots.

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41:42All right, we may come back to this, but I want to make sure I don't lose the thread. So the graphics for this political satire seems to be working pretty well. You return to your ideas from prior, which is how we got here. So thinking about anti-corruption and things like that. And then... We started our move to United States. We already established our presence in Los Angeles because of animation in 2010 and started to move all attention to the United States. Nothing good is going to happen in the country. It's ran by the KGB and they're not going to release their grasp over the country unless Thus, it's going to be like a revolution type of situation, which we saw that even opposition, they were trying to play the political game.

42:30And it was a lost game from the very beginning. So we knew that the show, Political Satire on largest TV network in Russia is not going to last more than the term of puppet president Medvedev. That's exactly what happened. As soon as Putin got back to his position, the show was shut down immediately. So we knew it's going to end. and we knew that we need to spend all of the money which we'll make from this in order to transit to the United States. So two questions, and it might seem obvious to you guys, but I think for a lot of people listening, they might wonder, well, why not Europe? Why not somewhere else?

43:06Why the US? And then how hard was it, or how easy to start to move your lives to the US? You know, in Europe, especially animation industry, is mostly subsidized by government. so you actually need to deal with bureaucrats and you need to get any finding in the private sector almost doesn't exist so I would say that makes it very hard for immigrants yes exactly and it was always like if you want to get if you're not local you need to work with local studios and they should get this funding we started developing the relationship but even faster we realized that in Hollywood we have all the chances and pretty quickly we were introduced to people who then introduced us to the agencies and William Moore's Endeavor signed up with us January 2010.

43:57Half a year after we started the company. You know, it's still a challenging process. Any immigration is a challenging process. It took us six years. Hope you will really take us seriously and to get to the same type of level of professional acceptance like then we had back in Moscow. But we found our ways. But at least it is possible here. You know, like in Europe or in the UK, you would never become... You would never be able to spend only five, six years and get into the major Hollywood studios. To be the same, equal. California has a lot of downsides, but one of the upsides is, and this is true in a lot of the US, no one is discriminating against green.

44:43And people like opportunity. And also California, a lot of people don't realize, part of the reason Silicon Valley worked is that California also makes it very hard to enforce non-compete contracts. So there are opportunities everywhere of all different types. Yeah, we agree with the competition. This was our observation that it's all about non-competes, that they are not enforceable, that this allows you to actually work at Google, write your own search engine at night, and then launch your own search engine, and Google cannot do really anything with you. A lot of free flow of talent. Free flow, yes.

45:18Which makes it hard sometimes to retain talent in Silicon Valley, but that's a whole separate story. So you land in LA, you have introductions to people at, say, William Morris Endeavor and other places. What happens as that momentum starts building? We actually had a pretty good success working with different studios and different big names, like Jimmy Fallon. We worked on the show with him. At some point we met with the guy who used to be John Stewart's head writer. And he just moved back from New York to Los Angeles and was sort of available-ish. He wasn't for a year, but then a year later he was available.

46:00And we took our chance to become friends over the year. And then when he'd become available, like, Josh, why don't you work with us? And we managed to convince him because we showed him how fast we actually can produce animation. Even like William Morris Endeavor or Josh, even being a friend for us for like a year, they never actually believed that we can produce animation in one week. And we had to prove it like literally by saying like, Josh, are you serious? Okay, just let's write a script right now, a one-pager. You will write one-pager joke. And in a week you will have it. In a week you will have it in animation.

46:36And that's what we did. And it was like, whoa, you guys were saying truth. You guys can actually do it. You guys can actually do it. Before that, he worked at Simpson, before John Stewart. And at Simpson's like 12 months of production. And you're like, you're making a joke, and it's already old. A year old joke. And with us, there was an opportunity for him to make jokes, which are super cards. So it was cool, but on the other hand, really wanted to focus more on the technologies which can transform society. And plus, Hollywood wasn't really our thing. There are some trade-offs. Yes. There are lots of trade-offs.

47:10No one cares about technologists, especially that time. You know, like, before Netflix and before all this stuff, no one cared about technologists. No one cares that you're faster and cheaper. We realize it too late. No one cares about, like, who is your, like, producers and, like, all the divorce lawyers and all this stuff. Wait, wait, wait, wait. How does the divorce lawyer fit in? We don't know, but people in Hollywood say so. Oh, wait, you need to know divorce lawyers? Yes, because they know people, like, the power dynamics. Oh, this is good for me to know. There's like a power dynamic of divorce lawyers who control...

47:42I picked up a new stratagem today. Thank you. Exactly. Okay. Divorce lawyers. So we then knew all the lawyers and we started to know the people and we started to meet the people. And eventually we deconstructed what the show needed to be in order to come to a meeting at Fox. At that point, then you're pitching your own show. Yes. So we get to the point of understanding that we cannot sell our technology. We have to sell the entire show. So we should package voice actors. The Trojan horse with the technology inside. Exactly. We took it all. That's why we needed Josh, because we needed head writer.

48:16We took the voice actors. We took the best concept artists to combine this all and produce a pilot, like a literal final quality pilot, and brought it to Fox. And who was it? Susanna Marcus at the time. She was like, wow, I love it. Because we actually knew what she likes, who she likes. What type of artist. What type of artist. We engineered it all. Data, data, data. Went to a custom tailor to put together a pilot for her. Yes, exactly. But it was also some misfortune time. Because Putin gets back to power. So our show was cancelled back in Russia. In 2013, the banking crisis in Cyprus. All our money was nationalized.

49:02All of our money. Hold on a second. So Cyprus, does that mean that you had moved your finances from Russia to Cyprus? And then it was out of the pan and into the fire. Yes. And then Cyprus got nationalized. It was like, uh-oh. It's the same story all over again. Yes. Same story all over again. There was like$6 million earned. And all of a sudden, we couldn't pay anyone in the United States. No voice actors, no screenwriters. We couldn't pay anyone. Immediately, it all fell apart. So did you get the green light for the pilot? Yes. And then Cyprus? Yes. And then Bye Bye Fuel? Bye Bye Fuel. And we tried to think what we can do in Hollywood more for like half a year, a year.

49:45But then we realized it will take us another four or five years to recover because there's no money. There's like nothing in there. So like, screw it. We're not going to stay in Hollywood. Let's move to Silicon Valley. So we'll move to Manlo Park. Right in the middle. Right in the middle. and also we really already wanted to return to our real like ideas we we started with transparency again we decided that we can do a trick that we can actually not target governments to become transparent but target non-profits like why we don't see how non-profits actually spend our money it's kind of obvious it's not your like personal money it's like we all together gather these funds to make the world a better place.

50:32So we created a transparent banking platform for non-profits. For many reasons. We were wrong about the ability and readiness. The appetite. The appetite, exactly. The appetite for the non-profits. But this was also the times when we realized that some of the fundamental challenges which we saw in economy, actually, they were true in the United States as well. Not only in Europe, not only in Russia, not only in Israel, but in the United States as well. And we realized that even with the nonprofit transparency, if you will look at research of what actually donors want, you will see that the previous generations of donors, they don't really want to see where the money spent.

51:25It's almost the last item in the list of their requirements. But our generation and generations younger, they actually are in the first place. We want to see what happens The dynamic of thinking behind this is that for the older generation, they donate money because it's a give back for them. So society gives them a lot. It's feeling good versus doing good. Yes. And for the youngest, it's like giving forward. We want to change what's bad right now, and we want to see it's changing now. And also, actually, previous generations got a lot from society in terms of form of free education, almost free college education, like 30 years ago, and things like that.

52:12New generation being hammered with student debt, etc., they don't really feel that society gave them much. But they really still donate the same portion of their share than the older generation. but it's just different reasons. I feel like some of the younger generations here, younger certainly than me, get a bad reputation for misunderstood reasons. Or I should say they're misunderstood in the sense that, I know you guys have spoken about this before, but if you look at, say, previous generations' ability to get a higher education, put a down payment on a house and pay for a mortgage, compared to some of the more recent generations, it's night and day.

52:54So it's important to factor that into how you evaluate them. So question for you guys with looking at the nonprofit and the this and the platform, right? You're very good at, it seems like, letting go of ideas, having a light grasp on ideas if things are not working so you can move to something else that you think might work better. That's not true for everyone. Some people get very attached to one thing and they want to ride it until they die and they get attached to things that may never work. And I'm wondering how you think about changing direction, maybe failure in quotation marks. What allows you to do that so readily?

53:38A, we learn the hard way. So the first, the game studio, we grasp and we try. You know that if you don't stop at the right moment, you can actually get to a deep shit. Yeah, you can get into a hole. Yes. but also what we saw in the data and what we realized also through the experience of game development, failure, and then animation success that we realized that... It is not always about your abilities. So you can fail just because of different reasons like financial crisis. Like poker, right? The time. You have to study the decision-making, not just the outcomes. Yes. In the statistics of venture startups, is that two-thirds will fail.

54:26Like completely fail, losing all the money at zero. And if you will look at all these failures, there are rare exceptions. But in most cases, what you should see is that if your startup is growing, you should continue. You should like double down, put your all attention there, et cetera. If it's not, think wise. If it's not growing, you should stop and quit and start another one. If we look at this purely from the perspective of statistics, if it's not doubled the growth, if whatever numbers behind your understanding of your business isn't doubled, didn't double, how to say, isn't doubled. Yeah, didn't double.

55:05Didn't double. Over what period of time? Over 14 months. 14 months. Why 14 months? I have to ask. It's pure statistics. If you look at the statistics, it's just… Oh, I see. I see. That's the pattern. And success is over that period of time. It's like a pattern. Doubling over 14 months. If you take all of them and divide, then just 14 months? Because if you're also not growing with this space, venture capital will not be accessible to you. And you won't be able to actually raise money. This is funds to grow further and things like that. So this market is actually pretty special in terms of these probabilities.

55:40Just one out of 100 is going to be a unicorn. success. And if you don't see trajectory to get there, the right thing is just to stop and start something new. And knowing that your chances are 1 in 100, you should try as many attempts as possible. Take more shots. We usually show to the young people, we show this picture of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel who made into success from the first attempt. Dropping out from the college and look, they're billionaires. Most of the billion dollar companies are not like that. It's created by people who failed multiple times and then got to success. In terms of statistics, this is what we should observe with this thing.

56:30Definitely something depends on your abilities to execute, etc. But there are things which are independent. I remember Angel Investing starting in 2008 and seeing business models companies that couldn't execute in a period of time because the technology just wasn't there and the adoption wasn't there. And then five, six years later, basically the exact same company. But a few things have changed. Mobile phones have become more powerful. A handful of protocols have been developed and then boom, it works. Uber is mobile phone with GPS. Yeah, you're right. Yes, with wide enough adoption. And it was tried.

57:10These ideas were tried before. boarding or text online yes for sure it's been there um and because of that you know especially because we really like you know we balance ourselves between sometimes when we work on some uh forward looking ideas like lying cars like something which is not happening yet and also we work on some projects which down to earth which already something which is happening and we know that with these projects, which are not there yet, yes, there is a chance to win big, but this chance is small. And there is like a lot of timing issues. And you can lose just because timing is not right.

57:54And we, as Daniel mentioned, we learned it hard way with Game Development Studio. It was really hard for us to stop. Even though it was obvious that we were lucky with the animation studio and then another unfortunate event was losing all of the money just in banking crisis in Cyprus. And we stopped pretty fast. I mean, we're like, are we going to spend time recovering or are we just starting something new? When Silicon Valley bank crisis happened, we were among a really small group of our friends' founders. All this time, we were obsessed with diversifying the money on different banks. and everyone would tell us that in the United States you shouldn't think about that stuff it can happen cannot just because cannot and we're like right surprise we are not immune from all the problems we've seen other places alright so I'm going to zoom out for a second because I like to think about sort of meta decisions that span across a lot of other decisions and projects and so on so the two of you living one life.

59:04We have to talk about this. I have never seen an example quite like this. I mean, there are couples who are, say, power couples, but it's a different dynamic. I mean, you guys have been seemingly sort of hive mind from a very early age. So when did this start? So you have one email address, one Instagram account, one LinkedIn. I think the phone is maybe the same. It's connected. Right, so I'm looking at some notes here. So since you were born, this year was the first time that you guys spent 10 days apart. Put it another way, not being together in one place, when you went to a Vipassana retreat.

59:44All right, so could you explain for people who understandably will find this interesting and kind of alien? How did this come about? and how is it helpful versus confusing? How do you guys do it? It is confusing in many ways. But A, we should understand that we, the six of us grew up in one room of a size smaller than this studio. Okay. For those who can't see the full studio, I mean, it's not huge, right? This isn't an airplane hanger. It's not a basketball court. It's like a bedroom. Three bunk beds. That's how the six kids could fit in the room like this. and then even later so we grew up like this up until school already started and I think until 13-14 years old it was the situation more or less.

1:00:33And then parents also sent us to school by pairs it was like a logistical innovation. It's like buddy diving when you're scuba diving. Exactly It was dangerous to walk out the streets in the 90s alone in Moscow they don't need to walk us to school so we can do it by ourselves. High degree of confidence. Exactly. So they were sending us by pairs to school. Not only the two of us, but the other kids as well. So we were a pair. David was five years old. I was six years old when we went to the school. And the rest of the kids were seven. So we were bitten. But because it's two of us, we learned how to...

1:01:13We learned how to avoid... To protect ourselves, being two rather than one. so had to survive it's like bonding for the bonding very helpful for the bonding helping each other like through the education like doing homework together all the stuff together by 13 14 years old that's when we started forming our own ideas of what could be cool for us to do in our life and that was already like a social justice type of thinking like how can we make the world a better place for everyone? And starting from there, we saw how no one literally was supporting this idea, except two of us basically continued the conversation in between the two of us, and it never faded away.

1:01:55Which idea is this? This is the combining? The idea is that transparency in government, it was just one branch of this idea. So the two of you are very aligned. Yes, the technologies can actually lead us to a better governance. And that's what we thought. And through this experience of being kids, first we realized that when you go to school, all kids, they are alone. But we weren't. It gave us a lot of advantage. We don't need to struggle to company gather around us because it's already two people. it's much easier to gather a company like a group of friends around. Also we realize that if I know mathematics better we can do it the way so that no one wouldn't know that Daniel don't know mathematics as I do.

1:02:49As good as he does. So you can actually copy this Voltron type of citation. And we learned that that's what we can do. that and if we weren't allow outside world to actually distinguish who has which qualities you can cover the bases yes we will be able to seem to be a superhuman because we have both of the qualities and like okay so i know you guys as an example are fans of the collison brothers right yes amazing and patrick's been on the podcast my understanding is they have they're very powerful together, but they have maintained, they're like, I don't want to say Batman and Robin, that's not quite the same.

1:03:31They're like two of the Avengers, right? I mean, they're superheroes, but they have clearly delineated separate points of contact and so on. What have been some of the other advantages or drawbacks of doing it the way that you guys have approached it? Even though they definitely are more separate than we do, but they did a lot of really great stuff. For example, they were like CEO and president, they switched with CEO and who is president and they switched roles. So they actually showed to the world that they are interchangeable. A team. A team. A team. And they are great in this regard. But our question.

1:04:07In our case, we went to just an extreme version of that, having one line of communication. So if you text me, you actually text both of us and you don't know who answered this text. But we can answer faster. We can answer faster. Seems to be this superhuman. And that worked pretty well during negotiations of the contract. David honestly hated speaking to people as he was young. He was like super not into talking to people. And I was super easy to talk to people. So it was my role in the couple to talk all the time. And I would still never pick up the phone if someone called. I don't pick up the phone either.

1:04:51I don't know what I'm signing up for unless it's my brother or family okay fine there are a few exceptions imagine that you can answer that

1:05:02so that worked in business pretty well even though our first business partners they were like why you're on the same meeting you can be in two places at the same time and things like that but we even at some moment gave up on trying to explain them that allow us to, in business especially, it's like win or lose. You won this contract or lost the contract. All these meetings are important. If you're playing two contracts and losing both of them, it doesn't matter that it was two of them. If you're playing one, but you're playing a hardcore game of us being a team in this conversation which can win the contract, it works much better.

1:05:43Yeah, bird in the hand versus two in the bush. Yeah. So what are your respective roles generally then in terms of responsibilities or strengths? How do you think about that? I would put this this way. We have two different intuitions and they're like completely different. David's intuition is he absorbs data. He remembers everything. And then at some point he can just like, the answer is this, like 42, like just out of nowhere, out of like, you know, like why? He's like, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's 42. 42, yeah. It's the hitchhiker's guide to the gallery. And then the next morning he can wake up and he's like, yeah, and now I know why.

1:06:23I cleared my path to this place in my mind, which actually made the calculation and told me it's 42. So here's why. My intuition is completely different. My intuition is like, we need to fly to London tomorrow. And he's like, why? I have a good feeling about this. and then we fly to London and we got the investors it's like this and like we need to offer these people this and David's like no no no no I'm like yes yes yes we need to offer them this I offer them this and they're like yes agree handshaking and David's like how did you know I'm just like I felt it so Daniel much better in reading people Daniel much better in reading situations in general I am much better in processing later processing knowledge I have this strange quality that I remember everything.

1:07:17Is that hard for you? I'm just wondering, because I have family members like this, and sometimes it's a huge advantage. But are there things that you wish you could forget? I learned to live with that. I think that because we have both of it, and I see what is the advantage of a different type of thinking, etc., and I learned how to live with that, and now I embrace it. I understand the limitations. but I cannot read the citation properly. I understand the limitation of this tool but because it's two of us and we have both I actually doubled down into these qualities and developed these qualities further and further and further.

1:07:55Do you guys get physical or psychological anxiety when you are separate? This was the first time when we were separate. April was the first time when we were separate like not even being able to text each other because the phone is off during the Vipassana for 10 days long. What was that like? Well, so you had something to do. I mean, you're in your own mind, but you had a task. So what was it like for you, David? It was unexpected, but for me it was okay. Because I knew that Daniel is working on something which is important. I knew that if he will extract some new experiences out of it, I also will do that.

1:08:36So it's kind of, I outsourced this. That was a guinea pig. And I actually felt like I had this intuition, like, I got to do this. And I just went. And it was so quick. So David had to wait for three months. So everyone expected. I was accepted four days before the course started. Everyone expected around that I will be devastated by this experience. But somehow I was super calm because probably because I knew that Daniel is working on something important for us. there was a purpose behind it and then the second time was like the same situation but reversed he was working on his mind and I was back home for me it was a little bit more challenging meaning that I had this mind trick which was oh it's your fault that he's there struggling there and like what are you talking about for you it was a great experience but yeah but for David maybe it's not as great maybe it's challenging for him like come on seriously stop it alright so you had the internal voice keeping you company yes part of the reason i ask and i don't know if this is true this is from the new yorker piece is selling shares in yourself the way of the future which i would love to hear if there's anything you wish were different in that piece for those people who might check it out but i was curious because at one point it says at home the brothers share a single king-size bed is that still the case we recently changed it in april we moved to a new house and we basically decided to have more bedrooms and we have separate bedrooms now.

1:10:00Because this behavior creates some limitations, especially around relationships. Yeah, I would imagine. So we decided that, especially now when it's published, we have an additional problem. I was already in the New Yorker. I imagine I'm not the first person to ask about this. So in Kenya, our bond is quite challenging in terms of relationship. that's why we decided that we need to make it easier like romantic relationship yes we decided that we need to explicitly make it easier for potential romantic partners and splitting bedrooms is one of the first floors Daniel has his own floor David has his own floor in the house I can imagine those in my mind as I'm painting a picture I just imagine the floors looking very different like if the respective brother floors must be very different.

1:10:55But also, you know, like when we were in the same room, it was for purpose. We usually would stop talking only like before like a minute we would go to sleep. And start talking as we wake up. So what are we doing today? This is a wake-up call. Now we travel into New York, we're in one hotel room. We constantly talk. What an incredible blessing and gift it is that you guys have each other. Yeah, I mean like we're absolutely enjoying this way of life. Yes, as David said, challenges in the romantic relationship, we will work it out. So do you think when you have romantic partners, let's just say you have romantic partners, maybe you have families, who knows, do you think you guys will still live together?

1:11:37Yes. We maybe will do some, you know, like, in our vision, we maybe can create a kind of special house when you have sections of private and not private and something like that because we definitely need to hear also what our partners have to say about things have to say yes but we really want to still have a place for for two of us when we can spend a lot of time together okay so i have heard people need to fact check this because i think a friend of mine told me just as a model that tim burton and his wife i think it's helena bunham carter if they're still together i don't know but that in their house they actually lived in separate wings and then they would come together for shared meals and things like that.

1:12:23So they had a very unorthodox arrangement. We have friends who build houses when they have joint bedroom and separate bedrooms. And a wing for kids. A wing for kids. So like wing for him, wing for her, wing for kids and wing for them together. It's like a spaceship. Yeah. I like it. I like it. I'm very interested in all. That's why maybe the divorce lawyers can give you some advice from Hollywood. What has worked? What has not worked? you mentioned Evan earlier not everyone's going to recognize that name how did you guys end up at Snap? our point of view we always tell the story from the perspective of us meeting Dalai Lama in 2010 when in doubt go with the Dalai Lama story so it was back in 2009 right in between us starting the animation studio and bankrupting the game studio there was three months of us took a Dalai Lama sabbatical yeah there were three months of us clearly not knowing what to do and then the bandits are threatening our lives we don't know how to like return the money and then we just decided to go for a five six days meditation retreat of a Rinpoche a Tibetan lama who just arrived to Moscow and a friend invited us so we came there with no expectations whatsoever but the gentleman was very interesting.

1:13:49He was young, he was super smart, speaking like 11 languages, and from time to time, he would switch from this Tibetan stories about the enlightened kingdoms to something more practical, even claiming that a single person can actually change the world if they want. And for us, it was like, wait, what? Are you talking to us? And we then asked if we can have an audience with Rinpoche. And we were told that everything is booked already. But five minutes later, he called us. Now, just so I'm clear. So he is which teacher? Giatro Jigme Rinpoche is like a Tibetan... Spiritual leader. Spiritual, yes.

1:14:34It's like a title which you can get only from your childhood if you recognize... It recognizes the reincarnation of the previous lives. Reincarnation of someone else. Yes. So this gentleman is in Moscow. And Rinpoche is asking us to come see him. And we're like, wait, okay, cool. So we shared our ideas about transparency, about how in the future we can live within governments without physical borders. And for Tibetan people, it's really important subject, knowing that they don't have their lives. So it resonated with him. And when we finished our story by saying, and now it's just two of us, he immediately abrupted us and said like the three of us and it was touching and like unexpected and he finished his phrase with come visit me in India in what was it January next year I'm hosting an inauguration of a monastery Dalai Lama is going to be there and I will introduce you and we will introduce your ideas together and we will see what we can do together that meeting actually happened and not happened at the same time so we flew to India we spent this week in the monastery in India, Tibetan monastery Dalai Lama actually arrived we had a non-private meeting with him in a group of 10 European donors of the monastery but then we had to have a one-on-one meeting with him next morning which never happened because a storm came I know this is like a movie story the storm came and Dalai Lama immediately took off.

1:16:11It was packed into the helicopter. The military helicopter and just disappeared. And we were standing there and in half hours the storm just rushed and flooded the entire valley. For the next two days we weren't able to leave the place because it was flooded. But then a month later we received an email from a gentleman whose name was Jerry Murdoch. He's the founder of Insight Partners. One of the biggest VC firms in New York. And the email was like, I'm at the dinner with Dalai Lama and this other monk. And they told me I have to email you and they give me your email. So that's what I do. That's why I'm emailing you.

1:16:50That's why I'm emailing you. So we've met with him a few months later and become close friends. And eventually through the many different stories, he invites us to a dinner. This dinner wasn't really for us. He thought that other people will come, but it didn't work. So he invited us instead. And there we met. Whenever he gets a job then. Yes. But since this introduction, we always were quite cautious about everything which was related to him. I mean, that alarm introduced to someone, you stick to the person. Should be the reason. There should be a reason. And we always try to help him and be around and just see where it will go.

1:17:31You're talking about Jerry. Jerry, yes. And at some point, eventually, he introduces us to Evan at his house. And then Evan gave me his phone number just right away at the meeting. And it was the right moment. Which wasn't expected for everyone around, because that's not what he's doing. And we were developing technologies around 3D avatars at that moment. And that's what was exactly... On his mind. On his mind. On his mind was he wanted to combine a Bitmoji, which were the 2D avatars he acquired from the Canadian company. and 3D engine of AR technology of Luxury, the Ukrainian company he acquired.

1:18:13He wanted to merge the two technologies. And our experience in Hollywood was merging technologies. We literally were transferring the 2D styles of existing animated shows into 3D and back and forth and back and forth. In that moment, we also focused on 3D avatars and how technologies can actually... Not a show, not something which require... Like a game type of thinking, like because we decided right after the financial transparency for non-profits didn't work we decided that we looked around and realized that the technology advanced like a computer vision and style transfers and like all this stuff advanced a lot since we left cg graphics and we realized that we know everything and more than probably everyone in the field so we can try to just start something and and probably gonna like build a successful company half a year later haven't offered us, not offered, but already acquired us.

1:19:07And so just for people who might not have the acronym, so AR, augmented reality. Augmented reality. So people may recognize some of the current or recent iterations on Snap where you can, say, put any number of different sort of overlays of characters. I mean, they do partnerships with all sorts of companies and so on, so you can add something to your face that sort of tracks your eye movement and augments the kind of visual experience. So is that what you guys were working on in some capacity? This technology, face tracking technology, it was Ukrainian company Luxury, which they recently acquired before us.

1:19:48And we worked how to combine the avatars into this technology. So right now, 3D version of Bitmoji is the most used avatars daily in Snapchat. It's already everyone in your profile in games, in lenses, in all places. And so you guys get acquired. And if I'm missing a chapter, let me know. But can you describe what you did, what your analysis looked like when Snapchat suddenly started losing users? I think it was in 2017? 2018. 18. So it was early 2018. Are you right? 2017 Instagram released their stories. And in the beginning of 2018, new version, new update version of Snapchat was released. Kim Kardashian tweeted, or Kylie Jenner tweeted that no one would use Snapchat anymore, all this stuff.

1:20:46And audience started to decline. And at that moment, most of the people believed... Internal idea in the company was that it's due to the... Public sentiment competition. Public sentiment of the bad new version or competition of Instagram and TikTok or altogether. While our analysis of data showed us that it's not true. And then the major reason for the decline of the audience was related to the fact that Android version of Snapchat after the update becomes so slow that people over time gave up. Yeah, they just abandoned. They just started abandoning. 10 % of the slowest devices of Android users could have experienced up to 40 seconds before the feed with Stories would load.

1:21:39Next time when you will open some feed, like count to 40. 40 seconds, no way. I'll barely wait for four seconds. Exactly. So it was so obvious that this was the reason. But it took some time. We realized that we didn't have any specific position related to that in the company. and we realized that what we can do is actually to just bring all the insights which we were able to extract to Evan. To the engineering team, to Evan? And to just give him all the evidences so that more focus can be added to the problem and to making the app faster. Now, why do you think you guys spotted this? Because it doesn't sound like it's immediately your department or responsibilities.

1:22:24So was the narrative that it was, you know, the Jenners and the Kim Kardashians and then the competition, was that so accepted at face value that people weren't looking at the data? Or what happened? So there were several reasons. First of all, it's Android. Android. We're Android users. And among executives, it was a really rare thing to use Android as a day-to-day. Evan, he pushed himself to use Android to experience this all, what his users usually experience when they use Android. But we use Android as a day-to-day devices. We're hackers. We don't like limitations of Apple App Stores and close-up ecosystems.

1:23:08That's why we always were there. So when we developed our 3D avatars, it worked faster on Android than on iOS. And it was quite unique to compare to other products. And through this experience, we learned a lot about some limitations. And we already, at that moment, looked at some data just for our products to be launched properly. We wanted to fix Snapchat's Android app earlier just for our product to work. So we kind of had already some predispositions and beliefs related to that. Then, when the product was launched, we decided to research everything about the user behavior in order to understand how we can better position our product inside of the Snapchat ecosystem.

1:23:49And with such problems, the challenge, there are different methodologies. For example, there is a methodology to A-B test. When you launch, half of the users will see one version and half of the users will see a different version. And then you will compare the results. But with performance degradation, the result is delayed. It's not immediate. You cannot really like, it's really hard to A-B test. It's not apples to apples. Yes. So you need to wait for some time, you need data for a longer period of time. And more or less, you need to break it, give your users a bad version, wait for them to use it for a long enough period for you to see the difference in behavior.

1:24:29Sounds like a tough assignment. Yes, moral decision was never do that. So you shouldn't really make the experience of users worse intentionally. And as hackers, for us, it was like, okay, can we find a way how to get this data anyway? So we started to look at all the previous bugs. Accidental. Accidental mistakes. Degradations. Which led to, and then was discovered, but lasted for long enough so that we can actually extract the change in behavior data. Still, it's really important to note in the article in the New Yorker, the words not from us, that's why they are not as clear. there were people who also believe in this idea, not only us.

1:25:14It was basically their initiative. There were not enough momentum and not enough people who would work on this problem. There were really brilliant engineers who already, before that, started to rewrite. You could be good ambassadors for this. So we used our previously earned social capital. of building this avatar product. We need to just spend all the social capital on this problem. Otherwise, shares drop to$5 per share from 20 in the entire compensation of ours. In the equity, of course. In equity, of course. And also, we saw the opportunity. For us, we got through two major crises in our life, not counting the childhood crisis, financial crisis.

1:25:59That's why somehow for us, when it is a crisis, for us, it's a great time. Now we can show how we can hide. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Yes, exactly. And at some point, we just had to show that we're good engineers as well. In order to challenge the status quo, David had to sit down and fix camera. Snapchat is camera. And David made it load twice as fast. Not load, like when you press a button, how fast the picture would be ready. I showed that it can be the speed can be doubled and it was like oh wow so yes you are guys also great engineers as well so how did you do that and we showed some of the principles of how you can find inefficiencies in the code but still it's really important in a sense it was a really team effort all the great engineers actually was part of this process what we see as our contribution this promotion and bringing this voice to the decision makers so that they also will be empowered with data to then spread it to the entire organization.

1:27:10And that's definitely really great times. It worked. And even though Snapchat has some challenges right now with financial side of things, but with audience, since then it's growing. The audience is growing. They recently reached like 800 million. The audience is growing in the countries where the Androids are even slower. So the app actually is pretty significant, right? In terms of Android apps, it's still one of the fastest apps to load compared to the major apps out there. What was interesting as well, launching a new updated version only happened in March-ish of 2019. But it was also important, and we put lots of efforts into this program more than the other one, to fix the existing version.

1:27:57Before the new was released, the old had to be fixed in order to stop bleeding. And by December, the bleeding stopped. And in January, the audience started to grow. In March, the new version was released. It never actually slowed down since then. So I have a question about this type of data-driven analysis. Do you attempt to do this type of analysis with goals or challenges that you have in your personal lives? Do you try to apply it everywhere? Are there examples that you could give outside of the business context? First of all, we should note that we, as Daniel mentioned about intuition, we believe in both.

1:28:41We believe in intuition, we believe in data approach. but yes so for example one of our major principle is that we know what is compound growth and for example when we have some crazy goals crazy for some people they will set some goals and these goals are seems to be impossible what we show again and again that actually if you have goals like for example number of followers or number of dollars in your pocket quantifiable things what you can do is that you can evaluate what you have right now and then if you can multiply this number two if you can double two times a year actually every year if you can double yourself It is greatness.

1:29:35You have the entire money on Earth, the entire population of following, etc. So it's really important when you have these big goals. You can't have any big goal with this approach. But you just don't need to run faster than doubling the number two times every year. Actually, what we realize is that there is this corridor. There's probably a physical limitation at the top, which is around 2.4. Like you cannot run faster than increasing your results 2.4 times a year in a long run. But what we realized is that it's actually a really tiny corridor. If you increase this number 1.6 times, you're successful.

1:30:18If you increase this number 2.4 times, you're superhuman. So this is only a small corridor. You don't need to think about something faster. Anything slower is just like a normal life. Now this is multiplying your KPI by 1.7 times? Every year. Every year. Once per year. Once per year. Yes. And we applied it a lot in our life, in our business life, in the life of our companies, in our personal life. So we use this methodology. How do you apply it? What would be an example from the personal life? Maybe it doesn't have to follow that doubling heuristic. It could, but what might be an example? But for example, amount of hours you spent with a romantic partner you inspired by.

1:31:05Okay. And so you would track the hours and then look to multiply that over time. So you shouldn't expect that immediately you would start a relationship, which would be perfect. And you will spend all the time, and all this time would be perfect and great, etc. But if you have one hour of this experience a year, the next year it can be two hours, the next year it can be four hours. For some it might sound like... In 10 years you have the entire life like that. Slow build. Slow build. And we just realized that when you try to run faster, you can actually break yourself. I see what you're saying.

1:31:47So you can make a mistake by saying, okay, I'm going to spend half of my time this year with this person because you're sort of biting off more than you can chew. Yeah. And maybe shooting yourself in the foot for the long term. Yes. Okay. So basically having an eye towards growth but not being excessively ambitious in the beginning because you'll break things. Yes. I know on personal experience, yes. This is like when you want too much right away, you break stuff. Yeah, I can see that. As someone who's got physical breakage also. Yeah, but even with the acceleration when you're in a rocket flying to space, there is this limitation of like 3G, like three times G, which then actually start breaking stuff in your cells.

1:32:34So it seems that it's kind of natural number. This is what we can sustain, like 2.4, like 2, 1.6. This is something which we can sustain physically and mentally. And you can honestly find it anywhere. You want to play music? Just start from something achievable right now, today. Double your result every year. And you will become like a Beyonce superstar. Certainly true with physical activity too. If you think about weightlifting or whatever, you don't need to 10x the number every year. And if you try, like I've tried, then you start damaging your connective tissue or needing surgery. one of the Olympic teams was it in UK or something I don't remember exactly but they got a new trainer and the new trainer was coach was with this approach but the approach was like we need to improve our KPIs 1 % a week, it's almost the same and they become champions from nowhere like the last position in the list they become champions but physical activity is the same in business activity writing books, money, finance music but really important is that you can achieve anything you can have any type of mission or big goals but then you write this you like draw this as long as you're consistent for yourself yeah and be consistent what are some of the logistics challenges and how have you addressed them in running your businesses how you run them or organizing your lives the way that you guys organize them?

1:34:14We have a very messed up calendar. It's like multidimensional.

1:34:23Does that mean that you're just traveling all over the place? We travel a lot for sure. We probably like this year were in the States for three months all over the year but at home like at home in LA even less time than that. Maybe like One week a month, not more than that. But what helped a lot, it started with two of us, but quite fast, two of our sisters joined. And they usually... And they don't travel that much. And they usually run operations and scaling of their projects. Do any of your other siblings have the pair bonding that you guys have? No, no, it didn't work. But five of us, we are quite close.

1:35:04And we work together. We work together, we live together in LA. Like our house is literally like two minutes away from each other. Yes, and they start to run our operations since game development, and then they become equal partners in animation studio. And since then, it's much easier for us to dream more and to act. No, now we discuss everything together, like philosophy, the vision for the future, the morality. It's a constant discussion among all of us. So I can imagine, I'm just putting myself in the place of people listening to this, that I'm sure there are people out there who work with family.

1:35:47And then there are other people who don't work with family, but I imagine working with my family. And I love my family, but I'm like, wow, if I hired two people from my family to run my operations, what do you do if it's not working? I mean, would you ever fire them or do you just have complete confidence that you can resolve anything that might come up? How do you think about? You definitely can fire, but for sure, we went through a really harsh experience with game development studio bankruptcy. And they were the only ones who stayed with us through the challenging period. Yes. And when you actually went through such experience, it's much easier to trust.

1:36:27Not trust just because it's family, but because you know what you can expect. You saw how they behaved. And especially in venture business, when, as we mentioned, most of your attempts would fail. It is really important quality to have someone who you can trust that they are with you long term, not just for this project. I would say this worked pretty well. Maybe this was the result of this experience, which we all had. But maybe just because our parents worked together. for us. We didn't have this concept that it's not right. Never work with your family. No! And we went through challenges. Definitely we argue with each other, etc.

1:37:09So we went through a lot of challenges, but it's worth it. I was thinking also as you saw your sisters, I suppose, doing the challenges of the game development company has reminded me of a quote. I don't know the attribution, but in English, there's a common expression, adversity builds character, but the alternative, which I think might be just as true or maybe truer, is adversity doesn't build character, it reveals character. And so you got to see how they responded to a lot of challenge, which gave you the confidence then. And there were a lot of challenges. We are lucky in many ways. I want to ask you about, this is the same question applied to two different groups.

1:37:54So the first is going to be your parents, and I want to just ask about what ideas of theirs you find most interesting. Maybe that's a place to talk about climatics, maybe not. Then the second is, what ideas you guys are most excited about right now? But I wanted to start with the parents. Do we have a couple more hours for each? Yeah. So our parents, so our dad, he was from physics. But he was, by government, pushed out from physics because he was Jew. And switched to biophysics? Biology? Biology, because biophysics was an open field. So physics was more protected and Jews were more discriminated against in physics.

1:38:39So he found this niche. It was a new niche. It was an emerging new science. And he came there with knowledge of physics. And that gave him a different perspective than most of the biologists. who would see everything through the prism of chemistry or through the prism of biology. He looked at it through the prism of physics. And he started discovering things faster in this field. Starting with the first thing which he discovered was that the color which was received by an eye is encoded not in the frequency, which is then translated as a signal inside of the eye nerve, but as a pattern of a signal in between the spikes.

1:39:27So it's almost like a Morse. And this is sort of like... And that's how he realized that it should be a computer there, that it should be a computation because the encoding happened. He came to this idea through a really interesting weird obsession of his on the idea that if evolution was working properly for millions of years, if not billions of years, then it should be optimal. That the most optimal mechanism should have survived the evolution process. And therefore, what's the most optimal from the physics perspective in terms of measuring the amount of energy spent on the operation and data?

1:40:11He's like, time. Time in between the quantum events. This is probably the most optimal one. And that, like, from this perspective, he was, like, from the perspective of optimality, he was trying to find how the eye works, and he was the one to discover exactly how it works. And he's like, wow, so I was right about optimality. And then he used optimality all the way down, exploring into the nerve, into the neuron, and into the core of the cell, into the DNA, and then, like, cross the entire cell. So, chimatic was the abbreviation of chemistry, optics, and mathematics. So he always believed that the real discoveries are in combination of different fields.

1:40:57That actually the fact that we learn this subject separately limiting us in terms of us being able to discover some things which requires you to look at that. Interdisciplinary synthesis. In their success, both like that and my, the success was because of that. they would combine things which others wouldn't combine. For example, he brought quantum physics into describing cells' processes. So even here, like maybe 2008, 2010, it was really a marginalized idea in science. They were trying to avoid as much as possible some complicated processes in biology because it will challenge the idea that it happened randomly and they were trying to avoid that.

1:41:44And only recently, more and more discoveries around photosynthesis, which probably requires quantum tunneling, and then the smell, and the fact that the birds can see the direction of... Polarization of light. Polarization of light, and like where is North Pole. This all can be described only through the quantum properties of some processes which happen inside. In life? So biggest discovery, which we personally, like it's the last discovery, you know, like it's always like that. It's not just discovery, it's like the entire concept that our consciousness works through the quantum compute inside every single neuron.

1:42:26Every single neuron is sort of a qubit. It's like a quantum state machine itself, which then combined in the network produce all the results. But every neuron is quantum state machine. This can actually explain a lot about our psychology, about how we think, how our consciousness works. But also it can give humanity a lot of clues how to build proper quantum computers. So currently, the quantum computers which we build, like Google builds or Microsoft builds, they all require some really complicated environments. So you need to froze the computers to like minus 270 degrees. fully isolated from any chaotic electromagnetic fields and stuff.

1:43:09So it's really complicated while if our parents write in every cell this process is happening at room temperature so we can actually look at how biology made it and then build a new class of quantum computers which can actually be in your watch and then this can accelerate the personal AI development, not the corporation's big AI, but the one which would be with you always and things like that. Plus, there is a chance also as well that if these processes are happening inside of the cell, the answer to a room temperature superconductors can also be there somewhere. I know that recently there was this entire hype with supposedly discovery of the room temperature superconductors.

1:44:00It seems that it didn't work this time fully, but we all were so excited because it can change everything. Understanding the quantum levitation, all roads can be done from superconductors. If all roads can be done, then we have flying cars. The same roads can then become the electric network, which distributes electricity around the globe from sustainable sources of energy, like solar panels. We have days somewhere each hour, all the time. And if the superconductors can surround the planet, then we have electricity everywhere without the losing of power. Lots of stuff can come from the superconductors.

1:44:45The answer can be inside of our cells. And the biggest discovery was that the answer can be inside of the cells. if we can actually look at the properties of these nanotubes. And they are really special. Right now, there are a lot of discoveries showing that these nanotubes have properties which no one would expect that they would have. Even though we all know about physics and chemistry, but we cannot predict these properties. Because this is recent, probably not even published, or maybe some discussions in the conferences is happening that the nanotubes of that sort, the cytoskeleton nanotubes, microtubulars, they can capture photons.

1:45:28They can capture light and direct it within its structure. As the light actually hits the microtubular, the photon goes inside the tube, as if it's a cord which captures the light. So a lot of really unexpected and great properties which can be used in industries and which can be used by humanity to just accelerate our developments. What is important is that they just realized that to achieve that, we need to be interdisciplinary and we need to combine. Through the last years, he was a promoter, that he believed that in schools we should teach kids like that. Not to teach physics and chemistry and biology, but teach it all together and show how all this interconnected, in that we need to kind of grow a new generation of scientists who wouldn't be so silent in disciplines.

1:46:23All right, so I want to segue to the ideas that you guys are currently most excited about. Thank you for explaining all that. I could spend hours just digging into what you just said, maybe another time. But since you mentioned teaching, which relates to learning, how would you teach kids to code or people to code versus how it's maybe currently taught so first of all we we saw that computer science historically emerged from mathematics and geeky minds like ours and so it's really great for us but for most people it's really alienating. Because if you're not good in math, you, mathematics, you will just avoid even learning, because you will think that you are not really great at that.

1:47:12In reality, coding is much closer to learning French or Japanese. It's actually easier. A friend of mine published a small book, which was basically code is poetry. That's interesting. Can you share it? Because we actually also wrote a tiny book like Code is Language. Sure, sure. I'll find it for you. I'll find it for you. And I'm not sure if he published it, but he gave it away as a gift. Matt Mullenwick, who's the founder and CEO of Automatic and was one of the lead developers, arguably the lead developer of WordPress. Probably need to combine our thoughts in one book and then publish it. I'll find it for you.

1:47:48I created, during pandemic, I had some additional time, so I created an interactive book where you learn that you can actually first type something in a normal language. description of the world. Description of the product? And then it can be easily translated by you into coding language, like Python or C++ or Swift. It's literally like a translation. First, you wrote it in your own language and then you translate it into the code. So the only thing which you need to learn is this a little bit different way to describe the world. And that's what mostly you should learn. You shouldn't learn the words.

1:48:31and punctuation and in orthographics of this language. And if you use these methods to learn, then you can actually code in any language because it appears that Swift or C++, they're all the same, they're all interchangeable. Every time when I interview an engineer and this engineer would say that, oh, I know only this language, this would be a red flag for me because it means that you don't really understand. And all this language is like, they're almost the same. Yes, there are nuances, but you almost don't have tasks which actually require you to use these nuances. But if you understand the meta language, and this meta language is really close to real human natural language, then you can actually code in any language.

1:49:15And that's what we really promote. And we happen to actually teach some people coding who would never think that they can code and who would think that mathematics is not theirs. Like moms of two. housewives. And they are great. Because they're great in language. And if you're great in language, you can actually learn this language as well. Especially right now, even though, yes, chat GPTs of the world, they can code for yourself. But if you know how to code, you will be well off in the next 12, 20 years, 10, 20 years. So for people who are listening, if they are resonating with what you're saying, so for instance, I'm a casualty of mathematics.

1:49:58I was actually very good at math. My brother also very good at math. And we had very different experiences with teachers. So he had a few great teachers, and I had one very, very angry, kind of abusive teacher. And so I said, no more math for me, even though I was innately quite good at it. He kept going and got PhD into statistics, and he's very math capable. but I sort of developed a, I had like an adolescent onset allergy, but I recognize the beauty and elegance and value of code. I don't think I would ever use it as a profession, but I liked the idea of testing myself, but I've always struggled with trying to identify how to start.

1:50:39And I've looked at AI as maybe a way to use an intermediary so I can use natural language to do some type of coding. But how would you suggest to someone who is interested, maybe a little nervous, but would like to explore coding? There is a free book on our Instagram. There is link which you can try. It's definitely only the first step, then you will need to learn more. But at least through the step, our expectation that you will stop being nervous and afraid of coding. Right. That's step one. that's why we wrote this book just to make it easy because I don't like any other courses because they all like start with syntaxes etc it's not the way you start there are great they are great courses it's just like not the way you start because you alienate people who are like oh function what is function I don't know anything about coding but it's the same with foreign languages I mean it's like you see the way that they're taught and it's like okay here's a huge table of conjugations memorize this and people are like, no thanks, I'm out.

1:51:42I'm like, no, no, here's a comic book. Let's look at some things you can use immediately, make it fun, and then later we can do the harder stuff. And also what we found, and that's how we learn how to code, is that usually when you learn language, you first read, not write, you read. And you need to read some easy but good written book to learn the language. Software engineering is the same. Like we actually... We mocked an Instagram application. We rewrote. We wrote a clean code of a simple Instagram application. Because everyone knows what it is and everyone understands how it works. So if you read this code, you understand what...

1:52:23And then in the middle of the course, you're just, okay, now change. Now change some stuff in the code and you will see the changes in the app. And as you change the parts of the code, you see the changes in the app and you're like, oh, that's how it works. Also positive feedback. Yes. And also, even if you decide not to be an engineer, even, for example, if you're a product person, product manager, or marketing person, it's really important for you to understand. Otherwise, you won't be able to give properly the tasks to engineers. You won't be able to manage engineers. And you're losing a lot of opportunities.

1:52:59you will always be triggered by engineers because you will ask them to do something but they will do something really different if you don't really understand their language but as soon as you do it actually I wish we had more time and more like eager to actually finish the full course but it's absolutely not the primary goal you know like hectic life as well so but I'll link to that in the show notes so that people are interested can at least find it and give it a shot. I might do the same thing. So ideas, exciting ideas. Exciting ideas. Could be projects, could be missions, could be ideas. Just things that have you both feeling excited and motivated.

1:53:46First, observations, which we have about the world. And this observation gave us a different perspective. And this perspective has almost obviously led us to some ideas. And then usually when we have ideas, these ideas exist in us for some years, and then we're trying to crystallize them in the project. One of the major observations, which actually started from bankruptcy of Game Development Studio, we really wanted to understand what was that. What the hell happened when the financial crisis? How we missed it? Not that we missed it. We saw that there was a problem in the real estate market, but everything collapsed around real estate market.

1:54:31We thought that just real estate market will collapse, but everything collapsed. Little did we know about how the financial market works. Yes. So then we dig deeper. In Get First, we got to the same conclusions that everyone, like economists. derivatives, credit default swaps this all adds to this bubble subprimes, like all this stuff yes, people usually, like when it's about derivative and credit default swaps blame the bankers like, oh, bankers, they made this deregulation, they are the problem and that's how it all happens but we usually, like, every time when we have a statement we check it with data and we decide who was the actual beneficiary of the credit default swaps Not of their fall, but of them being created and popularized that way.

1:55:23And then we realized that most of the credit default swaps through some vehicles, they were owned by pension funds. And we're like, what? Because we're from a region where pension funds are really small. Pensioners are really poor people. And you would never think that they own some multi-trillion dollar... Huge. Yes. Huge. Pensions in the United States are like, what is it? $40 trillion. It's more than the entire publicly traded market combined. You will combine all Apple, Google, Exxon, Walmart. You will combine all these companies. It's smaller than the assets of pension funds. Altogether, less than the assets of pension funds.

1:56:09So through this prism, we started to learn more and more like how the hell it happened. And it was a great invention. I mean, the fact that the United States is the greatest economy in the world is because of this. So we realized it's not because of the army, not because of military. It's actually saving some big chunk of their money, and the money was not just saved, but was invested into the market. And that's how market got all the capital to grow, etc., etc., etc. But then we realized that, unfortunately, as soon as this population not only grew to the amount that are the majority of voters, but also they have this enormous financial power.

1:56:50The financial power bigger than the banks, bigger than any other organization. So this financial power and this voting power... Together combined? led to a lot of popular political decisions and regulations, which was completely false. What types of things? We can give you some taste of it. Yeah, for example, when we first came to the United States, we learned about student debt. And for you, it's obvious. It's the United States, everything is commercial, that's why college is not free. That's how we got to the student debt. But the student debt, if you will look at the size, before 2000, it was a really small problem.

1:57:35It's now like$2 trillion. But before that, it was a much, much, much, much smaller problem. And what we realized that previously, like in the 80s, your tuition when you go to state college would be mostly subsidized by government. Like 90 % of your tuition would be subsidized by government. That's how your parents were able to actually pay for their tuition during the summer job. And that's how the debt never accumulated as much. But in late 80s, beginning of 90s, because of almost a bankruptcy state of public pension funds, the governments in different states and in federal level as well, made a decision to not only bail out, but also for the future protect these pension funds.

1:58:30For example, in California, the growth of public pension funds, including teachers' funds, guaranteed on a level of 7.8 % a year. Imagine that your deficit would be guaranteed as a level. From a state budget. And it's not even average. A state budget. So the subsidies to education went down as a result. Yes. Exactly. You can see tons of information become publicly available online. You can trace it. You can trace it. It's all there. Tons of data, but if you like to dig in this data, you can find it. It's just there. You can see it. You can like, all right, the money goes into the education, then...

1:59:08To the pension. To the pension, like a Calsper's in California. Yes, it's a public pension fund, pension fund of public workers and pension fund of teachers of California. No one really realized the size of these funds. And no one really realized the gap in between... Assets and liabilities of these funds. So when everyone discusses that the pension funds are underfunded, it's only public pension funds. Like$5 trillion of a gap. $5 trillion. This is accounting the money which is constantly transferred from subsidies to the pension funds. Someone might think that this is just public workers. They're probably 15 % of workforce in the United States.

1:59:57And yet, the size of their pension funds is half of all pension funds. Even though it's only 15 % of workforce. Why? Because of a guaranteed 7.8 % annual gross. Because when the rest of the market goes down, up, down, up... So, and this problem is not only education. If you look at the police, you know, there was this big movement of unfunding police. And we looked at the budgets. And per person in LA, for example, per officer in LA, it's almost like 250 ,000, 250 ,000 a year. And people was very angry about that. Like, what the hell? Like, we pay you a lot and like, you're not doing your job.

2:00:38The real workers right now and the real officers right now are not paid as much. And they get only a tiny portion of it. And most of it goes to the transfer for pension funds for officers who worked 30 years ago. So where does this lead? You guys are looking at the data, and I suppose a good set of data ideally allows you to have some predictive ability, or at least speculation ability. So what do you do with this? Zooming out to a larger picture. What it led to is that through the generations, starting from boomers, I know this is like a false science about dividing people into those generations, but we can...

2:01:18People who was born around 50s, yes, let's say. The boomers, as they were getting into 30 years old on average as a generation, owned something around 21, 23 percent of national wealth in the United States. That following generation Gen Xs, at the same average age, owned around seven. Us, the millennials, by the same age, owned only less than 3 percent, like 2.8-ish. and then the trajectory shows us that together with the crisis which happened during the COVID we can expect that the next generation after us, the Gen Z going to be in debt by the same average age on average as a generation they're still going to be in debt so trajectory really bad and also what this creates that if these young people not if, when they realize that the social agreement is not working social structures will start to fall apart.

2:02:20What do you think are some likely ways that that will show up? We will see like the new wave of unions, protests, people not working, economy slowing down, this stuff. New business is not created. We can see from the statistics that over the last 10 years, the share of the new business is created in the United States. And in the United States, lots of new businesses created every year. lots of them never survive the year but like that's the case you create many many many businesses and lots of them die and the some of them survive and that's the economy so the share of the new businesses created annually in the united states by the people under 30 years old used to be 40 percent or 45 let's say 40 and now 10 years later now it's a 30 it down 10 percent it was the same number of companies being built just by younger and older or is the total number more companies the total number is sort of the same it's just like not young people creating them it's people 55 plus creating them that's surprising that's surprising you know what like i would expect i never checked the data but my intuition tells me all those businesses are just real estate People buying houses and renting them out.

2:03:37So nothing new is created. Just the spike in the price in real estate is just because they're buying and renting out. And those are the new businesses. So there are a lot of problems. But still, when you talk about the problems, it's really important to also at least propose some solutions in what we saw because we realized that this shift is based on regulations. It's not natural that this shift is happening. It's a regulation. that the rules which were set by the previous generations which making this constant transfer. We realized that if you would decipher these regulations, what they did, that they made a preference to equity, to like shares of the companies, et cetera, compared to the income.

2:04:24So capital gain is taxed less. Like there are a lot of things which actually made the huge difference between equity, how equity is treated by the regulation and by the market. And personally. And how personally. Got it, right. The taxation. Everything. The incentives. The pension funds can invest in that, but they cannot invest in that, in things like that. So there are limitations set, not naturally. If you have all the capital, like the majority of the capital is pension capital, then where it can be invested matters a lot. Sure. So in this term, we realized that the solution which we can test and propose...

2:05:05At least try. ...is to try to convert income... Individual income. ...into securities. Okay. So this is where the Lieberman's company comes in? Yes. First time we did this... To ourselves. To ourselves. As a scientist, you need to make the experiments, and the experiments first... I wish more scientists did this. Yes. You've got to be the first monkey shot into space. Yes, exactly. At less than three Gs. So even though our income is not stable, but if you will build a model around all the founders, all tech founders, and the probabilities of successes during the period of time, we can build an income model, like you would do with a company projection.

2:05:51Risk-weighted, risk-adjusted cash flow projection of an entrepreneur. And then based on this... Like a value stock. Yes. And then based on these projections, you can actually set a price for a company which would have the same type of income. In this case, if you can form the company, then you can attract investment the same way companies do. And in this case, you will eliminate this bias and vice versa, we'll be supercharged by improving your future. So supercharged, just to try to ensure I'm hearing you correctly. So supercharged meaning if you're showing a decent rate of growth, even though you're capital constrained, if you can bring in equity investors who invest in you as if you were a company, you can accelerate your growth and potential.

2:06:42And then we can average this as an index across some cohorts of specific professions or specific cohorts like students, for example. You have higher education or you don't have higher education. How does it change your average income in the United States? Should we invest in every kid to have the good higher education for them to increase their individual income? And that's where investors get their money back. Or should we just leave it the way it is right now with the loan, which then suppresses the wheel to go and risk? And that's how young people don't create new businesses and just go find a shitty job.

2:07:23So how do you think you incentivize this type of wider adoption and data sharing? Because I can imagine if let's just say we flash forward and this has been widely adopted now, I can choose, do I want to invest in people who are getting accounting degrees, or maybe I have a more reliable return on my investment year on year? or do I want to invest in the growth stocks that have much higher volatility, like the entrepreneurs of a certain class or maybe age bracket, where it's going to be a much riskier by volatility measurements investment, but who knows, the gains could be higher. How do you go from a single proof of concept?

2:08:03I have also questions about taxation, just if you're being taxed at an ordinary income level, how you translate that effectively to equity holders who might be your investors. let's just say, but we could tackle any one of those. So it could be like, how do you contend with maybe the handicap of having ordinary income taxed, even though that's presumably what people are investing in on some level, like the discounted cash flow or whatever. And then how do you take this and encourage other people to experiment with it? We start with ourself as tech entrepreneurs, because most of our income comes from building companies and selling companies or making companies publicly traded.

2:08:44There is no difference whether you registered this company under your name or you registered this company under a holding company name. That's a great point. You guys are actually operating in a very easier case, straightforward case because most of your gains would be from companies therefore likely long-term capital gains. Maybe you have USBS exclusions et cetera, versus if you guys were like very high paid lawyers or something, it could get a lot trickier. Yes, we went through that example. Thousands of entrepreneurs can actually show in their example that it works for the investors. And then if it works for the investors, then we can introduce new regulations, which will make it work for the professionals, let's say software engineers, doctors, lawyers, and from there go to even wider groups like students.

2:09:35There need to be even more regulations because kids need to be protected and stuff like this. It's all possible to be done. So we're pretty sure that at least some politicians will see that their voters can benefit out of it and that they can actually live better life. And the problems like student debts can be solved in just really short term by the tools like that. We hope that some rules will change. Right now, most of the pension funds are invested in really bubbled, overpriced assets, just because it's too much money and not that much of instruments, like financial instruments, to actually generate the growth.

2:10:21That's why they needed this accredited swaths, etc. Because they need these derivatives, because it was just too much money to invest. and so if they will be invested in people everyone will win like pension funds will win people will win it's just the growth of the economy would be much faster it's likely going to be 10 times larger market to invest in when we start investing in individual income as equity what do you say to people who think about this and they're like okay I'm sure there are cases where this would be very attractive at least initially right so you might have somebody like a very promising YouTuber, they want to build out a studio and hire.

2:11:03I guess they could go out and raise like an equity round. That's what we did. Okay. But with individual income, like into YouTubers. Okay. So how, now, do you think if somebody is really successful that they would try to renegotiate or that they would not try to renegotiate? There is an example. It's not us. It was before us. There is a fund which invested in college athletes. And they proposed to every college athlete. They took the statistics because it's quite statistical. It's like a money ball type of a game. Like they calculated their weight to understanding how to predict how many students they should invest in in order to basically hit the...

2:11:45Have a couple of LeBron James. Exactly. Yes, and they offered every student around like... The same price. 5-10 % investment. We're buying 5-10 % of your future income and we pay you the same price. It's$10 million of... So half a million, million, 5 to 10%. 70 students agreed. Athletes. One of them already netted a 15-year contract for$350 million. So they did great with the fund. Yeah, they did pretty well. There is one athlete who tried to challenge this agreement in court. This one athlete challenge? One athlete. Was it the same athlete? No. This one, there is a great interview of him where he explains that this money actually helped him a lot.

2:12:27The last decision in his life. He would never do another decision. I'm just imagining, like, he might be cool with it, but I'm thinking about, like, the managers and the agents who are like, what the fuck is this? But it worked out. Yes, it worked out for everyone. But there is another athlete who netted, like, three, four million dollar a year type of contract. He tried to challenge this in the court. And everything in this case is more complicated than with our case. He was 16 when he signed. English wasn't his main language. And things like that. So he signed and still court was on the side of investors.

2:13:03Upheld the agreement. How can people find more about this particular example if they wanted to Google something? I will send you a link. You can send it to me and we'll put it in the show notes. Yes, I think it was in Wall Street Journal, the description of all this case. But also I can send you the links to the court case because all the court cases, they open. So you can see all the arguments. and arguments of the court, they were about the fact that he did well. So it's not about investors taking the last three-way view, I think like that. So he did well. And also investors described all the scenarios.

2:13:40In the agreement that there is a scenario that you will do well, and in this case, we'll get this amount of money. So they described all the scenarios. Precisely described. Moreover, I don't remember what was in their contract, But in our contract, when we... With your investors. With our investors, and when we invest in other people ourselves... We also invest in other founders. We also invested already in around a dozen people. We have this... Minimal sum, which we don't touch a year. Minimal sum, which we don't... Minimal income of yours, before which we are not getting anything. Okay, yeah, there's a hurdle, right?

2:14:12There's a hurdle. We actually aim to have the outliers. It's a power law distribution. It's a power law. In most industries, there is this power law. It's not only in tech, it's just in art, in podcasts. Our opinion about this, we will all win. The market will win. Society will win. Humanity will win from the fact that we will use this power law for wider groups of people to invest in them, provide them capital and provide them chance to get a higher education, to try to start a business. So question about your investments. Yes. And we can look at it at least two different ways. So one could be your investors and why they chose to invest in you guys.

2:14:56But since you guys made the decisions about your investments, I'm curious about those people. To what extent did you choose them based on their earning potential and so on versus their potential to be a good ambassador or story for this model? Because they both seem to matter. Yes, now we care about both. Like a good investment may have the financial ROI, but there's also showcasing. Because we have not that much money to invest in every people we want, we needed to pick those who will be a good story. So definitely we will look at both. So in terms of investors in us, the first investor who supported us.

2:15:36He did not allow us to back off. Like how to say back up. Yeah. And we were almost ready to say like, to give up. It's like, okay, we're not doing this. and he's like, no, no, no, guys, you have to do this. Like, please. Sam Lessin. He actually had the similar idea when he was out of high school in 2001. He is one of the general partners of Slow Ventures. So he invested in us. But then other prominent names like Mark Andreessen or Chris Dixon or Josh Kushner, they all invested in the departments. But we earned it. It did work right away, but we made the first round. then we proved some results, then we made the second round, like with the startups.

2:16:19So when we invest, for us, definitely it means a lot that we want to find really great examples, because all these examples will affect the future of the idea, and this will help others to get access to the same type of resources. But what's more important for us, the major thing is whether we believe in this situation if the person will continue building after failing yeah that's a big one that's a big one because you're not just investing in one yes we don't invest in one company moreover we would come and already did this through the last year and a half as we're investing in people we came to people and said like quit it drop it i mean that's not worth your time it's not working like switch to something new you will never hear about this you will never ever hear something like that from the investor who invested in this particular company.

2:17:10If I invested in you personally, I am mostly interested in your success. And if you are locked yourself into something which you're like, no, no, no, I got to do this because this is failure. It's not failure. It's an attempt. 70 % of those attempts are going to end up with zero. So just move on. Start next one. You'll be successful later. with sam is probably our like best relationship with the investors so far ever um so because it can be really open in not just uh you know like showing the good uh results but also showing the things which are not working struggles because now we like in a different type of relationship and we really like it and we actually we have challenging experiences with investors I don't think Sam's going to take you to any basements.

2:18:00Yes. Seems unlikely. Exactly. But not even that. I mean, he's fully supporting us. The same when we invest. So we understand that some of the founders we invest, they already failed with their current projects. And they started the new one. And we were the ones who support them through this process. Some of them are coming through hard times. And we would say, go for a sabbatical. Go to Vipassan. Go to the basement. Take care of yourself. You need to be super efficient and you need to be happy with your own life. Long term, you need to be efficient. Long term, this will score us much more than if you're like, well, destroy yourself right now.

2:18:39Yes, and we already have a really beautiful examples when founders were able, through this freedom, were able to act the way they wouldn't act. And it's already gave them results. and like we completely enjoy with the passes of all the people who we invested in and they're all very different different stories different individuals different uh spheres like it's everywhere from youtuber to like uh reinventing quantum physics yes and with youtuber marina she is actually really also awesome example she is a founder she had the startup but to create a marketing vehicle for the startup she created a youtube channel and then you to this youtube channel media empire becoming like a much larger thing than the startup making like a million plus a year a year but a mortgage family kids it's all risk which you like you wouldn't bet all of your income to the growth yes she was growing fast but as soon as she got like the understanding that she can use a capital from her future like literally this is what we are doing this is capital from your future if you are doing as you are doing right now then clearly you're gonna have that amount of money in the future you can take part of this money which already almost exists into the current into the present time and use it in order to make your future even more successful so this brings up something that i wasn't sure we would get to but i figure i can bring it up time machine is it possible well there's the time machine but there's also maybe the and i go back and forth on how i feel about this but the i guess we could you could look to the data if you have such data and there is some it would seem but the maybe the over fetishizing of suffering and how that contributes to success or the belief that the more one struggles, the more likely you are to have outside success.

2:20:44Because those make for good stories, right? Somebody suffers for their whole life, and then they show how much they can persevere, and then they succeed. But if you look at some of the examples that you mentioned earlier, of the dropout and then the big company, these are not stories of abject suffering from the earliest stages of childhood, generally. So would you say, and this is tying it to what you just said that by relieving some of those pressures with the mortgage and the kids you're improving the likelihood of a bigger success later or somebody could certainly look at it and say well she's not going to be as hungry so we have uh you know lots to say about this subject that's why i'm asking um a if we will look at the most successful experiment of all times for the humanity, providing free school education, free school education for everyone, doesn't matter whether they're the smartest kid on the street or not, like every kid gave us more than any other investment which we as a humanity, like infrastructures and stuff, no.

2:21:52Providing free education is this, like a capital early on. It was a controversial idea like 100 years ago. It's an expensive investment to provide education for every kid. Expensive investment. And we scored a beautiful world, gave a lot to us. So providing a little bit more of the same can give us unexpected results. The different perspective is if we look at majority of the unicorns created in the United States and look at who were the founders of those companies. And these are companies worth a billion or more. Those companies worth a billion or more? A big share of them, like most of them are from upper middle class families.

2:22:35They never struggled as us. They never went through real like poverty type of situation. Losing all the money on the bank accounts and stuff like this. You know, all the stories about dropouts from college. They never had the student debt. Parents paid for their college and that's how they afforded to do that. The other thing that gets left out of those stories is when you drop out of a fancy school, they always let you come back. Generally. It's not like you burn the ships behind you. Exactly. And then the last one. No problem, not the last one, but the one also the last one for me, then David will tell something.

2:23:14The struggle will come. It doesn't matter if you have millions of dollars, you will always be struggling because you strive to achieve more and it's challenging. and it's not necessary that the struggle is needed but it will be there doesn't matter if you're rich or not like what was this rich people also cry

2:23:44not going to wear that t-shirt around but yeah I mean that's true and the challenge comes especially when you started a startup you wanted to succeed also human nature is human nature Life is suffering. It's going to fine. You don't worry. Sounds sorry. Still here. But in general, with this argument, we hear a lot that founders should struggle. So we struggled a lot through our founder's path. We were like, no resources in the country where investments are always considered as a debt you need to put as a collateral your house and things like that. Compared to San Francisco. where there is no collateral, you can have a salary.

2:24:29In our case, we were prohibited to have a salary as the founders. You should have the skin in the game, they say. No salary, that's hardcore. So hardcore. If you compare this experience with Silicon Valley experience, this is a struggle. Not a struggle at all. So most of the successful companies you know would never exist without venture capital. Venture capital is money in advance. It's actually not struggling. Struggling is having the cash flow and building your bootstrap business. Most of the companies are not like that because some levels of achievements, at least in some areas, they require this freedom for you to actually risk and to try things.

2:25:21That's why we believe that some struggle is needed, but we believe that not on the level we have right now. You don't have to manufacture it. And there will always be competition. But student loan, which just stops most of young people in the United States from actually taking the risks early and to achieve more. And later, too. I know people in their 30s who still haven't paid off their, and I'm not talking early 30s, like mid, later 30s. especially if they go to an extended graduate school or professional school, they're still paying off student debt. This is unneeded struggle. This is really an optimal, not needed, artificial struggle, because we know that the subsidized money is paid through taxes by people, but it's just spent on a different stuff.

2:26:11Goes somewhere else. So we don't believe in this idea that this struggle is needed. and vice versa, we believe that the different local maximum, which would be much higher in terms of the size of the economy, is in the place where we removed some of the struggles, especially those which are artificial in an economy. It's just like trying to imagine what it is 10 times higher. More electricity, more power, more roads, more cars, more education, more whatever, more everything, 10 times more everything. This is when the abundance is probably likely to be close to reality. And that's what we can do in this new local maximum.

2:26:56If we just change the perspective on what's worse to invest in, the individual income or the undying companies. The companies are dying. On average, they live actually less than human beings. Like all the statistics is for people in their potential, but all the regulations are supporting for companies. Yes. It's obvious why it's this way. Because in the past, we needed this invention of limited liability companies in order to remove the personal obligations, individual obligations over the business. Like when your ship is sunk in the sea, now you own not only all of your money, your house, but your family can be taken and enslaved.

2:27:47Like we are far away from this world, like hundreds of years away from this world. So now we can elevate. Through the innovation of like limited liability and then the public market. And this is all innovation in the way how we see the market and the way we look at the market. But we are ready for the new innovation. and this new innovation can uplift the economy. So question for you guys, I'll answer it first too. So what would you, what requests would you like to make of my audience? So very diverse audience across many countries, many places. Most of them are interested on some level in technology, not all of them.

2:28:26Well, let's be honest, all humans are interested in technology. They just might not recognize it as technology. As I said, like a mental liability company is a technology. Is a technology, right? We all use tools. That's the reason that homo sapiens have done what they've done. Good and bad. But my request for my audience would be to send me links to some of the biological and biophysics topics that you both discussed earlier. Very interested in all of that. including quantum effects and potentially bird vision or olfaction. All of this is of great interest to me. So people can shoot those to me on Twitter at T.

2:29:08Ferris or elsewhere. But what requests would you like to make of my audience or places you'd like to point them? Anything at all? Two things. First, there is a conference about quantum biology near San Diego in the 20th, 18th of August. All right, here we go. Best scientists right now are gathering. It's still quite a small group of people. That's why they're really supportive to each other. Even though they should compete with each other, but they actually are quite supportive to each other. We will be in the conference as well. But what we would ask is actually, first, to think, who would be those individuals you would invest in?

2:29:51likely all of us have someone who we're like this guy is going to be very successful second is send this information out to us so if you know the great person you would invest you would invest your money probably we also should invest and the third one is think that maybe you should invest in this person as well maybe it's your kid and you're a parent and maybe you should make an agreement and actually invest Our agreement is publicly available online. You can all read it and check what the clauses in there. You can use this. And that's Liebermans.co? Yes, there is an agreement there. So I would say that this is a request.

2:30:33So first, think about these people you would invest in. Send out the information about them to us. So what is just being cognizant of the fact that this is a large audience, so sometimes not good to give out your private email? I've had people do that I warn them about it how should people notify you we have a form you have a form humanism.is humanism.is humanism.is and also we communicate quite extensively through Instagram usually we we use Instagram million people will come usually we use Instagram not for pictures but for larger texts in some of the ideas. That's instagram.com slash Liebermans.

2:31:22Liebermans. L-I-B-E-R-M-A-N-S also, same spelling, Liebermans.co. Just telling people. All right. So Instagram, the form at humanism.is, and people can find the agreement at Liebermans.co. There you have it for. The other ask can be, if we truly want to see this world happening, we need to educate the older population and the investors and the grandmas and grandpas who actually are shareholders, stakeholders in the pension funds. we need to educate those people who actually own most of the money in the country to gradually start investing in this type of agreements to at least check to see what's going to happen in 5-10 years from now if they're going to make more money by investing in individual income rather than private companies public companies and in this case we will be able to have an experiment and if it's a successful experiment we will educate country and market to shift towards this yes you can ask your grandma to look where are the pension money of her are invested and to see that probably some companies we all blame for some problems in the world they can be the investors that actually companies which affect our ecosystem in a bad way they are not owned by bankers people they actually most of them, like 90 % owned by pension funds.

2:33:04So if we can educate our previous generations that they can be the problem. They're shareholders in the problem. They're not the source of the problem. Or they're shareholders in the future and they have to choose how their money is influencing them. And they can be the shareholders of the future. This is a heritage they can leave. Destroying the planet or actually switching. And I would imagine 99.9 % of them have no idea where... That they can control it. that they have a choice. Yes, and they have. That's the funniest part. They can log in and they can actually change. They can log in and change.

2:33:35Sit down with your grandma, maybe look at their 401k. Write an email saying, I do want some share of my pension funds to be invested, on my savings, to be invested in the individual corporations. Or in sustainable companies, at least. This education should happen. Otherwise, there is this belief that they did, previous generation, did everything right. And just the new generation is fail. But it's really important to educate that some decisions which were made 30 years ago affect us a lot today. And some of this effect can be changed if we change where the money invested. Yeah, I think a lot of it is a communications problem and an education problem.

2:34:23And that net-net humans of different generations have more in common than they have different amongst them. But as you pointed out, sometimes the problems aren't obvious and sometimes problems aren't discussed and the options aren't discussed. The fact that I didn't know this until, I mean, shockingly recently for me, like 10 years ago, that I could, with retirement accounts, you can invest in privately held companies and all sorts of other things. It is an option. It's just not readily exploited by most people because they don't realize that it's on the menu. So I'm excited to see what people come up with.

2:35:02Maybe someone needs to make a startup which actually offers a solution for the pensioners to do it easier. Yeah. Sustainable companies. Some type of interface that makes it less manual, less one-on-one. Because right now it is hard. You need to spend some time to actually set up your account properly. But that's the greatest opportunity. We just need all to talk about this. If you have some challenges believing in this, A, you can make your own research on trying to understand whether we're right with our data and our points of view. B, you can ask a question in the form you can find a way to reach us out and ask a question.

2:35:44So we will explain how we see this and why we believe this is actually the really, really, really good way of investing your money. Well, also, I mean, this conversation has raised so many good questions. I mean, one of which is like, how do you take capital, which is a, you know, it's a currency, like it's something that you can exchange for other things that is currently locked in a somewhat static form that may not be generating much positive value in the world. And how do you liberate that for other faster growing, more dynamic sources of value, not just for the individual, but for the community, for society.

2:36:25And I mean, I think about that a lot. I mean, it's asset allocation, but on sort of a karmically considered level, at least at the collective. And you don't need to spend the money which you need right now. It is money which... You will only get access like in 30 years from now. So we made an experiment. When we joined Snap, it was the first time in our life when we got 4R1K. First time in our life employed. Yes. so Snapik wired us we are employed, we now have 401k and the experiment was we are getting exactly the same salary, exactly the same savings in the 401k account of both of us David changed everything in his account where the money is allocated towards more sustainable companies like companies caring about the planet The Port and Gambles and Coca-Cola of the world.

2:37:20Yeah, exactly. And the Monsantos of the world, removing them from there and just like shifting the investment towards the companies which are more sustainable. Me, I just left everything as it was by default, provided by the Fidelity. So far, I earned 20 ,000 more than Daniel. The gross is 30 % higher than mine. So in instance, it's just... That's the funniest part. So if you believe that other people believe in the same, is that actually the world is moving in a more sustainable, clean society, you will win financially as well. Because if this shift is happening, if you believe in this shift, then...

2:37:56And it should happen, otherwise we're all gonna die. But because it's happening, like naturally, logically, it's happening, then it should be a no-brainer that we should invest in the companies which actually does this. Because others will lose in the market game. Yeah, it doesn't... doing right morally doesn't need to mean doing something that is self-destructive. You can align the incentives. Absolutely. And investing in your kids, in your grandkids, is the best thing ever. Right. So I think everybody listening has a good amount to think about, and they have options for communicating with you.

2:38:34They can go to Liebermans.co to see examples of the agreements, the types of contracts that have this participation in future earnings potential and outcomes of individuals they can go to humanism.is to fill out a form after they think about which of their friends which of their peer group which of their circle they would most invest their own savings into and they can also consider doing that themselves with the templates that you provided we've got the instagram book and course for those interested in exploring coding and the Instagram is instagram.com slash Liebermans David, Daniel thank you so much for taking the time today it was awesome Pat, absolute pleasure so much fun to traverse so much ground with you and for everybody listening as per usual we'll have extensive show notes linked to all the resources everything that was mentioned and we'll track down a few things here and there including links to might have been in Wall Street Journal but the sports example and you can peruse those at your leisure at tim.blog slash podcast and until next time be a little bit kinder than is necessary to others but also to yourself and as always thanks for tuning in hey guys this is tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little fun before the weekend.

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