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

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4:26 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now it's in the time. Cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and those galaxy. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where my job is to interview and deconstruct world class performers. I get a two for one.

4:58 In this episode I have brothers David Lieberman. And Neil. Or Daniel Lieberman. They're both entrepreneurs and investors, one of a kind entrepreneurs and investors, with a close partnership spanning sixteen years. They gained valuable experience at Snap. Contributing to projects involving avatars, bitmoji, animation, and product operations. They're currently based in LA.

5:19 Where their primary focus is on building product science, a service dedicated to optimizing mobile apps. I'm gonna pause here and just say. There's a lot more to this story and this conversation than the bio I am reading. We get into crossbows We get into Russian mobsters. We get into some of the craziest stories. Honestly, I think I have ever heard S.

5:39 Take everything I'm saying. It's just a preview of one dimension of seventeen dimensions that we will share. Moving on, the Lieberman Brothers have established the Lieberman's Company, referred to as a people company, through their commitment to the founders pledge. They've allocated all future earnings and economic value for the next three decades to Lieberman's Co., including founder shares of product science and potential returns from future investments. Some of you may recognize the Lieberman Brothers. From Hey.

6:05 Fascinating. Profile in the New Yorker. On Selling shares in yourself. What might that look like?

6:13 What can that look like? What might it look like to invest in other people? for their future earnings, et cetera. They have a lot of wild ideas, a lot of great ideas. And you can find them online at Lieberman's dot code. That's spelled L I B E R M A N S. Lieberman's dot co.

6:31 You can find them on Instagram. At Lieberman's so L I B E R M A N S. And there's a lot in the show notes. So there's gonna be a lot in the show notes here, so be sure to check out the links. After the episode at Tim Dog slash

6:44 Podcast and without further ado. Please enjoy this very wide ranging. Conversation. With none other than the Very one of a kind.

6:53 Unique. Lieberman Brothers. Gentlemen. David.

7:02 Danielle? I'm getting that, right? Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. So where did you grow up? And what did childhood

7:12 Look like. So the two of us were born in Moscow. Still sevete in at that time. To a family of uh The very known neuroscientists.

7:23 By physicists. Who Like the Femin were sort of like upper middle class for the Soviet uh Measure. But as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed

7:33 With the Soviet Union the family collapsed to the below priority. Type of situation because Our dad was born in nineteen twenty five. So in uh nineteen ninety he was uh Pretty old already.

7:45 And uh Din Din had a chance to adapt to the new reality. So A complicated situation. Both of parents had to continue the work as they wanted actually to finalise and finish the work of their life. And at the same time somehow survive and fit kids and like

8:07 Get some clothes for us and stuff. And it's like six of us uh one year apart. Our mom was She was busy, busy, busy with making her breakthrough works in how neurons work and the signaling system in the neurons at the same time having six of us

8:26 In in and oh in eight years. Less than in eight years. How does any human do that? So let alone a mom, you know, not to get us into all these confusing gender waters, but let's just say for the time being, mom Primary caregiver, would that be fair to say? Yes. Yes. So how did she manage Both the scientific exploration with this groundbreaking work and six kids. I can barely manage one dog. So How did she do that?

8:54 I think that after the fourth one We kind of a little bit managed ourself. Right, right. But still it's not uh the answer or the question. No, there was a green line buff from time to time. From time to time they would uh drop half of us at the grandpa and grandma's place and then took the half of us with them to the laboratory. That's how we were spend a lot of time surrounded by the fish and snails. Uh Well we were s like we were surrounded by all this equipment, uh lasers, they they got first uh PCs uh much earlier than anyone else. That's why like we also were quite

9:31 Excited about that. And I think that sin general they were Super passionate about their work. That's what we definitely picked from our Parents. And about each other. So there were six of us.

9:44 It's a full team, yeah. It's a full soccer team. So you have Lots of excitement. Maybe lots of chaos. You have goldfish snail grandparents.

9:53 Lasers. Sounds like a pretty awesome setup for curious kids. Curious kids. And What did you pick up? on intellectually as a way of thinking. From

10:05 Your parents. And I ask that because I know both of you, for instance, and I'm not trying to lead with this question, but pay a lot of attention to data. You're sort of geeks for parsing the data, whether it's to like refine how you think about or identify problems and then also how you might solve problems. What did you observe? in your parents or pick up from them when it came to How they thought about things.

10:28 Now that you said that, I realize that Our parents were doing those experiments which required them years of repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating the same stuff. Like trying to get the uh Which would make sense. On top of uh their hypothesis of how everything works.

10:45 So I guess we've been surrounded by the Piles of vapors with just numbers. Literally, I remember this. Uh is this how how was the cards. The cards. Oh like the the punch cards. The punch cards. The punch cards. Like Everywhere the punch cards. Before the PC was there, there were like this huge Type. recording machines with all the data as well.

11:11 But what's interesting, both of them was always challenging the state of school. Of the current understanding of Science. Prove it for yourself with uh data probably.

11:25 Something is missing and you need to dig deeper in the game. And they had their own discussions with everyone around. And we sort of picked it up. As we were growing already, like I don't know. Fifteen ish years old.

11:39 Are that Was even older? So he needed someone to escort him to the conferences and like Meetings of scientists.

11:48 Just basically like it's uh Moscow and winter. And the roads are icy, I don't know, five, six months a year. Like something something like this. So he needed someone to basically help him get there. And being there all the time. We saw his conversations with the rest of the scientific community in the in his institute.

12:09 As they were just like laughing. Out of nowhere? I mean just like be like oh yeah, of course. Like again Lieberman is talking about the quantum nature of of the consciousness. Blah blah blah blah. Something like that. Why he has some ideas and proofs. So it was sort of uh Resistance. Resistance to the rest of the world. We felt his resistance and we like were challenged with this as we're like oh we can prove everyone. Libreman's against the world. Libreman's against the world. Yeah, exactly. Alright, so we're gonna leapfrog from that.

12:45 As far as the next logical plays. I mean, I like hopping around because I see things on paper, I find certain things Exciting to talk about and then we can fill in the gaps. So I'm just gonna actually answer my own question and I'm gonna take you to Around Then we can fill in the gaps as we go. So you're around eighteen to nineteen years old.

13:06 And you're presenting to Russian parliament. Yeah. What are you presenting? About. And how was the reception?

13:13 Um yes, so a little bit of background. So uh after Soviet Union collapsed The entire population of the country They will lost their savings in the banks like twice. During the decade. So it was a quite harsh time for everyone.

13:29 And for us it was uh Strange strange. Like we weren't able to understand how with all the modern technologies with computers and how it's all like how all this corruption in How it's even possible.

13:44 Uh definitely some technologies should be there. Should be there to solve these problems. We had internet pretty early. And we were. Hikers. I mean it was at that time of of the Internet era. When everything was possible. Access to everything was possible. So at that moment we read lots of uh the Hikers Manifesto since some

14:08 Like Libertarian ideas. Wandering around the internet. And we saw all these ideas of uh decentralized type of uh data storage. Which can be

14:20 Bulletproof from Various attacks or Attacks and uh modifications, like falsifications. Right. It's resilient against falsification. Yes, resilient against falsification, like a blockchain type of ideas before Satoshi actually released his uh first paper on the block. Chain. Which was never the one word, it was a like block. Like chain of blocks. But Victorian storage just exist at seven times.

14:52 We came up to a solution as we saw it. For Eradicating corruption in Russia. To me. All of the governmental expenses completely transparent.

15:04 Store it on the people's machines. So that none of the uh uncorrupt officials can actually even do anything with with the data. So we are presenting this idea And pretty soon when people realize what we are talking about, they basically Ask us to go out. Just like shut down the mic. Shut down the mic. He's like the meeting is over. Thank you so much. Sorry, having some technical difficulties. And then the guy who was actually Invited us. In who invited us. He was uh some s sort of a deputy for the head of the party at the time. At the time there was mul multiple parties like United Russia. But

15:40 This guy came Like Approach. Boys. I can see you are very smart, and all these ideas are just brilliant, but

15:51 Stop talking about this bullshit. Otherwise someone will kill you. No no no not not us. Like we're good guys. But there are bad people who are making lots of money And this is against uh what they want. Yeah.

16:03 Okay. So now at that point do you Pretty immediately pivot to something else. Pretty immediately we realize that what we need to pivot into is grassrooting those ideas instead of trying to make them uh top to bottom approach. Instead of being the uh the missionaries of anti-corruption distribu the risk of it. Yes. No it's it w it's like to be quite clear that people in the government are not those people who really can adapt those ideas.

16:32 Um it was another story to that in a week after that. Uh they actually invited us again to to come. Like we came in and they asked us to work on a project. And what is a project? And said that Well you mentioned something about industrialization and how the anonymous at the same time. Can you create an anonymous H agency which will sell seats in government. And we're like wait, what? He's like, Yes, yes, yes. So

17:02 Like imagine people who actually making lots of money and who's capable of paying lots of money for a sit in the government, they are people who like better than us. They can manage stuff better than us, so like just from the street just just happened to be here just by a chance because someone was like a friend of someone. So If we actually invite people who did something in business and have money to pay for the position in government, they can do a better job for the country. Do you really have uh priced for that? Yes, yes, yes, for sure like Can you give us an example?

17:37 Deputy Minister of Finance was half a million dollar. and minister of health care uh no ecology ecology was three milliars The question was immediately. Ecology? No one give a shit about ecology in Russia. She's like exactly

17:53 That's how The person who will take the position will have a return on investment pretty much all the small like fancy words. They'll get their money back pretty much in a year on bribes. Ha ha ha So we quite soon realize that uh they they uh like well uh appreciate the invitation. Appreciate the invitation, never call us again. Yeah, thank you. That was our reaction. Um but yes, that was a moment when we decided to pivot uh to Building our own businesses and uh gathering resources and then building type of uh technologies ourselves. Then you can buy the ministry of ecology so one day. Or we can like do the revolution or something like that. Now at that point while you're observing all this

18:41 And it's imprinting your young minds. Are you thinking? Eventually we are going to want to build businesses somewhere else? Or did you anticipate that you would be building in Russia for the foreseeable future? How were you thinking about things at that point?

18:56 For us? Somehow. At this particular moment it was uh Still uh new chable. an idea that we can fly somewhere and build businesses there. Like i it's only years after that we

19:08 Start to be more confident in our abilities and start to think about that. It was miserable. Like the first time we flew to United States just on our own. Miserable experience. Very low level like pro level of English. No understanding whatsoever what the country looks like and what's going on in the world. Miserable. Okay, so so at the time then You're just focused on building businesses and what type of business Were you building at that point?

19:43 Even before that, our first company was an ISP internet service provider. We wanted to have a good internet connection and it was super un unaffordable, like five thousand dollars to connect your apartment. Wow. It sounds very unreachable for most people. Especially for the family of eight people who was making like a couple hundred dollars a month. For the household. It was unreachable. So at some point we realize that if we want to have uh such level of uh internet at our own apartment

20:17 What we can do we can Go through all of the neighbors? In it was like what sixteen hundred apartments in the small district. Yeah, like the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods like a dense neighborhoods of uh Norwich Romoshki and Moscow. And uh we literally rang all the doorbells. And we're like the question was like

20:38 Do we have a computer? If the answer was yes, do you know what internet is? If the answer was no, like Okay, let us explain you. Let's have some tea. And we'll just literally sneak in into the People's apartment and

20:48 starting to explain them what they are losing by not having internet already connected to their computer. So we pre-solds of contracts. And with that we were like, Okay, we can now go to the bank. Get a how's it called loan? Consumer loan. Just like a basically consumer loan. And we use the money to buy all the equipment to buy the cable, like the Fiber. Yeah, fiber optic cable. Fiber optic cable.

21:14 And basically connect all these households and people paid and we covered the loan pretty fast, like still it's still Was a quite challenging project. So I'm wondering just what you're buying with the loans. You're buying like servers sticking them in a bathroom or like how did how is it being connected? to the existing infrastructure. First we needed to basically someone to bring the cable in. It was the most expensive uh part of the operation. Like dig in trenches. We hired the engineering team We were lucky because uh the largest um hub

21:47 Communication hub for the Moscow internet with Basically two kilometers away from us. That's great luck. We're there as well, and that's why Internet First emerged at this part. So we hired these people, the engineering team to bring the cable and then By night mostly.

22:12 We were Connecting twenty story buildings to each other. By shooting the cable using the uh athletic airball just Oh my god, Crossbow. Crusmo. Yeah, Crusbow.

22:27 They were bribed by the bigger player and they Didn't allow us to actually Uh get them to the the to the roofs and to properly Yeah, competition. Competition was there. Even though we had the license and by law they couldn't prohibit us to do this, but they were like not allowing us. That's why At night we would sneer the roof like pretty

22:50 Dangerous operation of getting onto the roof. Even without having an access through the door. And then from the roof to the roof, we basically were like putting these cables uh using the crossbows. Shooting from one roof to another roof. Um This company uh was then acquired by a bigger player that was a Um significant consolidation on the market. Between the uh Ninja Crossbow expansion. And the acquisition, how long did that take? Two years. Like two years. Yeah. All right. Moving fast.

23:21 Then later on we realize that what we actually need to do is Supercomputing. Like we were like we are smart in mathematics, we can write algorithms, and this is something like we foresee in the future of cloud computing. Using the machines in internet to parallelize Compute.

23:39 This was our idea originally, then we realized that it's impossible to do in Russia type of the business. And we decided that what we can do we can start building games. Now before you go on, was the computer science and like Whatever coding experience you had, was that self taught? Was it school? Was it parents? Uh Our college degree is computer science.

24:00 But in reality in uh Russia at this moment No one will really teach you properly in computer science because your Teachers would know less than Then you wouldn't. If you haven't if you're motivated.

24:16 Parents. We scientists we got PCs at our home. Much earlier than most of our peers. We've got internet now how much earlier than most of our peers, and we were

24:28 Super excited about this technology. And uh how to say naughty. So we would break the comput all the time and we had to fix them all the time for the parents to continue the work. And that's how we actually learn how to We build our first uh website for our guilt in the game. Online game, like Ultimate Online. Great choice. Curious and naughty, that can be the name of your Autobiography. The life and times of the Lieberman. Okay, so you have the consolidation and then you decide to focus on games.

25:04 After that. And what form did that take? We we played online Ultimate Online. We were super excited about this type of games. We thought that this is revolution. Because people just hang out there. Aim or you don't need to just kill all the enemies, just people hang out. Sandbox. You can have a marriage there, build a house, second lock. Instead of doom.

25:37 Was uh for everyone in the apartment. For us at night. That's why we actually wanted the the better internet all the time. And that's how the I SP started. So then when we decided to build such game А за момент зайдіє was really not popular.

25:54 You even can find some quotes From CEO of um electronic arts who would say like all online games is just a niche market, no one play online games and and all this stuff. He actually officially admitted he was wrong. Um I suppose.

26:15 Honest. Yeah. A lot of people don't own those. She was super cool and I think like I said that. I was wrong. Like now we are in the game. So in we tried to launch several um one time Failed our own Uh savings.

26:36 But then World of Warcraft. Was we list. And we were the only ones who were For years trying to raise money. For such type of the project. And that's how it's called attention at this moment, and uh we raised our first uh So World of Warcraft comes out, it proves It's a proof of concept. Yes. W for what you are also trying to prove in a way. Not only proof of concept, it was the first game ever

27:01 Natin one billion dollar Of Profit the 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

27:15 Hollywood blockbuster for a six month period or something like that. The numbers are astronomical. This market is really for years larger than uh the movie market. Yeah. But Fifteen years ago it was not as obvious. 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 And we got a lot of attention. Girl. Pretty fast to

27:43 Hundred fifty to hundred. But then uh two thousand eight crisis came and just it's all not ready. I mean World of Warcraft it took Blizzard, the top game development studio in the world. That what we didn't realise when we started, it took them like five, six years to build the game. With with an army. With an army and unlimited resources.

28:08 And us were like We can do it. With like couple of million dollars. Okay, we were miserable in this in this case, but Honestly, in this experience we realize that we can be cool in developing Sort of uh.

28:23 Hacking our way through the challenges. Inventing new stuff, inventing how we can the build and top of processes and technologies and et cetera. And even though we bunk ripped the company in two thousand nine I remember March two thousand nine I had to fire everyone, like a hundred and fifty people in one day. Sounds fun. Super fun.

28:43 The most challenging experience experience of real life. And 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

29:10 into the terms of experience. Most of the experience of like le 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 reinvent the the animation process. So we basically took the guy

29:32 who was experienced in producing three D 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?

29:44 Was a super challenging time. The company was bankrupt. By that time, we actually already were quite successful in different stuff. Already had uh venture uh venture firm raised thirty million dollars to the venture firm. But this venture firm Was took over. by our investors of the game. Um ration style guns. Like the people with the with the guns on the car. The security people from the person's arrived to the office took us in the like black cars driving us to the underground of the Office building in the middle of Moscow. So threatening us that they will kill us and our family because they know where everyone lives unless we'll return the money. So is this type of business experience? Strict investors.

30:31 In that moment we knew that we need to With the new projects, uh we need to do something fast because we still had some Облігійшнс ін плейс. Which we just fired because we haven't paid the salary for last month's outstanding debt to the investment. Um we were still living with our parents. Um so we knew that uh that we don't want to have investors anymore and they see like all this experience which we had, we wanted to So something which can generate cash right away, not like apartment building basements.

31:05 That was enough. A friend of ours. Who is uh a famous actress in Russia. She told The CEO, the president of um

31:17 Channel one, which is like NBC or Russia, like the largest network. Exactly, exactly. That we can do magic with the magic with the computer graphics. How did you become friends with the actors? Friends of friends introduce us and like we basically become super cool friends where we're like writing scripts together for the future movies and stuff. So in reality, I'm not sure that she really uh

31:42 Knew that we can do that. What uh what the C was very confident in selling. Goes a long way. So she sells this head of The you know, the this primary channel. That you guys can do work magic with We work magic with graphics. And he wanted to create uh political satire.

32:10 Show which would be based on the last week events. Which is impossible. Animation usual production cycle is uh nine to twelve months. South Park is actually like three, four months, but then they leave this uh 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 train. That's South Park. They're the fastest. They're the fastest. Exactly. Um and we invented the production uh process uh which allowed us to produce uh half hour animated show three D graphics in one week.

32:42 How did you do that? The interesting part was we just basically disassembled the entire process on smaller pieces and 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 the resources from IBM.

33:11 Okay, how's that work? And we agree that they will be DJ in the club. During the weekends that's how we knew the guy. So during the week you never know who's DJing at the club. Make friends. The DJ DJing at night and then like during during the weekends and then suit and then 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? And like it was like Yes.

33:45 I'll give you the equipment and they gave us like a I don't know what was it, uh it was around like a million uh dollars for servers. 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 with the most innovative show was created using IBM equipment. decided that it's too political they never even use it. Because the show was political satire in Russia. So the

34:18 headquarter in the United States was like no no no we don't know. They allowed us to use 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 gonna forget it's there for a while, you guys can use it? Yes. Yes. It was exactly like that. We we made the we made the first Season. Using that equipment? The channel one paid us like three million dollars.

34:45 For the first season. And with that money we were able to buy all the equipment we needed to do. Yes. It was advanced payment, so we came to General One and said like we need advanced payment. They're like why it was like The processes. And we basically pay the debts. Well. Okay.

35:02 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 you manage to negotiate prepayments, you satisfy your Outstanding debts to paying the ex employees. And then what? This was the first time when uh we actually Start to

35:25 earn enough of our own funds and we return to first we return to our Ideas. Uh to fight the corruption. What type of technologies can be created to Wre you guys not afraid? Honestly, the w the part of us not being afraid probably somehow was related to our dad was never afraid of uh whoever was challenging him. But at the same time, back in two thousand As we finish the school.

35:51 We knew that if we have all these ideas of change in the world It Gonna be impossible if we just stay home. play computer games and stuff. So we decided that we would go to some business trainings, personal uh development trainings, fear trainings. We started challenging ourselves in developing ourselves and by two thousand five

36:12 We spend like four years. Developing our own internal Equilibrium. So let's well let's talk about this equanimity for a second, because this is super important. And it's

36:24 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 gonna be from the US, and fortunately for them, they've never had the experience of being under a political regime where people disappear.

36:43 But I've spent a lot of time in South America. Poisoned 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. The risks were very real for you.

37:01 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

37:15 Any type of Like really significant consequence or something else? There are three answers to that. A Yeah, so we're only afraid to die. Okay. Somehow don't. I mean this is like you die, that's it. Whatever.

37:29 Сам хау And it actually really helped with the bandits in two thousand nine when they came to ask For All of their money in the game back. We knew that

37:41 It's their way of threatening you. And they want you to be Afraid. They wanted to fear. And that's how you're on a hook. And you show as soon as you show the fear, that's when they like hook you and you owe them forever.

37:55 And we showed them that like why can't kill us, whatever. I mean like you will never get your money back. And the other case, like we can probably work it out. We learn through this experience that actually if you don't show the fear It's much safer. Then if you show it's a little bit like with lions. Yes, so then the third one the third one. Is When it comes to the political systems

38:18 Let's say particularly the Russian political system. For the KGB people who were actually running the country at that time, like Putin is axe head of KGB. That's the only thing which we all should understand. That's a country ran by KGB people. Yes, they call themselves F but Who's the give it shit? It's KGB, it's the same guys who and K and Kada like who were just basically killing people sixty fifty years before that.

38:41 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.

38:51 It's either enemies or idiots. Fools. And misery. Your eyes are working for CIA? Or you're idiots. Or you're an idiot who was uh convinced by CIA to fight against them, and you just like fool who who like you're a pawn. Oh a pawn. So we play the pawn card. We're like

39:14 Let's show ourselves as if we're uh stupid. And we were completely transparent about All of our ideas from the very beginning. Saying like they will just see us As uh false.

39:26 Town lunatics. Town lunatics. Work. It was just rare that they're like, Oh, these guys are just crazy. If you're a CIA agent, you will try to hide. But if you like transfer money to the biggest supposition, you're like, and then like Oh idiots. They spend their money Okay, whatever, we'll just steal this money from the positioner anyway, so fools. That was the situation for so for us, uh the shield for all the series was like they believe we're just idiots.

39:59 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me. On the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.

40:48 go to drinkag one dot com slash Tim. That's drinkage one, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG1 dot com slash Tim. Check it out. Yeah. Alright, we may come back to this, but I wanna make sure I don't lose the thread, so

41:10 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.

41:24 And then we start our move to United States. We already established our presence in Los Angeles. Because of animation. Uh in twenty ten. And started to move all attention to Unit States. Nothing good gonna happen in the country. It's run by the KGB and will like they're not going to release their grasp over the country unless it's gonna be like a early evolution type of uh situation. Which we saw that the even opposition they were trying to play the political game.

41:53 Mm and it was a lost game from the very beginning. So We knew the the show political satire on largest TV network in Russia. is not going to last more than the term of Bappett President Medvedev.

42:06 That's exactly what happened, like as soon as the Putin get back to his position, like the show was shut down immediately. So we knew it's gonna end. Yeah. Money which we'll make from this. In order to transit to 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

42:28 Europe. Why not somewhere else? Why why 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

42:38 Animation industry. Is uhly subsidised by government. So you actually need to deal with bureaucrats and you need to to get any finding in like the private sector almost uh doesn't exist. Um makes it very hard for immigrants. Yes, exactly. Yes. And it was always like if you want to. If you're not local, you need to to work to work with local local students. And they should get this finding and like.

43:10 We have all the chances in Pretty quickly we were introduced to people who then introduced us to the agencies and the William Morris endeavor signed up with us. January twenty ten. Half 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.

43:29 Will really take us seriously and to get to the same type of level of uh professional acceptance like than we had back in uh Moscow. But we found our way. It is possible here, you know, like in Europe or like in UK. You would never

43:46 Become You would never be able to to spend only five, six years And get into the like Major hood of three days to be a equal to the case. Uh you know, California has a lot of downsides, but it's one of the upsides is like Yeah.

44:01 This is true in a lot of the US. Like no one is uh Discriminating against green. And 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, right? So there are opportunities everywhere.

44:20 Yeah, we agree with you. This is this is uh this was our observation that it's all about like non competes, that they are not enforceable, that this allow you to actually work at Google, write your own search engine at nights, and then launch your own search engine and Google cannot do Really anything that's like. There's a lot of free flow of talent. Which uh makes it hard sometimes to retain talent in Silicon Valley, but that's a whole separate story. So You land in LA. You Have

44:51 Introductions to people at say William Morris Endeavor and other places. What happens as that momentum starts building? We actually had uh a pretty good success working with uh different studios and different big names like Jimmy Fallon. We worked on the show with him in the U.S. At some point we met with the guy who used to be John Stewart's A headwriter. And he just moved back from New York. To Los Angeles?

45:16 And uh was a sort of available ish. He wasn't for a year, but then a year later he was available and we took our chance to become friends. over the year and then when he become available like Josh. Why don't you work with us? And uh we managed to convince him because we showed him how fast we actually can produce animation. Even like William Morrison Devor or Josh, even being the friend for us for like a year.

45:41 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. In a week we'll you will have it in animation.

45:59 And that's what we did. And it was like, Wow You guys were same. You guys can actually do it. You guys can actually do it before that he worked at Simpson before John Stewart and it's Simpson's like twelve months. 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 supercards. And really wanted to Focus more on the technology which can transform society. Wasn't really our thing. There are some trade offs. Yes. There are lots of things.

46:34 Especially that time. You know, like it before Netflix and before all the stuff. No one cared about technologies. No one cared that you faster in cheaper Like who is your like producers and like all divorce lawyers and all the stuff. Wait, wait, wait, wait. How does the divorce fit in? We don't know, but people in the Wally would say so. Oh wait, you want you need to know divorce lawyers? Yes, because they know they know because they know like it's a power dynamic. Oh this is good for me to know. There's like a power dynamic of like the divorce lawyers who who controls I picked up a new stratagem today, thank you. Exactly. Okay. And eventually 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

47:20 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 understanding that we cannot sell our technology. We have to sell the entire show. We should package voice A Trojan horse with the technology. Exactly. We took it all, like that's why we needed Josh, because we needed headwriter. That like we took the voice actors, we took like the best concept artists, like to combine this all and then produce a pilot.

47:46 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 artists. What type of artists were they're like we we like

48:02 Engineer it all. Data, data, data. Yes, exactly. But it was also some. Uh because Jelic. We didn't get to back to power, so our show was canceled back in Russia.

48:18 In two thousand thirteen. The banking crisis in Cyprus. All money was National Lized? So hold on a second. So Cyprus so does that mean that you had moved your finances from Russia to Cyprus?

48:33 And then it was out of the out of the uh out of the pan and into the fire. Yes. And then Cyprus got nationalized. Same story all over again. Same story all over again. Six million dollars like And all of a sudden. We couldn't pay anyone in the United States. No voice actors, no screenwriters, we like we couldn't pay anyone.

48:54 Immediately it will all fell apart. So did you get the green light for the pilot? Yes. And then Cypress. Yes. And then Yes. And we try to think what we can do in Hollywood more. For like half a year a year.

49:08 But then we realise it will take us another four or five years to recover because there's no money, there's like nothing in there. Like Screw it, we're not gonna stay in Hollywood. Let's move to Silicon Valley. Uh so and we move to Metal Park, uh at that moment. Right in the middle. Right.

49:25 And also we really w already wanted to return to our real like ideas. We We started with uh transparency again. We decided that we can do a trick that we can Actually not target governments. to become qu transparent, but uh target non profits.

49:43 Like why we don't see how non profits actually spend their money. It's like kind of obvious. It's not your like personal money, it's like we all together Yeah, there's a sponsor. To make Change a better place. So we created a transparent banking.

49:58 Platform? For nonprofits? For many reasons. We were wrong about the Ability and readiness on appetite. The appetite, exactly. The appetite for the non profits. But but you know like this was one of the this was also the times when we realized that some of the challenges which like fundamental challenges which we saw in economy Actually

50:21 They were true. In the United States as well. Not only in Europe, not only in like Russia, not only is Israel, but uh in the United States as well. And we Realize it even with uh the

50:34 Non profit. Transparency if you will look at research. Of what actually donors. Want You will see that the previous generations of donors

50:45 They don't really want to see Or is the money spends. It's like it's almost the last hotel. Yes, yes, it's almost the last uh uh item in the lists of their requirements. But our generation and generation's younger Actually in the in the first place. We want to see what happened with uh the dynamic of thinking behind this is uh for the older generation

51:07 They donate money because it's give back for them. They're like, So society gives them a lot. It's feeling good versus doing good. Yes. And for the youngest it's well given forward. We want to change what's bad right now and we want to see it changing.

51:23 You know? And also actually previous generations Got a lot. from society. in terms of form of free education, almost free college education, like thirty years ago, anything like that.

51:35 New generation being Uh hammered with uh student death, etc. They don't really feel that society Gave some much. Uh but they really still donate the same Share.

51:51 than the older generation, but it's just different reason for the top. I feel like the some of the younger generations here, younger than certainly than me, uh 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 it's 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. So it's important to factor that into how you evaluate them. So question for you guys with the the looking at the nonprofit and the this and that the the the platform, right? You have

52:26 You 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. Right. Some people get very attached to one thing and they wanna ride it until they die and

52:47 They get attached to things that May never work. And I'm wondering. How you think about Changing direction.

52:56 Maybe failure and quotation marks. Like what allows you to do that so readily? A We'll learn the the hard way. So the first the game studio We grasp.

53:08 And we're going to be able to do it if we know that if you don't stop uh at the right moment, you can actually get to the deep. Uh shit. Yeah, you can get into a hole. Yes. But also what we saw in the data is that uh And what we realized also through the experience of game development failure and then animation success. That we realize that uh

53:29 It is not always about your I'd be happy to do it. So you can fail just because of a different reason, like financial crisis. Yes. And the statistics of Venture. Startups.

53:46 Is that Two thirds? Will fail. Like completely fail. Losing all the money. Zero. And then if you will look at all the spailers

53:55 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 with your all attention there, etc. If it's not. But if it's not, if it's stopped. Probably. You should stop.

54:13 If you look at this. Purely from the perspective of statistics. If it's not doubled the growth, the if whatever numbers behind your understanding of of your business Isn't doubled. It didn't double. It isn't double. It didn't double. Didn't double. Over what period of time? Over fourteen months. Fourteen months.

54:32 Why fourteen months, I have to ask. Like if you look at the statistics, I see, I see, that's then success is over that pattern. Doubling over fourteen. If you take all of them and divide Then just fourteen months? Because if you also not grow in with this the space venture capital will not be accessible to you and the you won't be able to actually Raise money. This is funds to grow a further

54:56 anything like that. So this market is uh is actually a pretty Special in terms of these probabilities. I'm just one out of hundred. It's going to be unicorn. And if you

55:09 Don't See trajectory to get there. I think it's a very important thing. Uh just to stop and start something new. And knowing that your chance is the one in hundred? You should try as many attempts as possible. Take more shots.

55:26 Wanna be entrepreneurial. I wanna be entrepreneuriers we show this picture of uh Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel who Made into success. From the first attack. Droping out from the college and look they're billionaires. Most of the billion dollar company is created not like that. It's created by people who failed

55:45 Multiple times. And then Got. So success. In terms of statistics, this is what we should observe with this uh things. Definitely something depends on your abilities to execute, etcetera, but there are things which Totally. I mean I remember Angel Investing starting in two thousand eight. And seeing

56:05 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.

56:18 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. Yes. And it was tried. Or online text before text online. Yes, for sure. Um because of that, you know, especially Because we

56:42 really like you know we balance ourselves between sometimes when we work on some Um Forward looking ideas like uh Buying cars. And also we work on some projects which down to earth which already

56:58 Something which is happening. And we know that with this Projects which A not there yet, yes. There is a the chance to win big.

57:07 But this chance is small. And there is like a lot of uh timing is and you can lose just because Timing is not right. And We, as Daniel mentioned, we'll learn it hard way.

57:20 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 gonna spend time recovering or are we just starting something new? Yeah, when when silicon wallet bank crisis happen We

57:45 Or among like really small group of our friends founders. All this time We were obsessed. With diversify. Diversifying money on different backs. And everyone. Would tell us that on like in the United States you shouldn't think about that stuff. Don't worry about the stuff that's cannot cannot.

58:04 Can't just because can I like Right. Surprise. We are not immune from All the problems we've seen other places. All right. So I'm gonna I'm gonna zoom out for a second,'cause I I like to think about sort of meta decisions. That span across a lot of Other than

58:21 decisions and projects and so on. So the two of you living one life. I we have to talk about this. I've 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. A very early age. So when did this Start. Right. So you have one email address. One Instagram account, one LinkedIn.

58:48 I think the phone is maybe the same. Uh right. So I'm looking at some notes here. So since you were born This year was the first time that you guys spent ten days Apart.

59:02 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? I mean how do you guys do it?

59:19 It is confusing in many ways. Uh but A we should understand that we the six of us grew up in one room. Of a size smaller than this student. Okay. And for those who can't see the full studio, I mean it's not huge, right? It's not a this isn't a airplane hangar, it's not a basketball court.

59:37 It's like a bedroom. Three bunk bats. That's how the six kid could fit in the room like this. And then Even later.

59:47 So we grew up like this up until like school just started And I think like until thirteen, fourteen years old it was a situation. More or less. And then Parents also send us to the school by pairs.

59:59 It was like a logistic innovation. It's like buddy diving when you're scuba diving. Exactly. But it it was dangerous to um. They don't need to walk us to school so we can do it by ourselves and all the kind 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. Date was five years old. I was six years old when we w went to the school. And the the rest of the kids were seven, so we were bitten.

1:00:33 But because it's two of us. We learn how to like avoid to protect ourselves being two rather than one. So Had to survive? Very helpful for the blending. helping each other like through the education, like doing homework together, all the stuff together.

1:00:52 My thirteen, fourteen 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 uh social justice. type of thinking like how can we make world a better place for everyone And starting from there.

1:01:09 We saw how no one literally was supporting this idea except two of us. basically continue the conversation in between the two of us. And it never fade away. Which idea is this? This is the complimenting is it's uh like transparency. In government it was just one branch of this idea that's aligned. Yes, the technologies can actually

1:01:30 Lead us to a better Governance. And uh that's what we thought. And through this experience of being kids, you know, like first we realized that No, when you go to school All kids they are

1:01:44 Alone. But we weren't. Yeah, 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 group of friends around. Also veralise that uh if I No mathematics better.

1:02:04 We can do It the way so that no one wouldn't know that Danielle don't know mathematics as I do. As good as Hila. So and so so you can actually copy. Yes, we'll try and we'll we'll train type of citation. And we learn that that that's that's what we can do that and if we weren't allowed Outside worlds.

1:02:26 To actually distinguish. Who has which qualities we will be able to do. seem to be uh superhuman because we have both of the quality. Okay, so I know you guys as an example are fans of the Collison brothers. Right. And Patrick's been on the podcast.

1:02:47 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. They're like you know, 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?

1:03:05 or drawbacks of doing it the way that you guys have approached it. Even though they definitely more separate than we do, but they did a lot of really great stuff, for example, they were like CON president, they switched Who is Sean who is president and they switched role, so they they actually showed to the world that they are interchangeable. And and they agree in this regard. But um in our case we went to just in an extreme version. Umset?

1:03:34 Having one line of communication. So if you text me He actually text both of us, and you don't know who answered this text. But we can answer faster. Okay, and seems to be this uh

1:03:46 Superhuman and that worked pretty well uh during negotiations of the project. Hated speaking to people. As he was young. He was like Super not into talking to people.

1:03:59 And I was super easy to talk to people, so it was my role in the couple to talk. All the time. And I will n will still never pick up the phone if someone called. I don't pick up the phone either. It's just too much I don't know what I'm signing up for. Imagine that you can outsource that. That's pretty cool.

1:04:24 Uh worked in business pretty well, even though our first like business partners they were like, Why you're on the same meeting, like you can be in two places at the same time, and things like that. But we even at some moment give up on like trying to explain some that's not that' allow us to in business especially, it's like win or lose. Like you you won this contract or lost the contract. And in all these meetings are important. Doesn't matter that it was two of them.

1:04:57 If you're playing one. But you're playing hardcore game of us being a a team in this conversation which can win the contract. It works much better. Yeah, 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.

1:05:17 We have two different intuitions. And they're like completely different. David's intuition is He absorbed data. He remembers everything. And then at some point he can just like the answer is this.

1:05:32 Like forty two. Like just out of nowhere. Out of like you're like why? He's like I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's forty two. Forty two, yeah. And then the chapters got to the gallery. And then the next morning he can wake up and like yeah, and now I know why. I Cleared my path to this. place in my mind which actually made the calculation and tell me it's forty two, so here's why.

1:05:53 My intuition is completely different. The mindation's like We need to fly to London. Tomorrow.

1:06:00 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. I mean like

1:06:10 We need to offer this people this. And then it's like, no, 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 they're like, How did you know and just like I felt it. So Daniel much better in the reading people. Daniel Munchpar and within situations. In general.

1:06:28 I am Much better in processing. Later processing knowledge. I have this uh strange uh qualities that I remember

1:06:38 Everything. Is 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 in I see what is the advantage of a different type of thinking, etc. in I learn how to live with that and now I embrace it. I understand the limitations.

1:07:03 But I cannot read the citation properly. Like I understand the limitation of this tool. But because it's To Was? And we have both.

1:07:12 I actually double down into these qualities and develop these qualities further and further and further. Do you guys get physical or psychological anxiety when you are separate. This was the first time when when we were separate. Like not even being able to text each other because the phone is off during the Vapasana for ten days long. Um

1:07:38 E well, so you had a you had something to do. I mean you're in your own mind, right? Like, 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. So it's kind of uh

1:08:00 I outsourced the guinea. And I actually felt like I had this intuition like I gotta do this. And and I just went. And it was so quick, so David had to wait for three months. So unexpected. 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's a purpose behind it.

1:08:29 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 uh mind trick which was Oh it's your fault that he's there struggling there. And like

1:08:45 What are you talking about? For you it was a great experience. But like, yeah, but for David, maybe it's not as as great. Maybe it's challenging for him like Come on, seriously stop it. All right, so you have the internal voice keeping you company. 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.

1:09:16 In April we moved to a new house and we basically decided to have more bedrooms. And we have separate bedrooms now. Uh because uh this behavior uh creates some limitations especially around relationships. Yeah. So we decided that uh especially now when it's published we become an additional problem. I imagine I'm not the first person to ask about that. That's why we decided that we need to make it relationship human. Yes. We decided that we need to Explicitly make it easier for potential romantic partners and like uh

1:09:59 Splitting bedrooms is like is one of the first uh steps. Maybe a key. Different floors. Like Daniel has his own floor and David has his own floor in the house. I can imagine those in my mind, right? As I'm painting a picture, I just imagine the floors looking very different. Like if the respective brother's floors must be very different. We were in the same room, it was for purpose. We usually would stop talking only like before like a minute we will go to sleep. And start talking as we wake up. So what are we doing today? Like this is like this is a wake up call. What an incredible Blessing and gift it is that you guys have each other. Absolutely enjoying this way of life.

1:10:47 Yes, as as David said. Challenges in the romantic relationship? Like we will work it out. So do you think when you have romantic part like let's just say of romantic partners, maybe of families, who knows, do you think you guys will still live together? Yes. We we maybe will we maybe we'll do some, you know, like uh is in our vision we maybe can create kind of special house when you have like sections of like uh private and not private and something like that. Because we definitely need to hear also uh what uh

1:11:17 Oh partners uh say about things I have to say yes. But we really want to still have uh 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.

1:11:43 And then they would come together for shared meals and things like that. So they had a very unorthodox We we have friends who build houses when when they have Join bedroom And separate bedrooms. And a wing for kids. Wing for him. Wing for her.

1:11:58 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 Hollywood. What has worked? What has not worked.

1:12:12 You mentioned Evan earlier, not everyone's going to recognize that name. How did you guys end up? That's snuff. Our point of view. We always tell the story from the perspective of us meeting Dalai Lama in two thousand ten.

1:12:27 When in doubt, go with the Dalai Lama story. So It was back in two thousand nine. Right in between us starting the animation studio and uh bankrupting the game studio. There was a three months of us took a Dalai Lama sabbatical. Okay, there were three three months of us Clearly not knowing what to do, and then the bandits are threatening our lives.

1:12:50 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 uh

1:12:59 Uh Tibetan lama. Who just arrived to Moscow. And a friend inv invited us. So we came there With no expectations whatsoever. But the gentleman.

1:13:11 Was very interesting. He was young? He was super smart, speaking like eleven languages. And from time to time. He would switch from this uh Tibetan

1:13:21 stories about the uh enlightened kingdoms to something more practical Even like 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?

1:13:36 In We then asked if we can have a an audience with the the in poche. And we were told that everything is booked already. But five minutes later he called us. Yeah, just so clear. So he is which teacher?

1:13:51 Gather Jigmirin Pochen is like a Tibetan Spiritual Spiritual Yes. It's like a title which uh you can get only from your childhood if you recognize the recognizes the reincarnation of the incredibility of someone else. This gentleman Is it Moscow? And Rinpoche is asking us to come see him. I'm like, wait.

1:14:13 Okay, cool. So we shared our ideas about transparency about how in the future we can live w within governments without physical borders. And for Tibetan people it's really Important subjects knowing that they don't have the lesson. He immediately abrupted us into like the three of us. It was touching.

1:14:41 And like uh une unexpected. And he finished his phrase with Come visit me in India. In what was it, d January next year? I'm hosting an inauguration of uh monastery.

1:14:54 Dalalama gonna be there. And I will introduce you and we will introduce your ideas together and we'll 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.

1:15:13 We had a non private meeting with him with in a group of ten European uh donors. Of the monstering? Uh but then we had to have uh one on one meeting. With him next morning. Which never happened because a storm came.

1:15:27 Like this I know it, this is like a movie story. The storm came and Dalalama. Immediately. To confect and to helicopter. Helicopter and just disappear. And we're standing there. And in half hours a storm just rushed and flooded the entire. But then a month later we received an email from a gentleman whose name was Jerry Murdoch.

1:15:55 He's uh the founder of Insight Partners. One of the biggest uh VC. And uh the email was like I'm at the dinner with I'm at the dinner with Dalama 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. That's what I'm equ why I'm feeling you. So we've we've we've now seen viewers close friends become close friends. And eventually through the many different stories, he invites us to a dinner.

1:16:24 This dinner wasn't really for us. He thought that other people will come, but uh it didn't work, so he invited us instead. And they're Yes, but since this introduction we always were quite uh

1:16:40 Cautious about Everything we just related to some introduced to someone. You stick to the reason. Like and we always try to help him and like be around And just see where it will come. Where it'll go. You're talking about Jerry. Jerry, yes. And at some point eventually he introduces 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.

1:17:08 And we were developing technologies around uh Three D avatars at the moment. Uh and that's Uh What was exactly

1:17:18 On his mind. Like. On his mind was He wanted to combine A bitmology, which were the two D avatars he acquired from the Canadian company. And

1:17:30 Three D engine of uh AR technology of Luxury, the the Ukrainian company he acquired. He wanted to merge the two technologies? And our experience in Hollywood was Emerging technologies. We literally were transferring the two D styles of existing animated shows into three D and back and forth and back and forth. In that moment we also focus on the on three D avatars and how like technologies can actually not a show, not uh not something uh game type of thinking, like

1:17:58 Because we decided to 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.

1:18:08 And style transfers and like all this stuff. Advanced A lot since we left. CG graphics. And we realize that we know everything and more than probably everyone in the field so we can uh try to just start something and and probably gonna like build a successful company. half a year later Evan offered us not offered but over they acquired us. And so just for people who might not have the

1:18:33 The acronym. So AR 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. Oh.

1:18:48 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 capacities? This technology

1:19:04 Face tracking technology, it was uh Ukrainian uh company Luke String, which is a recently uh acquired before um and we work how to combine the avatars into this technology. I see. Uh so right now uh three D version of bitmonger is is uh the most used avatars lately. In Snapchat. It's uh it's already everywhere in like in your profile in games, in Lensas, in all places. And so you guys get acquired.

1:19:30 And If I'm missing a chapter, let me know. But Can you describe What

1:19:37 You did what your analysis looked like when Snapchat suddenly started losing users. I think it was in two thousand seventeen. Two thousand eighteen. Eighteen. So it was early two thousand eighteen. Are you right? Two thousand seventeen Instagram Release their stories. And in the beginning of two thousand eighteen new version

1:19:58 New update version of Snapchat was uh was released. Uh in the Kim Kardashian tweeted Mokali Jenny tweeted that uh like no one would use Snapchat anymore, all the stuff, and audience started to decline. And at that moment Most of the people given the internal idea in the company was that it's due to the public public sentiment competition. Public sentiment of the bad new version.

1:20:24 Or a competition of uh Instagram in and TikTok or all together. While our analysis Of David? Showed us. That it's

1:20:34 Not True. And then the major Reason for the decline of the audience. was related to the fact that Android version of Snapchat.

1:20:43 After the update. Become so slow. that people over time gave up. Yeah, they just abandoned started abandon. Ten percent of the slowest devices of Android users.

1:20:57 Could have experienced like up to forty seconds before the feed with stories would load. Next time when you will open some feed like no way. 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 realize that what we can do is actually to just bring all the insights which we were able to extract. Uh and to just uh give him all the evidences so that uh more

1:21:34 Focus. Can be Add it. to the the problem and to making the the app faster. Now why do you think you guys spotted this?

1:21:42 Right, because it doesn't sound like it's immediately your department. Or responsibilities. So was the narrative that it was you know, the Jenners and the Kim Kardashians and then the competition was at 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.

1:22:05 In among executives, it was a really rare Things. To use Android as day to day. Evan he pushed himself to use Android to experience this all I uh what his users

1:22:20 uh usually experience when they use Android. But we use Android as a day to day devices. We hackers, we don't like limitations of um closed stores and closed up uh ecosystems. That's why we always were there. And so when we developed our three D avatars Yeah. Well first it worked faster. On Android and then on iOS. And it was quite uh unique to to compare it 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.

1:22:55 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 uh the Snapchat ecosystems The challenge you know there there are different methodologies. For example, there is a methodology to A B tests. When you lunch.

1:23:20 half of the users will see one version and half the users will see a different version, and then you will compare the results. But with performance degradation The Results. is delayed.

1:23:33 It's not immediate. You cannot really like it's really hard to able to apples. Yes. So you need to wait for some time, you need data for for longer period of time. Give your users bad version? Wait for them to use it for a long enough period for you to see the difference in behavior. Yes, Evan decision, moral decision was never do that. So you you shouldn't really make the Experience of users.

1:24:01 Worse, intentionally. And as hackers for us it was like okay, can we uh find a way How to Get this that anyway. So we started to look at all the previous

1:24:12 But accidents which led to and then was discovered. But lasted for long enough. So that we can actually extract the change in behavior data. In the New York area is it's the words not from us, that's why they are not as clear. There were People.

1:24:34 У Олсебів сайдінато онлі ас. Uh it was basically their initiative. There were not enough. Momentum. And not enough people who would work on this problem.

1:24:46 There were really brilliant engineers who already m before that started to rewrite. You could be good uh uh ambassadors to we uh so we used our previously earned um Social capital of building our product. We need to just spend all the social capital on this problem, otherwise shares drop to five dollars per share from twenty in all our like the entire compensation of ours uh inequity and of course. And also we we saw the opportunity, you know, uh for us We got through two major crises in our life. not counting the the childhood crisis financial crisis

1:25:22 That's why somehow for us when It is a crisis for us is It's a great time. So we're like, oh like now our we can show how we can hide never let a good crisis go to waste. Yes, exactly. So and at some point we just had to show that we're good engineers as well. In order to challenge The status quo.

1:25:44 David had to sit down and fix Camera. Snapchat is camera. And David made it Load. Twice fast. Like not load, like when you

1:25:54 Press a button how fast the picture would be ready. I showed that it can be the speed can be doubled. So in it was like Oh wow. So yes, you are guys also great engineers as well. So

1:26:06 How did you do that? And we showed some of the principles of how you can find Inefficiencies and the code? But still it's really important in the sense that it was uh a really team effort. Those great engineers actually was part of this process. What we see as uh our contribution this that this Promotion of the same. 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.

1:26:33 And that's what definitely really great times. Uh it worked. And uh you know like even though Snapchat has some challenges right now with uh financial side of things, but with audience. Since then it's growing. The audience is growing. They recently reached like eight hundred million. The audience is growing in the countries where the Androids are s even slower. So the app actually is pretty significant, right? Still right now. In terms of Android apps, it's still like one of the fastest apps to load, uh compared to the major apps I was. Launching a new updated version.

1:27:06 Only happened when like in March ish. Of two thousand nineteen. But it was also important and like we put lots of effort into this program more than the more than the other one. to fix the existing version. Before the new was released, the old had to be fixed In order to stop bleeding.

1:27:26 Yeah. 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.

1:27:39 Since then. So I have a question about this type of Data driven analysis. Do you Attempt to do this type of analysis with

1:27:50 Goals or challenges that you have in your personal lives is do you try to apply it everywhere? Are there examples that you could give outside of the business context? First of all, we we should know that we Yes, Daniel mentioned about intuition, we believe in both. We believe in the intuition, we believe in data approach. But yes, so for example one of our Major principle.

1:28:11 is that we Know what is compound growth. And for example, when we have some Crazy goals. Crazy for some people. They will we'll set some goals, and this goals are seems to be impossible.

1:28:26 What we show again and again that uh actually If you have goals like like for example number of followers or number of uh dollars in your pocket quantifiable things qualifiable keeping it. Evaluate what you have right now. And then

1:28:46 If you can multiply this number. If you can double. Two times a year. Actually if you can level your result. It is a greatness. You like you have like the entire uh money on earth, the entire population of following, et cetera. So it's really important then you when you have these big goals, you can't have any big goal.

1:29:10 with this uh approach. You're just the need to run faster than uh two times eight every year. Actually what we realize that There is uh corridor if Physical limitation. At the top?

1:29:22 Which is around two point four. Like you cannot run faster than increasing your results two point four times a year. In a long run. Uh but what we realized that it's actually it's it's really tiny corridor. If you increase this number one point six times. You're successful.

1:29:42 If you increase this number two point four times You are superhuman. So this this is only the small corridor. You don't need to think about something faster. If anything slower is just like a little light. No, this is multiplying your KPI by one point seven times every every year. Every year. Once per year. Once per year.

1:30:02 Yes. And we applied it a lot in our life, in our business life, in the life of our companies, uh, in our Personal life, so we we we use this material. 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 be. But what might be an example but for example amount of hours you spent with a romantic partner you inspired by.

1:30:27 Mm-hmm. Okay. So And so you would look at your you would track the hours. And then look to multiply that. Over time.

1:30:37 So you shouldn't expect that immediately you you would start a relationship which would be perfect and like you will spend the all the time and all this time would be perfect and great, etc. But if you have uh one hour of this experience uh a year. This the next uh year it can be two hours, uh the next year it can be four hours. For some it might sound like in in ten years you have the entire life like that. Slow build. Slow build. And and and we just realized that uh when you try to run faster You can actually break yourself. I see what you're saying. So y you can make a mistake by saying, Okay, I'm gonna spend half of my time this year with this person because You're sort of biting off more than you can chew.

1:31:18 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

1:31:32 Break things. On personal experience, yes. This is like when you want too much right away. You break stuff. Yeah, I can see that. That's someone who's physical breakage also. Yeah, but even even with uh the acceleration when you're in a rocket uh fly into space, there's this limitation of like

1:31:50 Three. G Yeah, like three times G, which uh then actually start breaking. stuffing yourself. So it seems that it is an it's it's kind of natural number. This is what we can sustain, like two point four, like uh two, uh one point six. This is something which we can sustain physically and mentally. Um find it anywhere. You wanna play music?

1:32:13 Just start from something achievable right now today. Double year result every year. And you will become a like uh beyond superstars. Superstar. Certainly true with physical activity too. If you're say weightlifting or whatever, you don't need to 10x. Yes. The number every year. And if you try like I've tried, then you start damaging your connective tissue or I remember that was uh one of the Olympic teams, uh was it in UK or something like that. I don't remember exactly. But they're uh they got a new trainer and the new trainer was uh coach was with this approach like but the approach was like we need to improve our KPIs

1:32:54 One percent a week. It's almost the same. And they be become champion from nowhere. Like the last position on the list. So you can. Money, finance. Music. But really important is that you can achieve Anything you can have. Іні тайпов мішен у бі голс. But then

1:33:17 You write this uh you like draws this uh corpse for yourself. Yeah. And and be consistent. What are some of the Logistics challenges And how have you

1:33:29 address them in running your businesses how you run them or organizing your lives the way that you guys Organise them. We have a very messed up calendar. It's like multi-dimensional. Does that mean that you're just traveling all over the place? We travel a lot. Uh for sure. Uh probably like this year.

1:33:53 W in the States for Three months all over the year? But at home like at home in LA even less. Time than that?

1:34:04 One week a month, not more than that. But what helped a lot is that started with two of us, but quite fast, uh two of our sisters. Uh. And they usually run uh uh operations uh and scaling of the behavior. No no it didn't work. But five of us we are quite close. And we work together. We work together, we live together in LA. Like our houses is literally like two minutes away from each other. Yes. And they start to run our operations since uh game development and then the become uh the equal partners in uh animation studio um and uh in sin

1:34:46 It's much easier for us to dream more and to act, um No, but now we discuss everything together, like philosophy, the vision for the future the morality like It's um Constant discussion among all of us. So I can imagine

1:35:04 Just Putting myself in the place of people listening to this that I'm sure there are people out there who work with family. And then there are other people. Who don't work with family, but I imagine.

1:35:13 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 uh for sure. We went through really harsh experience with uh game development studio bankruptcy, and they were the only ones who stayed with us.

1:35:42 Uh through the challenging period. Yes. And when you actually went through such experience it's much Easier to trust, not trust just because it's family, but because you know what you can expect. In especially in venture business when As we mentioned.

1:36:00 Most of the 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 uh the result of this.

1:36:16 Experience. Which we all Had. But maybe just because our parents work together. Press, uh we didn't have this concept uh that's it's it's not right. No and we went through challenges. Definitely we we argue with each other, etc, so we went through a lot of challenges um but it's worth it.

1:36:35 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 is 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

1:37:00 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 in many ways.

1:37:12 I wanna ask you about This is uh Same question applied to two different groups. So 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 chimatics, maybe not. Then the second is What ideas you guys are most excited about right now.

1:37:32 But I wanted to start with Do we have a couple more hours for each? So our so our That He was from physics.

1:37:44 But he was um by government pushed out from physics'cause he was Drewn. In And sweet. Biology. Was an opening. So physics was more protected and and Jews were more discriminated against in physics. So he found uh this niche

1:38:04 It was a new niche, it was an emerging new science. And he Teams there. With uh Knowledge of physics.

1:38:13 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 uh f faster uh in the in this field. Uh starting with the uh the first thing which he discovered was that The colour Which received. By an I

1:38:38 Isn't Connot not in the frequency? Which is then translated as a signal inside of the eye nerve. But as a pattern. Of uh Pa signal of the pauses in between the spikes.

1:38:54 And this is a sort of like how he realized that it should be a computer is there, that it should be a computation because the encoding happened. He came to this idea through the really interesting weird uh obsession of his On the idea that If Evolution.

1:39:10 Was working properly. For millions of years, if not billions of years. Then It should be optimal. that the most optimal mechanism should have uh survived the evolution process. And therefore

1:39:24 What's the most optimal from the physics perspective? In terms of uh measuring uh energy spent on the operation. He's like Time. Time in between the quantum events. This is probably the most optimal one. And that like from this perspective

1:39:43 He was like from the perspective 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 used optimality. All the way down. exploring into the nerve, into into the neuron, uh and into the core of the cell, into the DNA, and then like

1:40:06 Cross the entire cell. Chemistry optics in mathematics. So he always believed that the real discoveries are in combination of different fields. That's 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 the interdisciplinary. Synthesis. In their success both like uh that and Mam the success was because of that. They would combine things which others would wouldn't combine. For example, he brought the quantum physics

1:40:44 In describing cells processes. here like maybe two thousand eight, two thousand ten It was really 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 that's they they would try to avoid that. And only recently more and more discoveries around photosynthesis, which probably requires quantum tunneling and

1:41:16 Then the smell and the this fact that uh the birds can see the direction of uh polarization of light and like where is North Pole. This all can be described only. There was a Quantum properties of some uh processes uh which happen inside. So biggest discovery which we personally Like it's a last discovery. It's like the entire concept that our consciousness

1:41:45 work there is a quantum compute inside every single s neuron. Every single neuron is sort of a Cubits. It's like a quantum state machine itself. Which then combined in in the network Produce all the results. is quantum stakewish. This can actually explain a lot about our psychology, about how we think, how our consciousness works, but also it can give humanity

1:42:08 A lot of clues. How to build proper quantum computers. So currently the quantum computers which we build, like Google builds or Microsoft builds, uh they are all require some really Complicated environments. So you need to froze

1:42:24 The computers to like minus two hundred seventy degrees. Fully isolated from any chaotic uh magnetic fields and stuff. So it's really complicated. While e file parents write. In every cell. Every cell in our body has a quantum. So we can actually look at How biology made it and then built a new uh class of quantum computers which can actually be in your watch and then and then uh this can accelerate the personal

1:42:56 AI development not Yeah. corporation's big AI, but uh 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 uh superconductor can also be there somewhere. I know that recently there was this this entire hype with the supposedly discovery of the room temperature superconductors.

1:43:24 It seems that it didn't work the this time fully, but we all like why why was so excited because it can change everything. Understanding the the quantum limitation. All roads. can be done from superconductors, if all the roads can be done, then we have flying cars. If the same roads can then become

1:43:43 of uh electric network which distributes electricity around the globe. From uh sustainable sources. We have they somewhere. It's sh

1:43:57 Power 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. So the answer can be inside of our cells. Yes, so and the biggest discovery was that the the answer can be inside of the cells if we can actually look at the properties of the s nanotubes and they are really special. No one would expect that they would have. Even though we all know about physics and chemistry But we cannot predict this properties. Because this is recently not probably not even published. Or or maybe some some discussions in the conferences is happening.

1:44:41 That Then nunnet soups of that sort The cytoskeleton nanotubes. Microtubulars. They can capture photons.

1:44:51 They can capture light. And direct it. Within its structure. As the light actually hits The micotubelar.

1:44:58 The photon goes inside the tube and then like as if it's a cord which captures the light and then unexpected and great properties which can be used in industries and uh which can be used by humanity to to just uh accelerate our developments. But it's important that they just realize that to achieve that we need to be interdisciplinary and we need to combine through the last years uh he was uh promoter that he believes that in schools we should teach kids like that. So like not to teach like physics and chemistry and like value, but but certainly but teaching together to all together in in in show how all this interconnected in that uh we need to kind of

1:45:39 Grow in you uh generation of uh scientists who wouldn't be so silent in the disciplines. Alright, so I wanna 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. Since you mentioned teaching

1:46:00 Which relates to learning. How would you Teach kids to code. Or people to could.

1:46:08 Maybe currently taught. So first of all we We saw That computer science. Historically.

1:46:15 Emerged from mathematics. And this minds like ours. Uh so it's really great for us. But for most people. It's really alienating because if you're not good in math You

1:46:29 Mathematics you will just avoid even No, because you will think that you are not really great at that. Ін реаліці It's a language. It's much closer to learning French or Japanese. It's actually less easier. A friend of mine uh published a small book which was basically Code is poetry.

1:46:48 Oh that's interesting. And uh can you share it? Because we actually also wrote a tiny book like Buddha Language. Sure, sure. 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. Online books. Where you learn that you can actually first Type.

1:47:22 Something. In a normal language. Description of the world. Description of the it can be easily translated by you in into coding language in like Python or C or uh or Swift. It's literally like a translation. First you 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.

1:47:50 And that's what mostly you should learn. You shouldn't learn the words. If you z met to learn Then you can actually code In any language. Because it appears that Swift or C like they're all the same, they're all interchangeable. Every time when I interview an engineer and this engineer would say that oh like I know only this language

1:48:16 This would be a red flag for me because it means that you don't really understand and all these languages 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 metal language, and this metal language is really close to real human nature language, then you can actually code in any language. And that's that's what we Really promote and uh We happen to Next slide

1:48:44 Teach some people coding. Who would never think that they can call it and who would uh think that mathematics is not there. Like moms of two housewives. Um And they are great. Because they're great in language and if you're great in language if you you can actually learn this language as well. Especially right now, even though yes, uh Chad GPTs of the of the world, they can code for yourself, but if you know how to code you will be well off in the next

1:49:11 Well twenty years, like then twenty 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. I 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.

1:49:32 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 you know, he's very math capable. But I sort of developed a I had like an adolescent onset allergy.

1:49:48 But I recognize the the beauty and elegance and value of code. I don't think I would ever use it as a profession, but I like the idea of testing myself. But I've always struggled with Trying to identify how to start.

1:50:02 I and I've looked 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 There is a f uh free book on our Instagram, like there is there is link which you can try. It's definitely only the first step, then you will Need to look more, but at least through the step.

1:50:26 Our expectation that you will Stop being nervous and and afraid of calling and it would be more initial for you. That's why um we we wrote this book just to to make it easy, because I don't like any other courses because they all like start with syntaxes etcetera. In in in it's not The way you start is 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? Which I don't know anything about coding, but it's it's the same with foreign languages, right? 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

1:51:03 Uh, no thanks. I'm out. I'm out. No, like here's a comic book. Like let's look at some things that you can use immediately, make it fun, and then like later we can do the harder stuff. And also what we found and w that's how we learn how to code. is that usually when you learn language You first read. Not right.

1:51:22 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 wrote code. We wrote a a clean Instagram 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 in the middle of the course you're just okay, now change.

1:51:49 Now change some stuff in the code and you will see the changes in the app. And as you change the part of the code, you see the changes in the app and you're like, Oh That's how it works. But also positive feedback. Uh yes, and also if even if you decide not to be an engineer. If for even for example if you're product person, product manager or marketing person. QA. It's really important for you to understand

1:52:13 Otherwise you won't be able to give properly the tasks. to engineers. You won't be able to manage engineers. And in in you in a lot of opportunities, uh you will always be triggered by engineers because you will ask them to do something, but they will do s something really different if you don't really understand their language. But as soon as you do it's actually uh I wish we had more time and more like eager To Actually finish the full course.

1:52:41 But it's uh absolutely not the primary goal. You know, like Hactic 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

1:53:05 Excited and Motivated. First observations. Which we Help.

1:53:13 About the world? And this observation gave us a different perspective. And this perspective is 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 trying to crystallize them in the project. Product. Um one of the major observation uh which

1:53:33 Actually started from bankruptcy of um game development studio. Really wanted to understand what was the hell happened financial. Like what um how we missed that, uh not that we missed it, like we saw that there was like a problem in the real estate market. But everything collapsed. Little did we know about how the financial market works. Yes. So in uh then we dig deeper in get first, we got to the same conclusions. Uh the everyone. Everyone. Like economists. Derivatives.

1:54:13 Ready to fall swaps. This all last to this bubble. Some times like all this stuff. Yes, people usually like when it's about derivative in uh create default swaps Blame the bankers. Like oh bankers, they they they made this deregulation. They are the problem and that's how it all happens. But we usually think Every time when we have uh a statement. We check it with data.

1:54:35 And we decided to say that who was the actual beneficiary. Of the created default swaps. Not of their fall, but of them being created and popularized that way. And then we realize that most of the create default swaps through some vehicles They were owned by pension funds. Yeah, well I

1:54:54 What? Because we are from region. Where pension funds really Small pensioners are really uh poor people, and uh you would never think that uh the On some like multi trillion dollar huge yes, huge pensions in the United States

1:55:12 Are like what is it? Forty trillion dollars. It's more than the entire publicly traded market combined. You will combine all Apple, Google, Exxon, uh, Walmart, you will combine all these companies, it's smaller than the the assets of pension funds. Al together less than the assets of pension funds. So through this prism we started to learn more and more like how the hell it happened. Yeah. The fact that the United States is the greatest economy in the world is because of this. So the army some big chunk of their money and the money was not just saved.

1:55:50 But was invested into the market. And that's how market got all the capital to grow. But then realize that unfortunately As soon as this population Not only Ooh.

1:56:04 to th the amount that's the or the majority of voters. But also they have this Enormous financial power. The financial power

1:56:14 Which is the bigger than the bigger than the the banks, the bigger than any other organization. Um so this financial power and this voting power Um together combined led to lots of uh popular political decisions and regulations and regulations, which was completely false. What types of things? So the one we can give you some some taste of it. Yeah. Yeah, for example, when we first came to United States We learn about student debt.

1:56:42 And for you it's obvious, like it's United States, everything is commercial, that's why college is not free. That's how we got to the student net. But the student that if you will look at the size in before two thousand It was a really a small problem. It's now like two trillion dollars, but before that it was a much Much, much, much smaller. Uh problems.

1:57:05 And what we realize that Previously, like in eighties. Your tuition when you go to state college. would be mostly subsidized by government. Like ninety percent of your T would be subsidised by government.

1:57:18 That's how your like parents were able to actually pay for their teaching during like summer job. Like through through the summer job. And that's how uh the that never accumulated as much. But In late eightys, begin of Nightis. Because of almost uh bankruptcy state of public pension funds.

1:57:42 The government's In different states. And in federal level as well. Made a decision. to not only bail out but also

1:57:50 For the future protect. This pension funds. For example, in California The gross of public pension funds, including teachers' funds.

1:58:00 Guaranteed on a level of seven point eight percent a year. Imagine that your deficit would be guaranteed as well. A state budget. And it's not even obvious. So the subsidies to education went down as a result. Yes. Exactly. Yes. So it's You can see tons of information become publicly available. You can trace it. You can trace it. It's all there. Tons of data. But if you like to dig into 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 and then like uh Cal Spurs uh of uh in California. Yes, it's uh public pension funds, pension fund of public workers and pension fund of teachers of California. No one really realizes um

1:58:43 The size Of this fans. And no longer you like the The gap In between uh liabilities of this fund. So when everyone discusses the pension funds are underfunded

1:58:57 It's only public pension funds. Public pensions funds which are underfunded. Oh again. five trillion dollars. This is Accounting the money which is constantly transferred. From subsidies.

1:59:11 So the the punch. Someone this is just public workers. Like they're probably what fifteen percent of workforce in the United States And yet The size of their pension funds is half of all pension of all pension funds. Even though it's only fifteen percent of of workforce. Why?

1:59:30 Because of a guaranteed seven point eight percent annu growth. Because when the rest of the market goes down, up, down, up So in this problem it's not only education. If you look at the police, you know, there was this big movement of unfinding police. And we looked at the budgets. And per person in LA, for example, per officer. In the layout.

1:59:50 It's almost like two fifty thousand, two hundred fifty thousand a year. And people were very angry about that. Like what the hell? Like we pay you a lot and like the you're not doing your job. The 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 Cost as a transfer for pension funds for officers who worked thirty years ago. So where does this lead? You guys are looking at the data? And I suppose like a good set of data ideally allows you to have some predictive ability, or at least speculation ability.

2:00:25 So what do you do with this? Zooming out to a larger picture. Well it led to is uh through the generations starting saying from boomers. I mean, I know I know this is like a false signs about dividing people into these generations, but we can buy around fifties, yes, so let's say. The boomers

2:00:46 As they were getting into thirty years old on average as a generation. own something around twenty one, twenty three percent of national wealth in United States. The follow engineeration gen X's. At the same average age. Owned around seven.

2:01:03 Us the millennials. By the same age owned only less than three percent? Like Two point eight ish? And then

2:01:13 The trajectory shows us that together with the the crisis which happened during the Covid, We can expect that the next generation after the Gen Z gonna be in that. By by the same By the same average age. On average as a generation, they still gonna be in that. So trajectory really bad. And also what they screwed that uh If these young people Not if when They realize

2:01:37 The the social agreement is not working. Social structures will start to fall apart. What do you think are some likely ways that that will Show up. We will see like the new wave of unions.

2:01:50 Protests, people not working, economy slowing down, This stuff. New business is not created. We can see from the statistics that over the last ten years The share of the new businesses 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

2:02:10 Th that's the case. You create mul m 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 thirty years old. Used to be forty percent. Or for you.

2:02:27 It's four let's say forty. And now ten years later, now it's a thirty. It down ten percent. Is the same number of companies being built just by younger and older or is the It's just like more companies, the total number is sort of the same. It's just like not young people creating them. It's

2:02:44 People fifty five plus creating them. That's surprising. That's surprising. And no what like I would expect? I never check the data, but my Intuition tell me All those businesses. Or just real estate.

2:02:57 People buying houses and renting them out. Still nothing new is created? Just the the spike in the price in real estate is just because of buying and renting out. And th those are the new VS. There are a lot of problems in but still like when you talk about the problems, uh the it's really important to also at least uh propose some solutions in what we saw because we realized that this shift is uh based on regulations.

2:03:22 It's not natural that this uh shift is happening in the regulation. That's the rules which were set by the previous generations which Making this constant sense there. Yeah. Decipher. This regulations.

2:03:36 What they did that they Made a preference. to equity. to like shares of the companies, et cetera, compared to the income. So

2:03:48 Capital gain is tax less. Like there are a lot of things which actually m made the the huge difference between um Equity, how equity treated? By the regulation and by the market. Got it. Right. The taxation Everything. Pension funds can invest in that, but can not invest in that. In in things like that. So like limitation set. Not naturally. If you have all the capital like the majority of the capital is pension capital, then uh where it can be invested.

2:04:19 Matters a lot. Sure. So in this term we realise that The solution which we Can test. and propose try is to try

2:04:30 to convert Income. Individual income. Okay. So is this this is this is where the the Lieberman's company comes in? First time we did this uh to ourselves. To ourselves. Yeah, you gotta be the first monkey shot into space. Yes, exactly um at less than three G's.

2:04:56 So even though our income is not stable, but so if you will build a model uh around all the founders, all tech founders, and the uh the probabilities of successes during the period of time. We can build an income model. Like you would do with a company. Um projection. Risk weighted, risk adjusted.

2:05:16 Cash flow projection of an entrepreneur. And then based on this uh Yes, in the in the c by based on these projections you can actually set a price For A company which would

2:05:29 have the same type of income. This case if you can form the company, then you can attract investment. The same way companies Do And in this case he will eliminate this bias and vice versa will be supercharged. by improving your future.

2:05:46 So supercharge, just to to try to ensure I'm hearing you correct. 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.

2:06:01 You can Accelerate. Your growth and potential. And then we can average this as an index as an index cross some cohorts. Of specific uh professions.

2:06:13 Or specific scores like students, for example, you have higher education or you don't have higher education. How does it change your average income? Should we in the state? Should we invest in good in every kid to have the good higher education, for them to increase their uh 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 suppress the wheel to go in and risk, and that's how the young people don't create new businesses and just go find a shitter job. Mm-hmm. So how do you think you incentivise uh this type of wider adoption and data sharing, right? Because I can imagine if let's just say we flash forward and this has been widely adopted. Now I can choose, all right, do I want to invest in people who are going

2:07:01 Getting accounting degrees, where maybe I have a more reliable return on my investment year on year. Or do I want to invest in like the growth stocks? that have much higher volatility, like the entrepreneurs of a certain class or maybe age bracket, where It's gonna be a much riskier by volatility measurements. investment, but who knows? The gains could be higher how do you go from

2:07:25 a single proof of concept. I 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

2:07:45 presumably what people are investing in on some level, the 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 ourselves. As tech entrepreneurs.

2:08:00 Because most of our income comes from building companies and selling companies or like making companies and there is no difference whether you Register this company under your name. Or you register this company under a holding company name. That's a great point. You guys are actually operating in a very In an in an easier case, straightforward case, because most of your gains would be from companies. From companies therefore.

2:08:26 likely long term capital gains, maybe you have like USBS exclusions, et cetera, versus if you guys were like very high paid lawyers or something, it could be a lot trickier. Yes, we went through that sample. Thousands of Entrepreneurs? Can actually show under an example that it works for the investors. And then it if it works for the investors, then we can introduce new regulations.

2:08:49 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. Thing there need to be more even more regulations because like kids need to be protected and stuff like this. It all possible. To be done. So we're pretty sure that at least some

2:09:09 politicians We will see that uh their voters can benefit out of it and that that they can actually live better life and the the problems like student debts can be solved in the in just really short term by the tools like that. We hope that some Rules will change.

2:09:27 Right now. Most of the pension funds Are invested in really bubbled. overpriced assets. Just because It's too much money?

2:09:37 And not that much of instruments, like Financial instruments. to actually generate the growth. That's why they needed this uh creditful swabs, etc, because they need this Deratives Because it was just too much money to invest.

2:09:52 Um so if we keep it everyone will win. Like pension funds will win, like people will win, it's just the growth of the economy would be much faster. It's likely gonna be ten times larger. Market? To invest in when we start investing in individual income as uh equity.

2:10:13 What do you say to people who think about this and they're like, Okay, there's 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 I guess they could go out and raise like an equity round if they did. Okay. But with individual income, like in the YouTubers. Mm-hmm. Okay, so how Now, do you think if somebody is really successful That they would try to renegotiate.

2:10:41 Or that they would not try to read the example. Uh it's not us, it was before us. There is a fund. Which invested in college athlete. In the proposed to every

2:10:54 College athletes. They took the statistics because it's quite statistical things. It's like a money ball type of a game. Like they they calculated their way to understanding how to predict how many students they should invest in in order to basically hit the couple of Lebrangia. Exactly. Yes, and they offer it every student Yeah, like Ten percent uh five, ten percent of your future income. And we Pay you the same price, it's ten million dollars.

2:11:20 So half a million million five to ten percent. Seventy Students. Agree? One of them already netted a fifteen years contract for three hundred fifty million dollars.

2:11:33 So they they did great with the fans. Yeah, they did pretty well. There is one. To Susan. tried to challenge this agreement in court. This one athlete challenge. Was it the same athlete? No. No. This one there is a great interview Of him where he explains that this money actually helped him. 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? Um but it worked out. Yes, it worked out. But there is another athletic

2:12:04 Ooh, not that like Three, four million dollar a year type of contract. He tried to challenge this in the court. And everything In this case

2:12:13 is more complicated than with our case. He was sixteen when he signed. English wasn't his the main language, anything like that. So he signed in still court. Was on the side of investors. So How can people find more about this particular example if they wanted to Google something? I will send you a little bit more. Yes. I think it was in Wall Street Journal, the description of all this case, but also I can send you

2:12:40 The links. to the court case, because all the court cases they open so you can see all the arguments in Arguments of the court The were About the fact that

2:12:52 He did well. So it's not about Investors taking the class period of you, I think like that. Uh so he did well in uh and also investors described all the scenarios. There is a scenario in the agreement that there is scenarios that you will do well, and in this case we will get this amount of money, so they described all the scenarios. So they 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 already in like around a dozen people. We have this

2:13:26 Uh minimal sum which minimal sum, yeah. Which we don't like. Minimal income of yours Before which we are not getting anything. Okay, yeah, there's a hurdle, right? Yeah, there's a hurdle. We actually aim to have the outliers. Yeah, it's a power law distribution. In most of the industries there is this power law. It's not only in tech, it's just in art, in podcasts, in like our opinion about this like we will all win. The market will win, society will win, humanity will win from the fact

2:13:56 That we will use this power of law. For wider Groups of people to invest in them. Provides them capital and provides them chance. To get a higher education, to try to start a business. So question about your investments. Yes. To the extent that and we can look at it.

2:14:13 At least two different ways. So one could be your investors and why they chose to invest in you guys. But since you guys made the decisions about your investments I'm curious about those people. To what extent did you

2:14:26 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're like a g like a good investment may have the financial ROI, but there's also Because we have not that much money to invest in every people we want. We needed to pick those. Will be a good story.

2:14:51 So definitely we we look at both. So uh in terms of investors in us, the first investor who supported us. He did not allow us to Back off. Like how to say back up. Yeah, yeah. And we were almost ready to say like oh to give up is like okay, we're not doing this and it's like No no no guys you have to do this like please. Some lesson. He actually had the similar idea when he was out of high school in two thousand one.

2:15:17 He is one of the uh genial partners of Slow Ventures. But then other prominent names like Mark Andressen or Chris Dixon or Josh Cushner, they So now all that's a tiny share of the liberts. 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, so Like with the startups. So when we invest

2:15:44 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 uh this will Help. others to get access to the to the same type of resources. But what's more important for us

2:16:01 The major thing is Whether we believe in this intuition. If the person will continue building After failing. Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big because you're not just investing in one company or investing one company. Moreover, we would come and already did this.

2:16:17 Through the last year and a half as we investing in people, we came to people and said like Quit it. Drop it. I mean But it's not worth your time. It's not working. Like switch to something new. You will never hear about the You will never ever hear something like that from the investor who invested in this particular company. If I invest it in you personally, I am mostly interested in your success.

2:16:38 And if you are like Locked yourself into something which you like, No no no, I gotta do this, like this is failure. It's not failure. It's an attempt. Seventy percent of those attempts gonna end up with zero.

2:16:50 So just move on. Start next one, you'll be successful later. With Sam is probably our like best relationship with uh the investors ever. Um so because it can be really open in not just uh you know like uh showing the goods

2:17:07 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. experience with investors. I don't think Sam's gonna take in any basements. Yes. Seems unlike it. Exactly. So um But not even that. I mean like he's fully supporting us. The same when we invest. So we we understand like some of the founders who invest they already failed with their 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 like hard times. And I would say

2:17:46 Go for a sabbatical. Go to the passenger. Go to the passenger. Like take care of yourself. Like You need to be super efficient and you need to be like happy with your own life. Long term this will score us much more. Then if you're like Well destroy yourself right now. Yes, and and we already have a really beautiful examples when

2:18:06 Founders were able through this freedom were able to act the way they wouldn't. acts and they they already it already gives them results. And like we completely enjoy with the passes of all the people who we invest in, and they're all very different. Different stories.

2:18:24 Different individuals different uh Spheres. Like it's everywhere from Youtube.

2:18:33 So like uh Reinventing quantum physics. Yes, and and and with you with youtuber m Marina, uh she is actually really also Awesome example. She is uh a founder, she had the startup, but to create a marketing vehicle for the startup uh she could create a YouTube channel and then you to this YouTube channel become like a much uh larger thing with the startup. Making like a million plus uh for network. A mortgage, family, kids.

2:19:03 It's all risk. Which you like, you wouldn't bet all of your income To the growth. Yes, he she was growing fast. But as soon as she got like the understanding that

2:19:13 She can use a capital. Firm her future. Like literally this is what we're 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. So take part of this money which already almost exists. Into the current into the present time?

2:19:31 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 I figure I can bring it up. Time machine. Is it possible? Well 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 we you could look to the data if you have such data. Uh and there is some, it would seem, but the

2:19:55 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 because those make for good stories, right? Yeah. Somebody suffers for their whole life and then they show how much they can persevere and then they succeed. But if you look at, you know, some of the examples that you mentioned earlier. Of like the dropout and then the big company.

2:20:20 These are not. Stories of objects. Suffering from the earliest stages of childhood, generally. So would you say and this is time

2:20:30 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 an A bigger success later or Somebody could certainly look at it and say, Well, she's not gonna be as hungry. So we have uh

2:20:45 You know lots to say about this subject. That's why I'm asking. Um If we will look at the most successful experiment of all times. For the humanity. Providing free school education. Free.

2:21:00 School education. Sure. Everyone doesn't matter but they're a smartest kid in on the street or not, like every kid. gave us more than any other investment which we which we as a humanity, like infrastructures and stuff. No.

2:21:14 Providing free education is this. Like a capital early on. It was a controversial idea like hundred years ago, you know. Expensive investment. To provide Education for every kid. Expensive investment.

2:21:31 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 United States

2:21:46 And look. And who were the founders of those companies? And these are companies worth a billion or more. Those are companies worth a billion or more? Or more? A big share of them, like uh most of them. From past families.

2:21:59 They never struggled as us. You know they never went through real like Poverty type of situation of losing girls. They never had the student debt, uh parents paid for their college and that's how they afford it to do it. 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.

2:22:29 Exactly. And then the last one. No probably not the last one, but the the one uh also the for last one from you, then there it will go something. The struggle will come. It doesn't matter if you have millions of dollars. You will always be struggling.

2:22:45 Because You strive to achieve more. And it's challenging. And It's not necessary that the struggle is needed.

2:22:55 But it will be there. Yeah. Doesn't matter if you're like Reach or not. Like uh what was this uh Which people also cry?

2:23:04 Not gonna wear that sh t shirt around, but yeah, I mean that's true. And the challenge comes but you like especially when you start a startup. You want it to succeed, but the also human nature is human nature. Life is suffering, you're gonna f it's it's gonna find you, don't worry. Sorry still here. Exactly. But but in general, you're like with this argument we Here a lot. That founder should struggle.

2:23:29 So we struggled a lot through our Founder Smith. We were like No resources. Yeah in the country where investments are always Consider it as a debt you need to

2:23:43 Put as a collateral your house and things like that. Compared to San Francisco. Where There's no current plateral. You can have a salary, you're like in our case.

2:23:53 We were prohibited to have a salary as the founders. You should have the skin in the game, they said no salary, that's hardcore. Uh so hardcore in if you compare this experience with Silicon Valley experience This is a struggle. Not a struggle at all. So Мос ов за суксел капініс юно. Would never exist. With venture capital.

2:24:20 Vature capital is the money in advance. It's actually not struggling. Struggling is like having the cash flow and uh building your like bootstrap business. Most of the companies are not like that. Because some Levels of achievements. In some at least in some areas.

2:24:37 They require this freedom. For you. to actually risk and to try things. That's why we believe that some struggle is needed. But we believe that not on the level.

2:24:50 You don't have to manufacture it. Yes. And there there will always be competition. But student loan, which just stops most of uh young people in the United States from actually taking the risks early and to achieve more. And later. And later too. I mean I know people in their thirties who still haven't paid off their you know, the then I'm talking not talking early thirties, like mid later thirties, especially if they go to like an extended Graduate school or professional school are still paying off student debt. This is a needed struggle. This is really an optimal.

2:25:23 Not niede. Artificial struggle because we know that so the subsidized money He is paid by tax uh through taxes by people, but just spent on a different stuff. So we don't believe in this idea that the struggle is needed, and vice versa, we believe that the different uh

2:25:42 Local maximum. Which would be much higher in terms of the economy. Isn't the place. Where we removed some of the struggles, especially those which are artificial in a very strong. More electricity, more power, more roads, more cars, more education, more whatever more everything, ten times more everything?

2:26:08 This is when the abuttance is probably likely To be close. The reality. And that's what we can do in this l new local maximum. If we just change the perspective on

2:26:22 What worse to invest in share for individual income or Yeah. Undying companies. The companies are dying.

2:26:31 On average they live actually less than human beings. All the statistics It's for People in their potential. But all the regulations are Yes.

2:26:48 It's Obvious why it's this way, because in the past we needed this invention of limit liability companies in order to like remove the personal. Obligations. individual obligations over the business. Like when your ship is Sunk.

2:27:03 In the sea. Now you own not only you all of your money, your house, but your family can be taken and enslaved. Like we are far away from this world, like hundreds of years away from this world. So now we can through the innovation of like limited liability. And then the uh public market. And this is all innovation in in the way how we see The market.

2:27:25 And the way we look at the market. But We are ready for the new innovation. And this new innovation can like uplift the economy. So question for you guys. I've g I'll I'll answer it first too. So what would you

2:27:38 What request 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. Uh well. Let's be honest, all humans are interested in technology. They just might not recognize it as technology. Is it technology, right? If uh we all use tools, that's the reason it's the reason that Homo sapiens have done what they've done, good and bad. But my request from for my audience would be to Send me links to some of the

2:28:11 biological and biophysics Topics that You both discussed it earlier. Very interested in all of that. Um including quantum effects in and potentially be a bird vision or

2:28:26 All of this is of great interest to me. So people can shoot those to me on Twitter at T Ferris 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 in near San Diego.

2:28:45 In twentieth, uh like eighteenth of August. Here we go. Like just scientists right now are against I mean still like uh you know like Still a quite a small group of people, that's why they really supportive to each other. They should compete with each other, but they they actually are quite supportive uh to each other. We we will be in the conference as well. But what we would Ask.

2:29:07 He's actually. First to think. Who would be those individuals? you would invest in. Like it all of us have someone who we like this guy is gonna be very successful. Second

2:29:20 He is uh Send this information out to us. So if you know the right person, you would invest. You would invest you would invest your money in like Probably will let us know.

2:29:31 In the third one. Is think. that maybe you should invest in this person as well. Like maybe it's your kid. And you're parent, and maybe you should make an agreement.

2:29:42 It actually means that's in the first time. Publicly available online. You can all read it. And check. What's the closest in there? Like you can use this. And that's Lieberman's dot co? Yes. Lieberman's. So

2:29:55 I would say that this is a request. So first think about the 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.

2:30:10 Thank you. 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. We have a form.

2:30:23 I S dot is. Humanism is humanism.is and also we uh communicate quite extensively through Instagram usually we You know, like we use Instagram. What usually we we use Instagram not for pictures but for larger texts in in some of the Instagram.com slash Liebermans. Liebermans. L I B E R M A N S also, same spelling, Libremans.co.

2:30:52 Just telling people. All right. So Instagram. The form at humanism. And people can find the agreement. And that Lieberman's. Lieberman's dot co.

2:31:03 Yeah. The other ask can be If we truly want to see this world happening We need to educate The older population.

2:31:16 And the investors and the grandmas and grandpas who actually are shareholders. Stakeholders in the pension funds. We ніto educate. those people who actually own most of the money in the country. To s gradually start investing in this type of agreements.

2:31:32 At least check. Do we see what's gonna happen in five, ten years from now? If they're gonna make more money by investing in individual income rather than uh 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.

2:31:50 To shift towards this. Yes, you can ask your red man to look Where Uh The pension money. Of uh her.

2:32:00 Are invested. And to see that probably some companies we all blame for some Uh problems in the world. They can be The investors.

2:32:12 But actually companies which affect our Ecosystem. In a bad way. They are not owned by Um people.

2:32:22 They actually most of them Like ninety percent owned by pension funds. So if we can educate our Previous generations. That's a the

2:32:33 Can be shareholders in the problem. Or the shareholders in the future and they have to choose how their money's influence. This is a heritage they can leave. Destroying the planet or actually switching. And I would imagine ninety nine point nine percent of them have no idea that they can control it. That they have a choice. Yes. And they have. That's the funniest part. Sit down with your grandma, maybe look at the their like uh. Write an email saying like I do want some uh share of my pension funds to be invested like my savings to be invested in the individuals, corporations. Or in sustainable companies at least. This education should Happen otherwise.

2:33:14 There is this belief that uh they did previous generation Did everything right? And just uh the new generation is uh well But it's really important to educate that some decisions which were made thirty years ago affect us a lot. Uh today? In some of this effect can be changed if we change where

2:33:36 The money. And where is the knowledge of it? Yeah, I think a lot of it is uh A communications problem. And an education problem.

2:33:46 And that's N 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

2:33:59 Problems aren't discussed and the options aren't discussed. Right? The fact that I didn't know this until I mean shockingly recently for me, like ten 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

2:34:23 I'm excited to see what people come up with. Maybe someone need to make a startup which actually offers a a solution for the uh for the pensioners to do it easier. Yeah. So to just do the sustainable companies, I think that's it. Some type of interface that makes it. Less manual, less one on one. Yeah, yeah.

2:34:41 Because right now it it is hard. You need to spend some time to to actually set up your account properly. But but that's the greatest opportunity. We just need all to talk about this. If you have some challenges believing in this You A you can make your own research on trying to understand whether we're right with our data and our points of of of view. You can like you can ask a question in the in the form you can like find

2:35:05 Find a way to reach us out and ask a question. So we will explain how we see this. And why we believe this is actually actually the really, really, really good way of investing your money. Well also I mean it the the the 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.

2:35:30 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.

2:35:42 sources of value. Not just for the individual, but for community for society. And uh I mean I think about that a lot. I mean it's Asset allocation, but On sort of a Carmically considered.

2:35:57 level at least at the collective. And you don't need to spend the money which you need right now. It is money which uh You'll only get access like in thirty years from now. So we made an experiment when we joined Snap, it was the first time in our life when we got four one key. First time in a life employed. Yes. Yes. We uh we never acquired us, we are employed, we now f have four one K. And the experiment was we're getting exactly the same salary. Exactly the same savings in the four one K account for o of both of us. David

2:36:29 Uh changed everything. In his account? Where the money is allocated. to towards more sustainable companies. Like companies caring about gambles and uh um Yeah, exactly, and the Monsantas 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.

2:36:55 So far I earned twenty thousand more. Then Daniel. It's thirty percent m higher than mine. Um so in Insys it's just

2:37:04 That's the funny thing. So if you believe that other people believe in the same, is that actually m the world is moving in a more sustainable uh clean society. You will win financially as well. If the shift is happening, if you believe in the shifts then And it should happen, otherwise we're all gonna die. But because and because it's happening, like naturally, logically it's happening. Then you should 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 um Doing right.

2:37:37 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. Think

2:37:48 Ever. It's so I think everybody listening has a good amount to think about and they have options for communicating with you. They can go to Lieberman's dot co to see examples of the agreements. Right? The types of

2:38:03 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.

2:38:30 And the Instagram is Instagram.com slash Liebermans. David? Daniel? Thank you so much for taking the time today. It's awesome. Absolute pleasure. Yeah. 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.

2:38:52 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 pruse those.

2:39:02 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? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

2:39:43 It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. Albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmas, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

2:40:23 This episode is brought to you by Protect Rest Supplement, a new take on getting deeper and more restorative sleep. I was introduced to this by former Navy SEAL Nick Norris, who has been on this podcast and as a mutual friend of ours put it to me, It's very annoying that Nick has no physical weaknesses. This is somebody who can climb like a spider. He has incredible abilities as a rock climber, he is incredibly strong and can also run ultra marathons. It's quite something to behold. And this is one of the tools that he uses. So it protects rest supplement, helps provide consistent, restful sleep without any habit forming ingredients or groggy side effects. Simply add it to your last glass of water before bed. and it goes to work. So I tried this after I mentioned to Nick that I was avoiding melatonin due to next day's sluggishness and its possible effects on testicular function, so I was trying to wean myself off of things like that. This rest cocktail has worked wonders and I've made it part of my sleep toolkit.

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