Julian Dorey Podcast - #18 - Alex Horowitz (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

This is the second podcast from The Bunker with Alex Horowitz. Alex is the Chief of Staff at Eight Sleep, a technology company in New York City that specializes in developing & manufacturing smart mattresses. Previously he was a debt underwriter at Goldman Sachs, where he worked with some of the world’s largest tech companies. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 4:12 - 12:14 ~ How the election is essentially Trump vs. “Not Trump”; Biden’s last ditch efforts to distance stances from Obama; Biden still a return to the Obama years? 12:14 - 15:39 ~ Horo’s take on Trump’s style; Biden’s blunders 15:39 - 19:04 ~ Discussing the other Democratic candidates who lost to Biden; The Biden Primary surge; the conspiracy question about Biden becoming the candidate 19:04 - 28:29 ~ Revisiting Bernie Sanders candidacy; Discussing the problem with calling Biden or Obama socialists; The rigged game against Bernie Sanders 28:29 - 38:54 ~ Dr. Steven Pinker and the income wage growth graph (since the 1980’s); the wealth gap and its effects on politics; how the Occupy Wall Street & The Tea Party Movements birthed Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, respectively 38:54 - 47:59 ~ The problem with Biden’s tax plan as an appeasement to Bernie Sanders voters; How the DNC doesn’t “get it” 47:59 - 50:29 ~ Biden campaign’s lack of self-awareness (again re: Bernie voters) 50:29 - 55:44 ~ Biden the politician vs. Trump’s rambling everyman schtick 54:44 - 1:04:59 ~ Hunter Biden story from NY Post; Trump’s issues with his own kids’ dealings 1:04:59 - 1:13:29 ~ DNC and Biden’s lack of understanding on the importance of “jobs” to common Americans; The Trump-Biden “oil” moment in the last debate; How the Biden campaign attempted to walk back his in-debate gaffe 1:13:29 - 1:21:29 ~ Julian talks about how some of Trump’s intentions seem right, but why his solutions seem wrong; Julian on how he intends to vote; Trump’s dog whistling pattern 1:21:29 - 1:25:43 ~ Horo on how he intends to vote and what an ideal candidate would look like 1:25:43 - 1:36:59 ~ Horo discusses his former employer, Goldman Sachs, and the work he did there; East coast business culture vs West coast business culture; Venture Capital (VC) industry culture; operating vs. innovating 1:36:59 - 1:42:39 ~ Horo talks about building a network from scratch in VC; Why Eight Sleep hired him to be their Chief of Staff; the importance of “reps” 1:42:59 - 1:45:59 ~ What attracted Horo to Eight Sleep; Eight Sleep CEO, Matteo Franceschetti’s history within Start-ups and VC prior to Eight Sleep; Julian on why some lawyers make great business leaders; How the idea of Eight Sleep came about 1:45:59 - 1:57:59 ~ Eight Sleep’s main mattress product, “The Pod;” Oxygen levels, heart rate variability, temperature, and thermoneutrality... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whereas when you see the politician look in the camera, they could have never heard of something in their life and this thing happens where their body just transforms and suddenly the twinkle goes in their eye and they go, let me tell you, like William really believe in this process right here. I have read every single document as it is pertaining to this law. Give me the name of the law again. Yeah, I know it. I have slept with this. In fact, me and Chelsea were up last night thinking about this and talking about how it's going to change the world. And I'm leaving office in six years, but this is going to live beyond me. And everyone's like, for some reason, he sucked you in every time because he was was the best yeah trump you know it's just some old fart who's like you know what i think he goes off it's another example yet again that there are broader political systems

that that govern this country that don't understand the common american all right let's transition this to the to the big boy issue the one we haven't really touched on yet got a little um little election going on on november 3rd no i don't know i just heard about it i think something's happening that day like people are gonna vote and shit yeah i think so yeah what what's what's your thought right now we look and let me preface that because that is a I think something's happening that day, like people are going to vote and shit. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. What's your thought right now? Look, and let me preface that because that is a loaded question. But we've touched on the fact that things are extremely polarized. We've touched on that we are literally drawing political lines down health issues and down the pandemic and down as far down the gutter as you can it has not changed the fact that once again and again my perspective here and i think

based on what you've been saying and what we talked about off the podcast you're in a very similar boat as me which is we find some things that we're like yeah i get behind that with each side and then we find a lot of things where we look at both of them and say no no no no no the answer's in the middle of you guys and you gotta stop fucking yelling at each other yeah what's what has been your vibe and don't let me put words in your mouth say whatever say whatever you you really feel about it no look i mean i i mean i think i think you've nailed it i mean i think i wouldn't say that, like, so this is the way that I see the election, you get sort of very little substantive change in terms of any positioning, really. I think when I look at sort of the recent stuff that's been happening in the election,

the recent things that Biden has been saying, I think he's trying more now to show people, I'm not just not Trump. I'm also this guy, Joe Biden, and here's why my platform is different. But it's almost a little bit too little too late to come off as substantive and so i'll bring up an example of this i think last night in the debate um by the way for for people watching this later it's the third debate the final one yep um i think it was the first time that we saw Joe Biden detach himself from the Obama administration on the position of immigration.

And I think it was the first time that I truly said to myself, oh, wow, like Biden is now saying that he would have done if he was in Obama's seat, he wouldn't have done the mass deportations. He wouldn't he would have had a more liberal stance on immigration and he would have done something different. Right. And that was actually a bit of a refreshing thing to see from from Biden when Trump's when Trump takes a bit of a hard-line approach on immigration. Is that a very main issue for you? I wouldn't say it's a main issue for me, but I think it was the first time where I... I mean, it is in the context of I would prefer a policy

that is more aligned with what Biden is finally saying, which is present you know, present an opportunity for people to have a path to citizenship who have come here illegally but not under their own control, right? You know, DACA, for example. Kids especially, yeah. To say nothing of the process is so fucked.

Yeah, yeah. But I think for me, it was the first time where i finally saw something different from from biden because i think a lot of biden's a lot of biden's campaign is about this return to normalcy and the normalcy that he's defining is the political environment pre-Trump, which is, to define that, the Obama administration. So I think the platform that Joe is running on, or has at least shown me that he's running on, prior to glimpses of this, oh, this guy, Joe Biden, he's an individual with different views. But prior to that, his platform was essentially, I am the Obama administration.

And that's what I'm going to do. He's drafting off Obama. Yeah, absolutely. And Obama's brand has been... Yeah. There we go with that word again. I'm going to do that every time. Every time I say someone's brand obama's style has been more appreciated especially by the people who loathe trump who aren't like

real even like really really liberal it's been more appreciated after he left as a result of the polarization that's happened the last four years yeah and so when i when i talk to a lot of and it's funny you say that because when i talk to a lot of people who are very clearly anti-Trump and very clearly pro-Biden, and I'll emphasize very clearly pro-Biden, like they go out of their way to say, I want Joe Biden to be the president of the United States, which, you know, say what you will about that statement. But a lot of them, they are just, what they're excited about is a return to the ideology of Obama. And what they, somebody literally said this to me, and I know this person's going to watch this podcast's gonna watch this podcast so in advance just don't say their name in advance i love you but what this guy this guy said to me that he was talking about different reforms in the electoral process that he would enact and one of them was the elimination

of term limits uh for the presidency i know what guy you're speaking of and you you actually don't, because I don't think you know him. Really? Yeah, you don't know him. The other guy we were talking about said, we were talking about this like 10 minutes ago, or whatever. It was said in probably a different context than that guy, which was, he basically said, I was like, why would that be good? Like, you see,

I mean, Putin's been president for, what, 50 years in Russia? I'm joking, but, you know. Fair point. But, you know, very long. He came back, too. Yeah, he became PM, he came back, you know, blah, blah, blah. PM. Hold on. Big air quotes there.

Yeah. So I was like, I mean, that just opens up so many avenues for corruption. Like, why would that be a good thing? And he's like, becauseama would have got elected again and i'm like well i i can't argue with with when you're gonna make statements like that i can't like have a real conversation because it's like i mean like what are you even trying to say like i i mean like the so so to get back to my original point there i mean i think a lot of people who are are happy voting for Joe Biden, they're trying to get back to this Obama-style government. But, I mean, I think we need some different things.

And so I struggle. I struggle because on the one end, I'm not a big Trump fan. And can you give some – and seriously, I just want to know what some people say because we do this all the time and I do it too. And I need to be better about this. Like we say things where we're this or we're that and we don't qualify it so specifically because there's a whole bunch of reasons people could not be a Trump fan. What are some of the big issues for you that you have a problem with? I'm sure some of them are the regular ones. So my biggest issue with Trump is his, when he presents ideas and arguments, they are impossible to follow.

He is not a coherent speaker. His train of thought and his stream of consciousness is so difficult to understand and follow. There's no way that you can follow anything linearly in what he says. in a lot of areas, especially when he said, for example, something about Joe Biden selling pillows and sheets. And I was like, I mean, I sort of understand what you're saying. But I mean, it's not a linear coherent argument. And so I don't like the way that he presents arguments. Do you think Biden, just because he's running against biden yeah because i agree with you yeah and the big difference here and i've said this trump is unbelievably entertaining yeah i would watch this man read the phone book i can't watch him and not laugh my ass off yeah and you got to remember there's a lot of people like that and it's like well fuck man it's crazy but it's entertaining.

And they don't separate themselves from the vote for that. But I will say that while I agree with what you just said, I mean, Biden, until the town hall and the final debate, he couldn't speak. I don't know what – like, seriously, I don't know what they put him on, but the guy couldn't coherently put together a sentence. He puts a lid everything every day too and i just don't this is what pisses me off so much trump was the one of the most beatable incumbent presidents in the and we don't know you know we're recording this when the election's not over so maybe biden will win but he is one of the most beatable incumbent presidents in the history of this country a living breathing moderate soul who just said a coherent sentence and said okay

and ran and just did a few campaign stops could beat this guy and they are the Democratic Party has chosen to run the one guy who apparently needs a nurse's help to wake up it seems like sometimes what's been different is the last couple again the town hall and the debate I don't know what the fuck is going on but he's been

very coherent yeah i have to give him that i look i mean as as someone who has been shitting on the guy about this from the absolute start from the primaries you know with with uh i mean i have all the videos saved of him making the craziest blunders. And they're hilarious. What was the one he goes, they used to rub my legs. And I like that. With the kids. You're just like that.

The corn pop story. As somebody who's been ragging on this guy the entire time, I agree with you. It's disappointing. But when you look at the – I mean, and it goes back to like who is part of the political system today and like like let's have a real conversation about who was was was running that realistically would have been better i mean i don't like i don't really know that there is somebody um that would have been better and and potentially different like you have um you you have you know amy klobuchar who's like you know literally the same person except somewhat coherent uh but zero mass support zero popularity you have pete budaj put the popularity

aside yeah to break it down but go ahead yeah you you have You have Pete Buttigieg who – I mean the guy was tooting his own horn when he won an election where he got – he won one election in his life and I think he got like 8,000 votes. Like the – like honestly popularity is a big thing. I don't know if I can necessarily remove that from the equation. That's fair. But you had a guy in Buttigieg who said a lot of quite strongly put opinions in the beginning and then walked back on every single one as it started to look like he had a chance.

And people saw that and they said, I think this guy's a phony. And so you had that guy. And the gay community, it seemed to me, really didn't like Pete Buttigieg. Because he was a gay candidate as well. And sometimes you look at the identity and you say it's natural. You know, like they may gravitate towards him because he truly represents them. But that, I mean, you go on Twitter, that did not seem to be the sentiment.

Yeah. Buttigieg's record also within the black community was terrible. I did hear that. And he had almost zero minority support. And so you had that playing severely against him, especially as the primaries started to get heated. And some of that support was, frankly, necessary to secure some of those early states. And it's why Biden had a surge, if we remember. You know, some of the earlier southern states after Nevada, he had huge amounts of black support. He got the Obama coalition.

Yeah, exactly. Was it Clyburn down in South Carolina? he had huge amounts of black support he got the obama coalition yeah exactly clive what was it cliburn down in south carolina yeah i think so in the endorsement and then that really set him off yeah exactly now the question i had and this is a little bit of the cynic and minimal conspiratorial or whatever there were 27 candidates running for this thing biden i believe lost iowa and then lost new hampshire no democratic candidate has ever emerged from the primaries without having won one of those and i think he got like fourth or fifth in new hampshire yeah and then suddenly he wins south carolina and all these people who it's early in the process is like fucking five states in all these people who had the support klobuchar buddha yeah yeah even like even yang it was never gonna win let's be honest

they all dropped out at the same time yeah and then and they got beto to endorse him all these people endorsed biden and like now kamala's his or kamala excuse me yeah is his running mate and she was body bagging him oh yeah debate stage yeah it would it's almost like ted cruz having been if he were trump's running mate in 2016 yeah all this really happened and lined up behind a guy who especially around super tuesday literally couldn't complete a sentence it was concerning yeah well i mean you're you're absolutely right to call this out because as somebody who was following this from the very beginning, and actually thought that the Bernie surge was quite intriguing. Oh, yeah, I didn't mention Bernie, oh my god.

I thought, I mean, despite the fact that I knew that this guy had no shot, because they weren't going to let him win. How sad is that? Yeah. Like, you were saying that in February. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I mean,

I was, I was saying this right when this whole thing started and I knew there was a groundswell around him because it was coming out that the grassroots campaigning that he was doing on the ground was super strong, especially in those early States. So what was the meme? I am once again asking for your support, your financial support.

Yeah, so I saw this swell coming, and I was doing a lot of news consumption at that time because I wanted to almost corroborate this thought that I had that they weren't going to let this guy Bernie win. And what I noticed around that time, the time of the earlier primaries, was there was a lot of media just pummeling of Bernie. They dragged this guy through the absolute mud, especially in those last debates. This guy couldn't get a word in edgewise. After COVID, yeah.

Which no one was watching, too. This guy could not get a word in edgewise. And actually, I'm talking... Yeah, I guess it was after COVID now, when those final ones started happening. You know what's crazy, though, though too because i want to inject this into your train of thought and let you run with this you see the fear-mongering from both sides yeah but if we're going to look at the right sides and look they're playing the game whatever think of it what you think of it what do they always say joe biden's a socialist socialist. They immediately put that tag on and everything.

And all the Democrats, they want to make this all socialism. And let me not even say they're wrong. Let's say they could be right in the long term. I don't know, man. Don't ask me if they're right or wrong there. But they do this to the same party who has taken the only avowed socialist in the last two elections. Yeah, and basically crucified the guy. Summarily pushed him to the door.

Yeah. No, I think, yeah. And, I mean, sorry to cut you off, but, I mean. Not at all. To that end, there's no way that this guy Biden is a socialist. And it's kind of what I started off with. He's not. Which is, I mean mean he's just not Trump

that's basically it Obama was and listen people like to end sometimes I do wonder if it's a little bit I hate to throw this out there because but you have to sometimes I do wonder if it's a little bit

racially prejudiced motivated but people love to label obama a socialist yeah was he as much of a capitalist as trump not even close yeah yeah but obama's entire cabinet was goldman sachs and city group yeah there's no economy was down it at the symbolic number of 666 on the S&P in March 2009, six weeks after he was in. And frankly, whether or not he hindered some of the growth or not, the right wants to argue that, fine. But when he left office, it wasn't down there. Yeah. It's funny because people that don't believe this, I mean, Trump literally says it all the time yeah he says he says all the time oh obama was the one funded by the wall street execs not me i didn't take their money he took

their money and then he says he's a socialist yeah and exactly you can't say both things in the same sentence um and i i'm very inclined to think that he's not and that, I mean, he isn't. I do think Joe's proposed tax plan is a little excessive. No doubt about that. I damn well don't support. That is not something I support in his campaign. And I've said this, say it again, just make sure it's always above board. I'm not voting for either of these candidates.

They have not and will not earn my vote. That has been set in stone for a long time. And nothing's been done to change that. But it's it's it's kind of a stupid argument yeah right right especially especially especially getting back to the bernie thing when when basically after new hampshire right because iowa regardless of whether or not you believe that Pete Buttigieg won or lost, Bernie really won there because. Why is that? He he had the he beat Biden. So from all accounts, Bernie, Bernie won.

And it was it was great for his campaign. And he virtually tied Buttigieg, too. So let's I mean, that's that's, I mean, he was basically tied for first. Then he goes to New Hampshire and wins. And sure, I mean, it's basically home field advantage. But by then, if you're a Bernie supporter, you're starting to look at this and you're like, oh, you know, maybe there's a chance here. Yeah.

And if you're... They were, man. Yeah. They were. Yeah. And people were getting riled up, man. Yeah. They were. Yeah. And people were getting riled up and the ground game was getting stronger than ever. And then all of a sudden,

the last card was played by the party, which was we get at the exact same time, we get all of our potential mainstream candidates who might want a cabinet position or a VP spot, we get them all to drop out and throw their support behind Biden. We then get all of the mainstream news outlets to start pushing Biden. And we have this all happen at the same exact time. And when this happens, combined with endorsements from key people in these next states we're going to completely flip the narrative and they and it worked i mean they had it down to a t

and i'm like you i knew it was gonna when when when they're like oh my god he's gonna win he just won new hampshire he basically won iowa i'm like yeah yeah he'll be done and then the and then the narrative switched and from there was basically over and i think i think that was i think they knew that they needed to do it then i think if they let it go on too long it would have been too late and i don't think that they would have been able to stop bernie at super tuesday because i think that that was the backup plan. That was totally, yeah. That was the plan B, was, oh yeah, we can just, even if Bernie, like, even if Bernie

gets really close to winning out, we can just stop him during Super Tuesday and, you know, rig the delegates. You know, they had more super delegates that were, you know, mainstream leaning than him. But, I mean, it worked and it worked well. And there is data to support this, actually. And it would be, I'll share this with you. But when you look at the data that shows how many Democrats and when i say democrats i mean individuals who are affiliated with the democratic party i don't mean politicians when you look at how many of them believe what

they see on the news media and this this was a this was a graphic that came out around the time – based on data from I think the primary, it said that around 60 to 70 percent of mainstream Democrats believed what they saw from mainstream media outlets so that's cnn msnbc um you know believed as a broad term in that way yeah yeah just in general yeah took took with less skepticism that than you would expect okay when you looked at republicans who did the same down in the down in the 15 to 20 percent range that's hot that's higher than i would have thought but but i mean that goes to show you that they had the data behind this to be able to prove that it was going to work this is the best argument i've heard about this yeah i mean and i'll send you the graphic because it please it's real and it exists i want to put that in again like whenever we're talking about this stuff we pick the best sources we can but i want to put it out there so that people can check it

themselves as well so i appreciate that yes and so it was almost uh it was almost uh probabilistic that that this was the best outcome for them in order to stop Bernie from becoming the nominee. Because they had the data behind them that they knew that people would believe them if they slandered him on TV, which they started doing every single day after he started winning states and before that, too. But they started going hard, really hard. Here's the 500- pound elephant in the room that i don't hear people talk about very often i'll give i think one guy who did talk about it dr stephen pinker who i've read a lot of his work out of harvard he's a uh one of the preeminent psychologists in the world and he writes he's particularly interested in the issue of things are better than we

make them out to be. And he backs it with empirical data, which is a pragmatic way to look at it. I love reading his stuff. His latest book, Enlightenment Now, I've talked about that on podcast before. Better Angels of Our Nature from 2011. These are amazing works. And he – in Enlightenment now, he breaks it down across every level of global society, like literally down to world hunger by the numbers, murder rates, war rates, a whole bunch of – the climate, everything. And he tries to look at it with empathy but then also

deferring to what's the best possible outcome here and one of the things that was a theme he talked about across some of these in the book was first of all he was open he is not a trump guy at all i would say borderline hates him when i've seen him speak publicly about him he's more measured yeah um but you know that's okay like like that's just kind of his point of view but he he understands what trump did very very well and i bring it up because he points out that bernie did the same thing and gets no credit and i love his point and here's here's the bottom line of the issue when you look at 2015 2016 first of all let me add my own point in here yeah absolutely I always ask people who were the last four candidates in the primaries total between the two parties who were the last four candidates standing they always know Trump and Clinton and pretty much everyone knows Bernie who is the

fourth Cruz yes Cruz okay now for both policy points and public image points which in the context of the popularity contest that is the presidency it's the same thing across those four candidates bernie sanders hillary clinton donald trump ted cruise is there anyone in there who's even like a modicum of a moderate candidate no no there's not so we can agree that we've obviously even in our selection process weeded out the people who come with the moderate voice that we supposedly love to hear the difference is the guys who aren't moderate get the attention in the media so then that's who people pay attention to and that's who wins the elections anyway that needs to change either Either way, in that election, there were two people in that entire cycle

who identified the problems that Americans had, a lot of Americans, and spoke directly to them. And it's not close. Clinton was not the other one. Trump was one. He was brilliant at it. Bernie Sanders was the other one, and he was brilliant at it yeah bernie sanders was the other one and he was brilliant at it and i and i raise it because we should have seen this coming and i've talked about the wealth gap with you when we were talking earlier um and i've talked about in other episodes but it's it's the number one theme it drives everything that's happening out there and what these guys did is you had trump who's your pure businessman capitalist regardless of whether you hate him or not the guy fucking loves america i mean he's just he's all about it he just he's he's kind of an asshole when he talks and so he turns a lot of people off and his policy positions have a lot that i

certainly will save for another day to argue against either way he has the the capitalist businessman policy positions bernie sanders the other hand, has been a consistent socialist. He calls himself a democratic socialist, so let's give him the name that he calls himself. And he believes in really – there are some times where the circle of life of the right and left between Trump and Sanders overlap a little bit, like with NAFTA and with some of the chinese trade deals but other than that for the sake of argument let's say they're pretty much opposite solutions the thing is when trump got his support to win was it the wall street guys voting for him was it the ceos voting for him right no it was the middle american base that had been left behind, whose industries were being automated away, their margins were going like this, their wages were going down. Another point that Pinker points out is that if you look at a graph – I'm going on my monologue here so that we can get all the context so we can get it out there right now. So bear with me. But when you look at a graph from 19 – the one he looked at was 1988 through 2008.

But when you look at this graph, roughly empirically from 1980 through today, and the graph goes like this. And if you're not watching us, on one side, you have 0%. On the other side, you have 100%. And it measures the world class structure. So at 100% are the richest people. Jeff Bezos is 100%. 0% are the people who don't even live in society, like they live up in the mountains in certain countries and are cut off. Okay. And it measures wage growth over that time adjusted for inflation,

meaning dollars being consistent. The entire graph is positive as you go across it, including in the most impoverished areas who still have a long way to go. And then when you get to 75, the graph starts a swan dive. And by 80, it's negative. And from 80 through 85, roughly a. And by 80, it's negative. And from 80 through 85, roughly a little more than that, it's negative. And then it goes up above, and then once it hits 90, it starts to go way up again.

So that's where you see the richest people winning in the Technorati society. 80 to 85, that percentile happens to correlate and represent with the working middle class generally or the upper lower class yeah yeah of the richest societies in the world america being the preeminent example which goes to prove that there are a tremendous number of people in this country the freest best country in the world and i will say that open i love this country but there are a tremendous number of people who were left behind. And both of these parties missed the boat. And shame on the Republicans for missing it because they actually got voted out of office on this. But if you remember back in 2011, two things formed. You had the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street.

And if – let's just call it what it is. Trump and Sanders formed. We just didn't have a name on the politician yet. And the Tea Party movement actually – they took out guys like Eric Cantor, who I believe was like the Speaker of the House. Yep. They won seats in Congress. The Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to do that at first. They've done it now locations and different generations often. Like the Tea Partiers tended to be middle or older age who were middle America and struggling and falling behind in traditional industries. Occupy Wall Street tended to be more urban liberals, younger, skewed millennial, and maybe slightly older, a little bit of Gen X too. And one side, Occupy Wall Street, wanted all the money taken from the corporations and wanted a socialism type idea.

The other side, the Tea Party, kind of wanted the same thing and didn't call it socialism. They wanted more trickle-down Reaganomics, if anything, but they had the same anger. Point being, these people had the same exact problem. They just wanted slightly different solutions. In comes Trump, Hurricane Trump and Sandersers the difference being the rnc has generally always been inept at understanding where the movements are going the dnc has not been but the dnc then has a history of fixing it against it they're just smarter but you know they've rigged the process which is why it's kind of evil but income trump and sanders and they got down on a

level with these people yeah they weren't up there hill Hillary Clinton got up there, and I think she opened her campaign maybe at Liberty National Park in Jersey City, literally in New York almost, going, We're going to fight for freedom and justice, and we're going to continue the great Obama years! And she would speak with this, and it was almost like Howard Dean needed to come out of the back and go, You know? And it's like we're going going back to 04 Kerry with this whole shit. Or 2000 Gore. And then on the Republican side, you had Cruz getting up there, doing the old, you know,

when our founders wrote the greatest document that was ever written, called the Constitution, which has been upheld by my mentor and the man that i will tell you 600 times more on this campaign trail not care that i worked for and maybe did sexual favors for antonin scalia that is what i'm going to washington dc that you saw me shut down the government two years ago to stop the liberal media and all the Democrats from destroying the greatest document that was ever written. And people were like, okay, all right, we get it. You're from Texas.

Like, you're a conservative. He wasn't fucking speaking to these people who had these problems. You get Trump to go up there, I will never forget this. New York City. I'm hungover as a motherfucker. I think it's like Halloween on a Sunday. I wake up in Ingger and Drake's apartment. I'm like, all right, fuck.

Like already a bad start. And I whip out my phone and Trump is doing a rally at like 9 a.m. on a Sunday on a boat somewhere. And I turn it on. There's fucking 2,000 people on this boat. I don't know where the boat was. He's wearing the white Make America Great Again hat. And he's getting up there and he's talking about wind turbines and how eagles die when they fly into him therefore we shouldn't have wind turbines and he's like we love the eagle we love the eagle the eagles it's our

burden and and they put these wind turbines up there they say they're saving energy but they're just killing the eagle do we want to stop the wind turbines and you see all these people go yeah because that represents the technorati and all the people who are trying to take away their jobs it's like the south park episode they took our jobs yeah and now i realized in that moment and i didn't have the foresight to like understand like some of the things that were wrong with this but i was like holy shit he's speaking to people so we have ignored even the rnc still hasn't like caught up to that there's a lot of them are supporting trump you have the guys like ben Sasse who aren't yeah but they haven't caught up to the fact that man when we did like our whole autopsy after after Romney lost we really missed the boat here and

the DNC hasn't woken up to the fact that man you know we don't have to like socialism and yeah we want to rig against that but why have we had to rig against this twice it's because they're not speaking the language of the common man yeah well you want to know the biggest way that you can you can see that i mean it's it's through the tax plan when you look at biden's tax plan and and you look at how unpopular it is i think the i mean it's the clearest example that, I mean, I would go as far as to say that the DNC, I mean, it's so hard to believe this, but I would go as far as to say it. I don't even really think they understand what Bernie stood for at all. come out of seeing Bernie in 2016 and seeing the groundswell that Bernie had in, in, in, you know, 2019, 2020, when he was running, uh, again. And the only thing that you get out of it is this guy wanted to raise our taxes. You really have a weird, twisted way of looking at this guy's politics. And in my mind, there's no

doubt, there's no doubt that if that's the way that they looked at the, at this guy's politics, that instead of sitting back and actually learning something from them, which probably they should have done if they didn't want him to actually be the president they probably should have put somebody up that was like a bernie clone right but instead of just instead of doing that they just they just said oh this guy he's he wants to i mean he doesn't stand for anything that our donors stand for so we're just gonna write him off right when they could have learned all this shit about him and and and said, oh, there are these things that the people that support Bernie, the the lower upper middle class. Yes. So to be clear, the working class of the middle class. And then you could stretch it also within these wealthy countries like the US to the upper lower class. Yeah. Like the tail end on the edge exactly that group they want a lot of things that I mean it's they don't like

really that's what you get out of it like that we want to raise taxes like that they want to raise taxes no they want all these things that they don't get because they're in a disadvantaged position within the economy. Oh, I understand what you're saying now. Okay, keep going. Keep going. Like, yeah, maybe there would have been a need to raise some taxes to accomplish some of these things that, like, these people want but like it's just so weird to me that like the that that biden's team and like the the democratic party thinks that like you're gonna appease people by just saying that you're

gonna raise taxes i i mean it it just it's it's uh it's almost like they're playing into some weird trope that, like, isn't true. And frankly, I think people are getting more andiberal left the the moderates the you know fiscal conservatives the you know i can go i can go all the way down the spectrum right and all we hear is republican and democrat and all we hear is republican and democrat and we see somehow for some reason still we see these like weird standard republican and democrat things that are just like like touted as like oh this is going to appeal to to this group no i mean you have to like you have to really drill into people what what people want and the the thing that the thing that the the dnc needs to realize is

sometimes a data-based approach which i i i think is the is the way to go yeah you've been you've been consistent on that and i i i am a big on data and i think it's the most important thing but sometimes you really need to supplement that with like having people in the field like like like observing what's going on because like clearly they're not right like like you need you need some level of quant uh of qualitative assessment with the the the quantitative to to have a holistic view. And they don't, it seems like they just don't like, like that,

them putting out that plan was like, for me, it was like, okay, you guys don't understand Bernie's politics. Or if you, or if you do, you're just trying to pretend that you don't understand them so that people

don't call you out for uh essentially dubbing this guy the nomination am i understanding i want to make sure i'm understanding fully correctly because i've throughout this is going to be two podcasts now obviously because we've just gone off on a whole bunch of things this has been wild today, people. You are saying that from your seat, you don't condone or not condone. You're not supportive of socialism and you're not supportive of Bernie's tax policies, but you were supportive of a lot of the problems he identified in the way that he understood people and some of the things that those people wanted and should should get and should get the help from their government yeah and then furthermore on top of that so i can just let you unpack all this you also think therefore that the biden campaign with the best example being them just touting this tax plan above all along with other things are just trying to lift almost for

like a participation trophy some oh they if they like bernie they must like this thing so we'll just say we're doing that and just inserting it into the campaign to say look we're doing what you want yeah exactly i mean i think i think both things are true and and what i i really hate isms so i'm not going to go out on a limb and say I hate socialism, because I think when you group concepts and thoughts into isms, it makes it hard to delineate between different things within that. So I feel like I need to walk back just that one thing that you said in terms of I don't like socialism. I would just say that's not how I think in terms of my worldview. I don't think in terms of isms. But what I will say is that I 100% agree with you that, yeah, maybe Bernie didn't really have a fully fleshed out tax plan. That was going to make sense.

But a lot of the things that he identified that people needed, you know, health care. Yeah, give context. You know, immigration reform. You know, things like that, for example. Childcare. That was a big one. Yeah. None of the candidates seem to have an answer for that except except him yeah elizabeth warren had something but she was another one of those candidates that sort of walked back a lot of things that she said she's insufferable we'll

get back to that but um but yeah i think i think he identified a lot of things that people really needed that were important. And he was speaking to a lot of those things. And then the DNC, what they lifted from his rhetoric was rich people make too much money. So we need to tax them more. Not like, Oh, there are these like problems that like everyday people go through that like they need to fucking solve. And like they can't solve it on their own because they're shit out of fucking luck the moment that they step into this world.

They want to put a head on a stick. Like, yeah, exactly. And so instead of instead of going into Bernie's actual policy and figuring out what are those things that really are going to hit home with people, like those people that need these things. They capitulated and said, oh, well, if we just say we're going to tax the rich, that'll be enough for them. Yeah. And who are you speaking to? Like that, I really like it frustrates me because who like who are you genuinely speaking to? Like that, I really, like it frustrates me because who, like, who are you genuinely speaking to? I sit here as somebody who does not come from a lot of money and you tell me that you're going to tax the rich.

I have zero opinion about it, except that sounds annoying. Sounds like, I mean, the taxes that I pay for, I mean, I don't see them necessarily going to anything substantial. But I mean – That doesn't solve your problems. It doesn't solve my – yeah. It doesn't solve my problems and it certainly doesn't solve the problems of the people who need things that we're not providing them. Now, that's really interesting how you put that too. That's incredible self-awareness.

Yeah. Because as it's been made clear with you talking here, you're an extremely intelligent guy. You're an extremely well-educated guy. You're a guy – what are you, 26, 27 now? 26. Yeah. You have accomplished more by age 26 than 99.999999999% of the population. And you're pointing out that, yeah, like any other voter, you're voting on your issues and there's things that are important to you and you want to see certain things from candidates.

But you're recognizing the fact that there are a lot of people out there who maybe didn't have the smarts you did, didn't have the environment you did. I mean you come from a great family and a good area. You never had to worry about where a meal was coming from exactly and so you recognize that there are legitimate crises here and it's been ignored for so long as dr pinker's graph points out that yeah we as a voter there's a responsibility to look out for your fellow man like that too yeah no i think that's 100 true and it actually it's funny because you know about this, I'm getting more and more frustrated with Biden as the candidate. But I think that, I think there is, there's such a disconnect and such a lack of awareness from the people that are putting together Biden's policy. Because, I mean, let's be real.

He's not putting this policy stuff together. No, he's not. Maybe he has a couple this policy stuff together. No, he's not. Maybe he has a couple things that he cares about, but he's not drafting shit. No. You know, so, I mean, they just don't know what's going on in the world. And it kills me. Because, I mean, like I've said throughout the past couple of hours, right? We've been talking for like five hours.

We should all be putting ourselves out there to learn what's going on in the world and care about what's happening. Regardless of your political affiliation, we should all want to see what's happening to push forward our society, to push forward the human race. How is cherry picking raising taxes so that people feel like you maybe get what Bernie's talking about? How does that help?

The other issue is this the current vice president mike pence and the last vice president joe biden were a stark departure from at least the previous two vice presidents and i could go beyond that but let's just say they were stark departure from dick cheney especially and al gore in that and there's something commendable about this they are both incredibly loyal to the president yeah biden was and people you know because biden says some old school things and again i don't know if the guy knows where he is sometimes which is really sad to say but people say he said racist stuff in the past or whatever say whatever you want he was the vice president for the first black president this country ever had and he and that bond is is very very real and and not to put something behind it but sources that i have who i trust tremendously who have been right on other stuff who are privy to that

back that up 1000 and then you look at pence right now like pence is you know like trump buses balls because you know he's a bible belt in indiana guy who asked for permission to walk into a room if his wife's not in and there's another woman there i'm being exaggerating but you know trump rolls his eyes at that shit but trump and pence like support each other a thousand percent and so the original point you brought up in this argument is very important for biden's candidacy in that we did see i don't know so much in the town hall like a week or two ago whatever that was but in that last debate we did see him willing to take a little departure from some of what obama did and

and he you know it was almost sad to watch because you could tell he was like so hesitant to do it because he felt like, you know, he's a loyal guy. And again, it might be too little too late because one of the things my dad pointed out and, you know, my dad is kind of been a Republican his whole life. Not somebody who's loud about his opinions, but he has busted balls the last four years. It has kind of been a Republican his whole life. Not somebody who's loud about his opinions, but he has busted balls the last four years. It's kind of funny. And he takes it, too. My dad takes it very well. Like, he works with a lot of people. A lot of his co-workers are all, like, Democrats. And so, they have jokes. It's a very healthy thing in our polarized society that I wish everything was like that. Anyway, he was pointing out last night as we were watching it the debate he goes you know i don't know maybe i'm just biased but there's something about the

fact that every time biden tries to make a point he's that typical politician he turns and he has the twinkle in his eye and he looks right at the camera and does the thing whereas when trump's going man i mean he's just one thing you cannot take from that guy and i will i will die on this hill besides the entertaining thing is he's real he tells you who he is man and he like yes to your point i agree he's incoherent half the damn time and most of the time it's like to kill time because someone asked him something he's like i don't fucking know the answer to that so like you remember when he was running for office and they asked him in the debate about cuba this was just one of many examples i actually don't remember and you could you saw his face he's

going like like john harwood i think was asking the question you could tell john harwood who does not like trump was just like i i got him and and he just go never thought about cuban in his life forgot cuba existed in all likelihood yeah and and he stands there he goes well i'll tell you I got him. And he's just going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Never thought about Cuba in his life. Forgot Cuba existed in all likelihood. And he stands there and he goes, well, I'll tell you something, John. When you look at Cuba, I mean, bad things in Cuba, bad things. But, you know, obviously there was the whole Russia thing and there was a lot of, you know, people had a lot of questions around that. But Cuba, you know, Castro, it just starts throwing out buzzwords.

Castro and obviously dictatorship, not great. But, you know i there's a deal to be made there's always a deal to be made i can tell you we're looking into it we're looking into it i got i got the best people in the world we're looking into it there's a deal to be made there's the new castro down there and uh we'll get back to you we'll get back to you on it john said nothing i remember that answer said nothing in that answer and he did that a lot but a it's funny b it's it's literally like an admission like i have no it's it's like i have no fucking idea what this guy just said so let me just make up an answer and all you people you see i'm making up an answer right now whereas when you see the politician look in the camera

they could have never heard of something in their life and this thing happens where their body just transforms and suddenly the twinkle goes in their eye and they go let me tell you like like william jefferson clinton was the best at this he could look you in the eyes and have no fucking idea what he was talking about but that politician came on and be like let me tell you something i really believe in this process right here i have read every single document as it is pertaining to this law to give me the name of the law yeah i know it inside i have slept with this in fact me and chelsea were up last night thinking about this and talking about how it's going to change the world and i'm leaving office in six years but this is going to

live beyond me and everyone's like for some reason he sucked you in every time because he was the best trump you know it's just some fucking old fart who's like you know what i think he goes off yeah yeah i mean look that's why i was so like i said that's that's why i was so happy to hear something new for a change from from biden something that actually seemed uh genuinely original from from him uh a viewpoint that was his um what do you think of the whole and and i gotta bring it up because i think we've attacked trump on every level with his family his business every single thing's been attacked for four years so let's be fair here what do you think of like this hunter biden thing i'm sorry um i had to do it yeah Yeah. I mean, is it possible that Joe Biden personally benefited from dealings that Hunter had overseas?

It's possible. Is it also possible that, I mean, you had a guy, Joe Biden, who was really letting Hunter live on a long leash because he had a really tough life? Absolutely. Yeah. life absolutely yeah um and so it's conflicting for me because i think i don't think that it would it's it's a malicious thing at all if if there was any any benefits gained by the Biden family generally in Hunter's dealings with foreign entities. I really don't think it was malicious. I think a lot of it just stems from the fact that, I mean, when you're talking about a guy that's gone through some real tough things in life, as Hunter Biden has.

Lost his mother. Lost his mother. Lost his mother. Lost his sister. Lost his brother. Exactly. Was kicked out. Was kicked out of the military. Which, you know, look, you make mistakes.

We all make mistakes. And he served this country. And that's a really tough thing. You deal with that dishonorable discharge to say nothing of the pressure of who he was i think that's important to give context yeah but i think when you take all that into account and you're a father i think it's really hard to keep your son on a short leash with a life like that that that that he, the cards that he was dealt. And so I think that if it was something that Joe let happen, he let it happen, but not in a way that he was being malicious or corrupt,

more in a way of, like, my kid's gone through so much shit. You see the human in him? Yeah. Yeah. Like, my kid has just gone through so much shit like i'm gonna let him live his life and see what happens um you know i i think i think of it more on that level because if it were me in that spot that's that's probably what I would have done. You know, and I'm not saying that Joe Biden and I share similar personality traits, but I just think that there's an innate human sort of thing there from dealing with all of that trauma. That makes it tough for me to think anything badly in the grand scheme of things about about the situation

you got empathy for it yeah yeah for sure now the law of averages says that right now with what i'm about to say half my audience is going to scream fuck you and half my audience is going to say good that was a good answer and let's move on but um i'm not going to push back on that at all and i and i've read the case ad nauseum now and there are some certainly questionable things there and there are some things that may involve biden a little bit that it doesn't make them look great yeah it's stupidity at best and some corruption at worst the reason i'm going to let it slide a little bit is even though i think the media has been hysterically against Trump to the point that they've lost all credibility yeah there is if you really want to

play this game the guy was a businessman it's a different ball game than politics with different things to worry about yeah you can't tell me that there wasn't something with his family there at somewhere with all this news even if 99% of it is fake, and it might be. There's 1% there that has a kernel of truth that shows, like, you probably don't have a ton of room to talk in this scenario. To say nothing of, like, I'm sorry, but his daughter's, like, the special advisor to the president. His son-in-law advised him to fire Jim Comey, which, think what you want of Jim Comey, and I got a guy coming on who's got some opinions on that.

But not a bright move. Not a bright move. You know, and there's a nepotism there at any rate that I'm like, well, all right, fuck it. The one guy's son got paid a little bit of money. Whatever. Look, the way I see it is this, right? Biden is a hokey old politician guy. Yeah.

And he really, in his career, right, he really wasn't that corrupt of a guy. If you look at him and his earnings and his net worth in the context of all of these other congressmen that he was in Congress with, he was probably in the bottom 10% of net worth looking at everybody within the Congress that he was a part of. To be clear, we don't have any data to back that up right now,

but the concept of what you're saying inherently, I would agree with. Yeah. So he was, in my opinion, and again, I mean, there needs to be data here. But in my opinion, he wasn't more than the classic old-timey politician who dished out favors for favors in a way that wasn't what you're not saying is right but yeah yeah you know and when i look at the the situation with hunter i agree with you completely business is business it's a different story and was there is there a possibility possibility that some benefit trickled in? Absolutely.

There's no doubt in my mind that there's a possibility. But, you know, I can't, like, I can't fault or I can't rush to conclusions without first of all more understanding of what probably happened meaning is there more proof out there about other things that

like you know Giuliani talks about these emails like can somebody find one email and that's something we should say if you haven't checked out these new york post stories this needs to be said and and when it's the left side this shit never gets said but that doesn't make it right like the guys who were responsible that the whole story to make it short revolves around hunter biden's old laptop that had things on it that incriminated some stuff.

And it certainly the FBI appears to have supported the fact that it is his laptop. But some of the things that were reported in the news, we got to see what's what. The guys who who produced the laptop after they got it from the computer store owner who had it the story was pushed by rudy giuliani who was trump's personal attorney and steve bannon who is you know the former ceo brightbart used to be strategist to the president to president trump and so yes inherently just like a lot of the left-wing media it has a bias to it so it's another thing that makes me go whatever that by the way the censorship argument we were talking about way back that does not change i could that's a separate issue but if we're talking about this in the context of corruption here and what's what i mean it's sad

that i say this because i feel like it's a race to the bottom but it's like whatever man you know and and it sounds like you're you're kind of saying that too. And I will say Biden is also always – and I'm not saying he can't be a bit of a corrupt politician. I probably buy the fact that he is. If you're in Washington for 47 years, some shit is going to happen. But he is – he was universally liked across party lines. Like they – and it's all corrupt. Like they all have dinner together and cheers and laugh at all the Americans sometimes. I'm sure they do that.

Like if I'm being a cynic, and I am sometimes, like that's probably true. But he's very well liked. Yeah. It's true. But the thing that I thought he missed last night, and again, very coherent once again, the town hall though, I will say this until the day I die. He was phenomenal in that. I was turning on. I'm like, I want whatever he's having.

Like he was like emotional. He would switch from person to person. He was personal. He was measured. His stances minus like one or two were very moderate. They're like, I was like, I'd vote for that. And then, you know, it kind of turned off. But he has been like that.

But one of the things that we talk about this Bernie thing to go back there and how the Democratic Party misses some things. The Democratic Party seems to have – and the RNC was missing this too. And the only reason they haven't missed on this is because of Trump, in my opinion, because this is one place he's good. But when it comes to jobs and people having a purpose in society right now trump is still speaking that language did you well let me ask you this first and then i'll take it somewhere what did you think the most shocking moment of that debate was last night i have an answer you don't have to agree with me but what do you think the most shocking moment was or what do you think i'm gonna moment was? Or what do you think I'm going to say? Maybe I should say.

What are you going to say? Man, I mean, for me, it was like a Hershey bar. It's pretty one note. I don't know if there is anything really shocking to me. Oh, you know what I will say, actually? I will say one thing was a little shocking to me. It was shocking at first, but then it was walked back. So I don't know if this is what you're going to say. But when Trump said that he accepted responsibility, so to speak, for the amount of deaths that have occurred in the U.S. as a result of COVID.

So I was sort of shocked because he's never said that before. But then he sort of walked it back and was like, but it's China's fault. So he didn't really accept responsibility. The China virus. So I was shocked for a second there because I thought he was actually going to take some responsibility over the thing, but then he didn't. You know what? I actually forgot about that because he went, let's be honest, he did go then straight to the, but you have to remember, this virus was brought here by china yeah yeah so it's a china so he didn't like i can't really give him credit for that because it's like when you say i'm sorry but yeah exactly you know which probably the greatest i'm sorry but i ever saw i

shouldn't say this but was um when the access hollywood tape came out and he everyone thought he's done he releases the video at midnight and he's just staring into a monitor. He goes, I'm very sorry for what I said and it was wrong. It was locker room talk. But Bill Clinton raped people. It's like the ultimate idiot. You know what I mean?

But go ahead. What was the biggest shock? I'm surprised you were shocked by anything, but maybe I'm forgetting something. I have it pulled out behind you here. Let's take a look. If you take a look-see right here, this was an interesting

moment, and we'll play this video. Alright, here we go. To the oil industry, I'd start giving them federal subsidies. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah to the gas and she should be to the to solar and wind look at this baby giving it to the oil industry we actually do all right the summer with we have a statement in terms of business yeah look at Biden's face Roy the oil industry.

Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma? Yeah, so here's the thing on this, actually. After the debate, the Biden team walked back on this. And even though Biden said it, I think it was a bit of a snafu. I don't think he meant to go this far. Because after the debate, his team came out and said let's just clarify this we don't want to completely eliminate the oil industry we just want to give significant subsidies um to clean energy and take away subsidies from the oil

industry which is frankly a pretty mainstream position. So they walked back those statements. But I agree with you. I was also shocked. I remember saying, and by the way, this was after a bottle and a half of wine. So, I mean, at this point, I was, you know, they got into the corruption thing. Yeah.

And I just started pounding glasses of wine. Good for you. Good for you. Good for you. But I will say, and I hate to say that because it's what liberals say all the time. He didn't mean that. People do it for Trump, though. Can't watch these things without my wine. You know what I mean?

But let's be real. I was shocked by that. And I was like, wait, he just said that he's anti-oil pro 100% clean energy but yeah they ended up walking this back so I agree with you shocking at first but now it's like

oh it's just a classic democrat thing here's the problem that people have and this is why I see this and once again I go cause I mean Trump's performance as an entertainer i mean trump's performance as an entertainer i mean that's textbook trump right there i mean that is a 30 second clip for the ages without him saying anything for the first 15 with his faces because trump understands this

like oil as an example it is something eventually we want to be able to get rid of it's not great for the environment the thing about it is it employs 10 million people in this country, including a lot in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the process to do it can be done slowly and over a long period of time, whereby you give that industry an ability to innovate things that aren't necessarily oil and continue to provide jobs. Dude, this is literally what I'm talking about when I say that the DNC just takes points from the far left and regurgitates them into what they think people want to hear. Yeah.

It's ridiculous. Because let's just say that that was a talking point that they thought would score major points, right? Oh, we want to go completely clean energy, right? It goes back to the whole Green Deal, the Green New Deal, sorry. You know, that AOC and Bernie, I mean, Bernie was a co-signer of the original Green New Deal bill, right? So it goes back to that, right? And so when you say, oh, I want to go, I want to cut oil and make a hard pivot to clean energy, which is basically how that was positioned. You're missing the point. point A, which is where we are today, to point B, which is a world that is more green energy focused,

where there have been really no lost jobs in the process. Yes, in the bill, there's a lot of public spending that was probably too much. But the core of the bill is that it serves a purpose for people, which is it provides them jobs. And then it serves a a purpose for people, which is it provides them jobs, and then it serves a second purpose for people, which is it cleans up the environment, right? But the DNC doesn't understand that. They just take the issue, and they just regurgitate it

into what they think people are going to want. And that's a perfect example, again, of a situation where they had to walk back from it because it didn't work i agree with you though i think it was a snafu yeah i don't think let me be fair to joe biden here i don't think he actually meant that i just don't know that joe biden knows anything he means i mean how many times has this guy and in a similar subject matter said we're gonna ban fracking and then goes i never said that.

And also, Trump has to walk back things all the time. Trump has snafus like every day. The thing I will respect about it, not the snafus, but Trump tends to be the guy to walk it back. He comes out there and maybe sometimes he even says, that's not what I said. And maybe he didn't mean to say that sometimes. And so he doesn't even do it correctly but he does it yeah it's not like some campaign advisor behind some

pr statement in an iphone note that says tonight joe joe r by senator vice president joe r biden said that he did not want to have the oil industry continue we would like to reflect we i'm sorry he would like to reflect that this is not in this in no way represents – you see what I'm saying? Yeah. It's not real. At the very best, it's a snafu. Yeah. And at the very worst, it's another example yet again that there are broader political systems that govern this country that don't understand the common American.

And that's where Trump is the ultimate paradox to me. This is really important because you see Trump. Trump just the ultimate paradox to me. This is really important. Because you see Trump. Trump just wants people to have jobs. He wants people to work. He likes his rallies where everyone's happy and whatever. And what he misses, like, the intentions to me are right on that. The problem is, what does he do? He goes to the coal miners.

That's the most extreme example. He goes to the farmers. Coal miners destroying the coal miners that's the most extreme example he goes to the farmers it coal miners destroying the environment doing that goes to the farmers who frankly aren't going to be needed already kind of aren't needed in some ways he goes to all these old school traditional industries that when he leaves they're going to go back to being gone again yeah and the difference is he's got them making as much money as they've made in a while right now he's got them working and feeling good and now let's take the extreme example the coal miner example this is where his policies go wrong

in my opinion even though he has the right intentions the coal miners are now bringing their sons they have eight years or four years maybe eight if he wins to bring their sons into the mines and what's going to happen when trump leaves it's going to go right back to washington business as usual and this is where the republicans and democrats should all stand in a corner and stare at the floor. Because they have missed this for years, where all these people were crying out, and they just sat there drinking their wine in Washington, D.C., and pretended, ah, they'll figure it out. Especially when the Democrats, and this is where they'll get blamed, the Republicans didn't help those people at all. The Democrats would openly, without looking at those people out in middle America, they would say,

no, they'd go after the latest most progressive thing we're gonna destroy this and go to the green thing this and not worry about the fact that all these people who lived in these rural places who didn't have access to an environment that could actually like feed them intelligence to be able to function in a future economy we're now going to fall farther behind and we're going to need to rely on the government and then on the other side by the way let's be like this is where i get savage against the parties here this is a prime example yeah the republicans go yeah exactly now we got that right because we got trump okay what about all the cities with all the low-income communities who have been given no resources who've been who've had fathers thrown in jail for years that usually starts with being arrested for

a fucking joint when you're 17 in a system that's never changed what about what have you what have you done for them all you do is yell oh democrats have controlled those city for 60 years yeah but what what did you do when you controlled them i'll tell you what you did when rudy giuliani was there and there were some good things he did as mayor because he was mayor during 9-11 but you know you i think it was him and bloomberg it was another republican for a while there. They did the stop and frisk. Yeah. They created an environment that perpetuated a lot of these standards. So if you're going to complain about, well, the Democrats never listened to the rural people in the middle,

you've never listened to all the cities where there's all these problems, and they're along racial lines a lot, too. So these parties have nothing to stand on, and I don't care if you have the right intentions or not. That's why there hasn't been an answer where I go hey this works in the long term and short term but last night there was the difference between the politician and the guy who at least even if he's got it wrong speaks the language and understands you don't walk up to people or better yet walk up next to them and not even look them in the eyes and say yeah we're going to take your jobs away yeah yeah and so if you if you boil if you boil it down and you ask me, what am I going to do on the third? I mean, I know I'm not voting for Trump. And I mean, the way I see it, Biden's got the next two weeks to convince me.

Because I'm not really there yet. Yeah. I'm not. And I don't know if I'm going to get there. I think you're in a common boat with a lot of people, and that's why it's going to be so interesting to see how the election goes here, who decides to vote, and when they vote, do they vote for somebody? Here's how I look at it, and I think I relate to you a lot.

I know I've said this now. Maybe this is the third time between these two podcasts. I'm not voting for either of these guys. I know that. Unless Jesus Christ came down and said I was real and I endorsed whatever candidate, I'm just not doing it. And the reason is I view a vote as an endorsement now. And so I'm never going to lie about my vote. I will tell you who I voted for. That's never, I don't care if I have a podcast or if I'm fucking talking to you on the couch, I'm never going to lie about my vote. And if I vote for somebody, I am going to be cast as an endorsement for that candidate. And so when I look at it, Biden eliminated himself by the fact that he can't talk. And obviously it's been different the last couple debates but i can't look past that it is it is it is the ultimate race to the bottom can you can you formulate a sentence

no so yeah that then puts me like well do i go for trump i can't endorse policies that i just laid out i can't endorse the fact that this is a guy i mean i'm sorry but he's 74 he's a boomer you know he's 74 years old he's never had a computer on his desk. The only thing he knows how to do is type in enough to tweet. And we're not sure that he actually does it with his own fingers. He may just, I've heard he dictates it, right? So this is the guy, like, I'll give him credit. He stood up to China.

In my opinion, I could be wrong here. I think he stood up to China on all the things they want him to stand up to them on to create a distraction because he's standing up to them on trade materials and old school business you know what the china 2025 campaign is all about though this is made in china 2025 it's a campaign from the communist chinese government it's all about technology yeah okay so maybe trump's protected some ip what what has he done to curb what they're doing investing in the blockchain what has he done to curb what they're doing investing in artificial technology in artificial intelligence and maybe passing us in that department they've passed us there's four main departments that tech is judged on they all got really fucking long names the only one i can remember for sure so i'll say is artificial intelligence by 2018 18 years after being

behind us in all four china was ahead in two tied in one and slightly behind in ai they're ahead now yeah for sure that's a fucking problem that's not the guy i want fucking taking care of it so i can't endorse that i i won't do and to say nothing of i'm sorry whether or not he's a racist or whatever if someone walks up to me with evidence of all this shit i can't sit there and tell them they're wrong how many times is he going to stay say stupid shit maybe he's not but how many times is he going to say stupid shit that I'm like, I can't defend that? Yeah. I mean, he can say blatantly, he can say blatant things in the contrary if he wanted to. Like, when he said the, look, I mean, the Proud Boys thing, I get it. It could have been a mistake. I don't think he knew who the Proud Boys were.

I mean, it's possible. But, I mean, why do you have to have Junior go up and apologize for you? I actually, prime example, because I gave him credit. Actually, let's do that. Because I gave him credit for always being the guy to come out and and correct the record and he very often does on that one he should have stood right the fuck up there and said i just found out who he should have admitted i had no fucking idea who they were instead he it was the same thing as cuba uh you know yeah he should have admitted it yeah i mean i i frankly i didn't really understand that move. And, like, if you've got a guy standing next to you, Joe Biden,

who consistently says that you're a walking, breathing dog whistle, I don't know why you wouldn't do everything in your power to make it seem like you weren't. I agree. It just strikes me as bizarre. And when he tweets out stuff, like, and this is where I just go, what the fuck are you doing? When he tweets out stuff through like code words, almost like he'll tweet out the suburban housewife must vote for me because they're the Biden Obama rule to let in lower income housing. You're going to lose your neighborhood.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's coming in in the lower income housing there you know you know what i mean like it's so it's careless at best yeah i mean you know so so that's where we're at that that's that's really where where my position lies now and look i what this is what i hope right i mean i'll i'll i'll i'll caveat this all with with what i hope happens right which is i hope someone can come in and think a little bit more pragmatically about things and you know i don't know i don't know what it requires um i know that there are are parts of the population that that need need to be heard that are not heard right now. But there has to be someone that can do that in a way that makes capitalism work for everyone.

And again, I'm not an ism guy, but just to put it in the simplest terms. while also providing people who need to move their starting point forward, get a little bit of an edge. And I don't mean an edge in terms of them being further than everyone else, but at least at the same point, so that systematically we can combat some of the things that make it impossible for that to happen today. And if you asked me right now, who's going to do that and what candidate is the closest? I mean, I would tell you right now, nobody.

I can't think of one person. Maybe Yang. Maybe Yang? Maybe? Yang's an interesting guy, man. But Yang's already under the control of people that I think he was diametrically opposed to now. So I don't know if it's Yang anymore. I think he kind of walked into that blissfully ignorant because I really – I like that guy. And I'm not – I got to do a lot more research on some of the things he said, but I've researched the UBI a lot.

But that guy came at it from a fresh lens, and what I loved about him is he talked with everyone. He wanted to do interviews with the farthest left-wing stuff, the farthest right-wing and everything in between i commended that so i appreciated that a lot yeah and i mean he's got a lot going for him in the sense that he he understands a lot of different perspectives he himself is a minority he has a son with autism um you know he he understands technology very well entrepreneur um yeah he's a by trade an entrepreneur and so he understands where we're headed and where we're behind and so i think there's a lot of potential there i mean i just i don't know what i don't i don't know where his head's at now that that he works at cnn i don't know but yeah you you could say that about you could say that about a lot of guys i mean i i don't know sometimes i'm cynical about it but

the minute you see anyone on the right or anyone on the left lose or lose a job they get a job at some network and then start being a talking head on stuff and it's like you almost get sucked into the system you know it sucks because it's like uh you know not to derail things too much but it's like uh it's like sports you know how like you end your sports career and you become a sportscaster but being a sportscaster doesn't like ostracize you from like half the population uh you know i don't know but yeah yeah um i don't know who it's gonna be man i feel you man wild times i mean just wild times to say the least but um thanks for all all the insight on uh on what's going on now i i think especially over this full course of the day, recording these two, talking about a whole bunch of issues,

you haven't backed down from anything, and you're giving a ton of nuance in these opinions, and I love that when I find the guys who can do that because sometimes I feel like the only one sometimes. I know I'm not at all. A lot of people feel that way. But let's turn away from politics. I'm getting exhausted here. I actually wanted to catch up with you because you've been around the sun here a little bit. And to talk about your background, can you just explain when you came out of college, where did you go and what did you do? Just so people have some context on it? Yeah, for sure. Immediately out of college, landed at Goldman Sachs,

doing credit underwriting for big software deals. So company needed a loan. We'd work out a deal, write them a check, and all the good stuff that goes into that. So can this company pay their loans if they can? I mean, I'm saying it in the simplest terms possible, but if a company can essentially pay down their loans that they want, we cut them the check, and in good faith, we set an agreement that they get this amount of money,

and if they default, then we have certain rights that we go after them for. So, I mean, that's loan 101, right? And then – And you can't say client names, by the way. I want to do that. But you did work with some of the biggest companies in the world. Yeah, that's right so i mean all across the spectrum all the way like investment grade which is essentially like the biggest companies um you know companies that have

gigantic balance sheets um and then also the little guys so so companies with like you know companies worth like 50 to 100 million dollars which is like pretty small in the context of you had a big range yeah huge range yeah because we were we were um we were industry focused um so we saw deals no matter how big or small small market big uh mid-market uh large cap as long as they were in your industry you probably touched you know the gambit of all those those different size companies and you were really specifically software you said yeah so software specifically and i worked primarily in a couple of different uh niches just based on where i fell

with my team so fintech enterprise software um fintech isTech is financial technology. Yeah, financial technology. Enterprise software, cybersecurity. What else? You know, other types of like software as a service. Those were my bigger focuses and where I saw most of the deal flow. Now, when you were coming out of college how much of like a tech guy were you because obviously you went to work at a bank and then you you went to work in in in the part of the bank that works with the major tech clients but how much were you like

really into that or did you grow into that yeah it's it's funny and i actually just had this conversation with somebody the other day about how different being in New York is and growing up in New York versus growing up in San Francisco. But, I mean, the answer is zero. I really knew nothing about the space other than it was cool. It was really happening on the West Coast. Like, when you grow up in New York, not a lot of people, when I was growing up in New York as a kid, which is like the late nineties and the entirety of the, the, you

know, 2000 to 2010, uh, like the, the, the early aughts, right. early alts right um nobody at that time in new york was really talking about startups at least where i at least where i came from and it's because everybody had a daddy on long island who was in finance um or was in sales or you know you know, ran a business. And so it was really most people were talking about finance as the end-all, be-all. Most people were talking about, like, they weren't talking about finance. They were talking about small business in the context of non-techntechnology driven small businesses so um you know restaurants um which i mean we can argue that all these businesses now are technology driven but um at the time i'm talking uh but but restaurants um you know stores um construction businesses like you know

what i'm saying good old new york construction, baby. The quintessential small business. And so those were the things that you heard a lot about. And I really hadn't identified tech as something that was interesting to me and the tech world, the space, until I started at Goldman. Because at Goldman, that's when I really got insight into, I mean, all these amazing things that these companies these industries that were completely disruptive, right? Completely changing the way that, you know, companies did, for example, telecommunications, that companies did cybersecurity, all these different things. And I saw basically all of these companies through M&A processes, mergers and acquisitions. So all these big companies within my vertical start to acquire and gobble up all these small companies that were doing these disruptive things. And I started saying to myself after I, you know, I'm just and I'm just sitting there on 200 West Street, you know, modeling in Excel and writing checks, you know, signing documents. And I'm sitting there and, like, you know, I kind of feel like I'm sitting on the sideline here while all this cool stuff's going on. And I don't really want to sit on the sideline for much longer.

And so I ended up hooking up with some mutual acquaintances that were in finance and then moved to tech. And they said, look, man, like, it's possible. Like, don't let anyone tell you that from going to finance to the tech space is not possible. Because if they tell you that, they're lying or they're full of themselves um and i sort of looked at him and i said well i mean that i mean i think it helped me a lot to to sort of frame what i was looking for because i think i think there's a difference between operating and vc in in the startup land in terms of the qualifications that you need and the things that people look for. I think to be a VC, a really successful one in sort of the startup ecosystem right now, you need to know a lot of people in tech already like you need to you need to have networked the shit out of every single

pocket of tech and the tech community as as you possibly can it's about who you know i think it's a i think it's a big i think it's a big thing uh to to to really have a huge rolodex when it comes to being a VC. What makes you say that? I think if you know a lot of people, you share deals. So they'll let you know when certain deals are happening. And obviously the best deals to get are the ones that you know are going to be amazing in their early stage because that's where you're going to get the most return. And so when you look at, for example,

the early investors in Uber that's where you're going to get the most return. And so when you look at, for example, the early investors in Uber or the early investors in Facebook, they were all guys that sort of knew each other. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just to be really successful VC and to find those unicorns, the best way to do it is to know other people that are looking for the same things that you are yeah and so so for for for that sort of ecosystem i think a lot of it comes from making a name for yourself and in and and developing this network i think operating is different i think i think you can do

as an operator of a startup, as a founder, is to go out there and find undiscovered talent. And the reason why is if you do that, you're not competing with everyone else for those people. So you're expending less resources to acquire those people as part of your organization. And those are the people whose upside is potentially untapped because they don't know really any better

except, you know, being a talented, stellar person. Like, they're not chasing necessarily the next big thing immediately. They need to prove themselves, right? joining the operating world easier for me because I didn't know anyone in VC. I knew a handful of people. And every single time I would try and network with a VC and say, hey, I'm interested in this potentially,

they would pretty much say, well, how often are you going out to lunch with VCs? How often are you, you know, practicing your pitch with other VC? Like, and I mean, I didn't have time to do that. Like, yeah, I was working 85 hours, 90 hours a week at Goldman. Exactly. But what I did know was I was a hard-ass worker, and I wanted to just grind for a company and get that experience. And so I ended up meeting, you know, Matteo, the current CEO of 8Sleep, through some mutual acquaintances.

And, I mean, sort of the story there i mean i think i think you know there was an opportunity to to come in as a bit of a generalist and help accelerate some things um and i mean at that point i couldn't say no and the company is amazing by the way now what and we'll get to the company but what what you just said generalist but it sounds like you were first of all trying to build a network from scratch there because even at goldman on the deals you were working with you were kind of working with the businesses and you're you're in the shit like you're in there crunching the numbers and making sure everything lines up and delivering on your value and there's not much time to build as much of the relationship but

if you were let's say starting from ground zero here to build out and say like okay i want to end up there in the vc world i want to end up in the tech world that's where the action is i need to build that network because that's the feedback i'm getting what was different about mateo approaching you and then talk about mateo's background a little bit he's really serious guy where he was like yeah you know what i'm gonna make this guy one of the most important guys at my company coming from Goldman. Whereas other guys were like, yeah, who do you know? What's your pitch? And I don't really know where it makes sense. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think, I mean, I think, I think it's because when, when you, when you operate a business, you're looking

for that untapped talent and you're looking for a different skill set. Like, I think the VC skill set is like we were talking about. I think it's a lot of Rolodex. I think it's a lot of identifying things in startups that you've seen consistently over and over to be the characteristics of a successful startup. And it's hard to prove that you know those things

if you haven't worked at a startup or if you haven't been a VC. So how did you do that? I think, what do you mean? How did you prove that then? Oh, no, I didn't. I'm saying that's why I thought it was going to be really hard to become a VC. Got it. Because I couldn't prove it it and i could have tried really hard by you know practicing and studying and and all this stuff but i mean i i wouldn't have felt very good about it because i mean what i what i found in finance and i mean it's it and it's particularly true with investment banking, is the way that you get really good at investment banking is see as many deals as possible. Reps. Get as many reps as possible.

See as many deals. Work on as many deals. Build as many models as you humanly can. That's technically not different than it would be in VC, though. Exactly. Okay, got it. Exactly the point I'm trying to make, which is in VC, it's the same thing.

If you want to get really good at being a VC, the way that you do that is, the best way to do it is through reps. You see as many deals as possible, talk to as many founders as possible, talk to as many other VCs as possible, build as many models on those companies as you can, talk about the risks and the benefits

and the things that you see, the vision of the founder, when it's an early stage. All of these things are things you need to do constantly to prove that you can actually hang. And it's hard to replicate those things in a non-experiential environment. It's almost impossible. It's doable because I think, you know, there are plenty of people that I know that went from finance directly to VC. But they, I mean, they worked their ass off to do it. Like, you know, they studied, they, like, created these mock cases where they pretended to be a VC and they basically went through and said, look at all these deals, like, which of these deals were good deals, bad deals. They, they tried to like,

you know, research videos of the founder to like figure out if he was like a good founder. You know, it's really tough if you're not like going out there and doing the work. On the operating side, what you really just need, and this is no discount to operating it's actually really hard to operate but you just need a voracious work ethic a an ability to identify and solve problems and execute things quickly yeah and you just need to be able to work your ass off and grind it out. All things that you had to demonstrate in your last job inside and out. Exactly. Exactly. So with that said, I mean, I think there was a gamble taken on me for sure.

And I think all the things that I just mentioned were qualities that were seen. I think the caveat was, all right, well, now that you're here, you got to learn what this shit is all about. You got to learn what tech is all about. You got to learn what the startup space is all about. So it's been a lot of the focus, aside from obviously grinding it out every week. But a lot of the focus has been, all right, let's build the network.

Let's learn more about how this thing works. Let's read. And let's talk to as many people as we can. I think it goes a long way to, you know, talk to other people in similar experiences. It's like anything else. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, and I think that's just basically how I got to where I am right now. Now, what attracted you to this project, though? I shouldn't even call it a project to this company i mean did how how long have they been around now eight sleep uh been around since uh 2015 five years so a while and matteo previously started and scaled and sold some companies yeah yeah what companies he was an alternative energy for a while um and he was a

lawyer so it's a different from completely different from this business yeah honestly some of the biggest killers i've run into are guys who have that jd and then if they practice too and then bring that and have that they got that thing they got that business acumen they got that you pointed out a couple minutes ago, but it's so true. And you could say this about, it's the number one soft slash hard slash everything type skill in the world, which is problem solving. Who am I trying to serve? What do they want? And how am I going to give it to them? And how am I going to do it where I don't just listen to the words they say? I listen to the things that aren't the words but are behind what the words are

where they're coming from. Yeah. You know, and this guy, I mean, he's not old, right? How old is Matteo? No, I mean, he, I mean, he's, he's not, I think he's in his late 30s. Yeah. So he's, he's done this at a young age. Yeah.

But this, this company in particularly particularly what's the we we touched on it earlier but what's some of the maybe and what's going to be the last podcast i forget i'm losing track of all this it's like it's seven it's 7 50 and we've been going since like 12 45 anyway um what is the what what's the premise here what's the product yeah and and what was the where did it start how How did it get here? Like yeah, yeah start with a bed and on that so so basically, I mean it started from and I don't know the the the exact story, but what I do know is You know Mateo has always been concerned about sleep from a personal standpoint. He never was a good sleeper.

And the idea came about that sleep improvement was an area that really hasn't been touched by the current mattress industry. It's kind of – I mean, the current mattress industry is, is kind of, you know, prehistoric. They're not technologically innovative at all. And when you look at some of the companies that are out there doing innovative things in, or that say that they're doing innovative things in sleep, like Casper, I mean, that's, I mean, the whole story there is fake. I mean, at the end of the day, they're still selling you a dumb piece of foam to sleep on. There's no technology there. How do they get away with that?

Because they flaunt, they try to flaunt, like, technology. Yeah, they try to talk about technology. I mean, they were the first company to do the bed in a box, really, on a bigger scale. By the way, for context, when we say technology with beds, let's just fill people in who are listening like, what the fuck? It's a mattress. What do you mean? Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that goes to what we're doing, which is, you know, what Eight Sleep provides is the ability to improve your sleep through technology with a technology-enabled mattress. You can go on the website, eightsleep.com, and you can see our hero product. It's called the pod. And what the pod allows you to do is thermoregulate yourself through the night automatically based on your biometrics. English. Yeah. To put it in plain English, change the temperature that you sleep at based on your sleep habits and your health metrics god i hope you say it like that when you guys are marketing this yeah i know it sounds like real this is where sometimes they get lost in the weeds like just as a common man over here i know it sounds really cool when you say the thermodynamic adjustment or whatever but when you just say it like that like yeah man you're

gonna improve improve your sleep the temperature's gonna be great you're gonna be comfortable as fuck like people are like all right i buy that yeah you know um yeah i mean the the point is the the real mission is is twofold it's it's how do you take the average eight hour night of sleep and get the same quality sleep within six hours that's the long-term vision and then the other long-term vision. And then the other long-term vision piece is, what if going to sleep was more valuable for your health than going to your doctor for a checkup? And so those are the real long-term visions, right? And the way that we're accomplishing those are, through one, optimizing and controlling

all aspects of the sleep environment the environment, the sleep environment, so to speak. So right now we're doing temperature. But in the future, we have plans to optimize and regulate all aspects of the environment when you sleep. And I mean, that spans a whole bunch of different things, oxygen level, smell, firmness, you know, temperature of the air, not just temperature of the bed, a whole bunch of different stuff. And then there's another aspect of it, which is health tracking, which we've started doing as well with the pod. If you get the pod right now, it tracks your HRV, it tracks your resting heart rate.

And your HRV is, by the way, for people that don't know, heart rate variability. And what heart rate variability measures, in the simplest terms, is how recovered are you? So when you went to sleep, there are periods of high heart rate activity, periods of low heart rate activity. If there's a big delta between that, it means you're well-rested and well-recovered. If your HRV is low, meaning there's less variation between the highs and lows of your heart rate at night, it means that you probably worked out the day before very hard,

or you probably had a little bit too much to drink, or you probably didn't sleep enough, but it indicates a lower level of recovery. So does it gamify, because it measures all this, it's tied into an app so that people can track this. Does it essentially then give people a simple standard way to gamify how their sleep is improving or going the wrong direction over time? Is that the value prop here? Yeah, so it does. So it basically, it dishes you insights. So it tells you how you're doing well and how you can improve. But I think the, and it's really in a basic form now, the insights, where we're surfacing you sort of this high-level data about your sleep. I think where we want to get to in the future is really create the ability for the tracking to

predict things about your health. So, you know, do you have sleep apnea? That was my next question. Do you snore? So, it can determine that so our technology our technology can determine it we have not built the capability to surface that to the user it's part of you know future iterations of the product future versions of the product now as we know we can do it though okay that was gonna be my question so you're that's already certain like yeah we're we're actually in the middle of some clinical studies right now um and i won't We know we can do it, though. Okay, that was going to be my question. So that's already certain.

We're actually in the middle of some clinical studies right now, and I won't get into the specifics there. But they are studies around what we can and can't detect with our technology. And one of those things is sleep apnea. Well, here's maybe a stupid question, but I've got to ask it, just because this is so out there. It's literally what you sleep on at night. I've never heard of anything like this with a mattress is there anything that's like regulated like what you're allowed to do versus what you're not allowed to do uh with regards to what the technology yeah because like people everyone

sleeps on a mattress oh yeah you know what i mean yeah i mean like are there any potential health downsides that i don't know who the hell will get involved here but the government's like oh you can't do that yeah no definitely not i think the and and in terms of emissions and things like that i mean we're completely compliant and all that stuff so i think it can only help it really can can't hurt. The, you know, temperature regulation is, I mean, if you read some of the sleep literature out there, like the sleep science, for example, Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep, which is a great book, probably like the Bible in the sleep science world of like the primer of what people should look for when they talk about sleep.

He mentions that thermoregulation is probably the most important thing that you can do to improve sleep. And sleep improvement is really seen in a couple of different vectors. There's really sleep onset. So how long does it take you to fall asleep? Two, staying asleep. So are you able to sleep through the night? And then three, which is similar to two, but it's slightly different, is how often are you interrupted during the night, you know, from your sleep?

It's different than two. Two is more waking up in the middle of the night because you can't fall asleep. Three is more I toss and turn during the night. I'm constantly being... My sleep is constantly interrupted. How deep is your sleep? Yeah, exactly. How restful is your sleep? And so when you look at the sleep science,

what it says is that thermoregulation can improve all of those three things. And I won't get into the exact numbers because I actually don't know them off the top of my head from the book. But Matthew Walker, the author, lays out clearly in the book but matthew walker the author lays out clearly in the book the the figures in terms of

improvement from using temperature regulation to uh at sort of these different stages during the night um to improve sleep and there there's there's a a concept here that is really what governs this principle, and it's called thermoneutrality. And it means that your body is in a neutral state of temperature through the night. The reason why this concept is important is because our bodies, your body, my body, anyone's body, does not stay at a consistent temperature through the night. Our circadian rhythm actually changes,

or sorry, rather our temperature changes based on our circadian rhythm through the night. So when, you know, the temperature that your body is at, at midnight, will be drastically different than the temperature your body is at internally at will be drastically different than the temperature your body is at internally at 4 a.m or at 6 a.m it's helping your body to prepare you for sleep so basically i'll explain it a little bit when yeah when you begin your your sleep right when you when you go to sleep you your body gets colder and that's to facilitate what's, what's called

deep sleep, which is, which is a, a state of sleep that is, uh, I mean, it's, it's deep sleep. Um, um, so that's why we, most of us, most people I talk to, we naturally like, like we prefer having a cold room to sleep in as humans more likely than having a hot room to sleep in. Yeah, exactly. Same idea, okay. And then what happens is as you... And that facilitates you basically staying asleep. And then as the night progresses,

your body starts to prepare you to wake up, and so it actually warms you. So it's almost like a U curve, in a sense. You start here in terms of temperature, then your temperature drops, and then through the night, it goes drastically back. Dramatically, no, not dramatically. Over time, it starts to go back up. Yeah, so for people listening, it's exactly what it sounds like. Just picture a U.

That's what's happening yeah so because that's the way that your body's circadian rhythm works and that's the way that that temperature changes based on it there's no one temperature that we as humans are comfortable at all through the night that's the one problem and second problem is, if you have a dumb mattress, you're basically sleeping on a piece of foam that's just going to get hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter all night long without any way to dissipate that heat. And what's going to happen is,

you're going to have problems falling asleep and you're going to have problems staying asleep. You're not going to cool yourself enough to get into a state of deep sleep. So that's the immediate sort of scientific backing behind why thermoregulation is so important. And the pod, just to be clear, so now I understand all that, but the pod functions in a way that it affects the temperature of the mattress and therefore the temperature of your body at all times to match this exactly circadian rhythm am i saying that correctly yeah exactly got it and so most people when they use the product they they start off um at least this is my

experience i won't speak for everyone because everyone's different in this regard as well which is important i mean personalization in this in this sense is also very important um but i start off very cold at night and by the way you can manually control the temperature of the bed as well um but most people do the smart temperature which is what i'm describing which is you set it and you forget it and it works sort of based on your preferences based on how your circadian rhythm works. Is this like a $30,000 mattress? No, it's $3,000. What? 3-0-0.

Is it a twin bed? No, no. So 3Ks for the queen, 3,500s for the king. How? How? How the fuck does that make sense? mean you're describing a robot to me yeah tell me i can get a robot i sleep on for 3500 and get a king bed yeah i mean look it's it's part of what makes us so special as a company we can provide this in a way that nobody else can in a

way that really works for people and it's generally generally accessible. I mean, if I hadn't been working at Eight Sleep, and I found this thing, I'd buy it. Because it's accessible to the average person. And by average, I mean, the average sort of upper middle class person, not sort of the average American. But, you know, it's an accessible product. And, you know, what a lot of people do is they elect to pay through financing. So they pay, you know, $50, $60 a month. Oh, wow. You offer that? Yeah, it doesn't break the bank. And you pay for three years. And the thing is yours, and you use it for another five. I think about this. It's such a, it's mind-blowing to me,

because what's the most important thing in most people's lives that they use on a daily basis? Their phone. Their phone is where their contacts are. It's where their connection to the Internet is. It gets them from point A to point B. They answer it. They talk to people, human connection.

They check the time on there. You know, I still wear a watch just to wear it it i don't think the time on there is right you know but when you also then consider okay what's what's the next most important thing putting like a wi-fi connection aside or something like that yeah uh maybe even more important is what you sleep on yeah and i like i'm i'm also it's i have to take my own lumps on this because i'm one of those guys like you know i grew up with big families on both sides i was like yeah fuck it i'll sleep on the floor like i never cared and it was probably stupid i probably took a couple years off my life like just sleeping wherever but when we don't

like you kind of know when you only got like four or five hours of good sleep you're just not that same guy yeah it like last night i slept pretty well yeah shockingly because i ate like shit yesterday but i woke up today i legitimately felt like i had like seven and a half hours and it made a big difference and i got your basic ass mattress but what you're describing to me and this this is the beauty of what technology does technology more than more than anything, is a time saver. When the first technology happened where the caveman invented a wheel, it saved time to be able to move products around because they could roll instead of using their own brute strength and then having to put it down and stop and get there slower from point A to point B. When you're talking about sleep right now, you're talking about taking the quality of eight hours and moving it into six, which frees you up for two more hours during the day, which I got to tell you, like, I was, I was texting back and forth with one guy who's like a huge VC,

like hustler the other night. And you know, he knows the grind just like you. And he was touting, he's like, I make sure I get eight hours every night. And I see all this guy does. And I'm like, imagine if he had two more. Yeah. Well, I mean, I get eight hours every night. And I see all this guy does. And I'm like, imagine if he had two more. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's exactly what I was going to say. We talk to, so on a pretty regular basis in terms of like the, like on the growth side of things, on the marketing side, we talk to athletes all the time. And we have this series and I encourage people to check it out at blog.8sleep.com.

But it's a series where Mateo, our founder, he interviews influential people in tech, in sports, in a bunch of different verticals about the things that they do for their health, right, to stay fit. And one question that he always asks is, what's the biggest health hack that you do? You know, what's the biggest thing that you do for your health that gives you an edge, that gives you a performance boost above and beyond what, you know, competitors are doing. And I'd say probably we've done, we've, I think we've put out maybe five or six of these interviews right now, but we talked to a lot, we, we, we've filmed a lot more. Who's like the biggest name you talk to? Are you allowed to say if it's unreleased or?

We, I'd say check them out, check them out. Okay. A good hedge. I respect that. But 99% of them say sleep as their biggest performance hack. And I mean, it's funny because I'm always the guy who doesn't sleep enough. But I can tell that the quality of my sleep has improved from using the product. And have you been using it like literally since you started there?

Yeah. That's awesome. So you're getting high on your own supply. Exactly. Now, like dead ass though, it works. I mean, it really depends what you're looking for. Like, are you looking for... For you though.

For me, it works. Yeah. I had horrible issues with sleep. I had a love-hate relationship with it where I wasn't getting enough. I also sleep really warm. So I was a person that was consistently night sweats, waking up in the middle of the night. How much clothes do I wear? How much blanket do I use?

You know, a lot of issues with sleep um this has cured all of those issues i i've not sweat the bed once since having the product um i still probably don't get a good night's sleep i mean i probably still don't get a good amount of sleep in a night do you track it consistently based on the metrics you guys use yeah for sure you've seen improvement but i've seen improvement that's good for sure um and i mean the quality of sleep because i don't wake up anymore from the the temperature issues that i had i mean it's like night and day now i i would be really curious about it because i have felt i love my mattress like it's very comfortable but I struggle with temperature a lot.

You'll love this one. But you remember I went to college with Alex. He was a year younger than me, or Horo, as you've heard me call him. But you remember senior year at the Deli, which was the name of our downtown house for people listening, and me and five of the other guys lived in, how the oil kept on emptying yeah and we went to college it was the middle of fucking nowhere pennsylvania it was the coldest winter on record that year and by the end of november we realized like we were all poor college kids like we realized shit we're just gonna have to bite the bullet and not really have the heat on so i lived up in the attic which was a sick room because it took up like the whole top

of the house like everyone we always brought everyone up there i loved it but this was this house by the way later fell down about a year and a half later and had a huge lawsuit around it neither here nor there but these were paper thin walls the windows were like that thin and i know because mike spears threw me through like two of them but um we had to bite the bullet during this winter and so my my room was was regularly we would measure it it was around like it would peak down at about 37 degrees at night there was i i realized probably by about march that i could get up i like and i had never done this before at like 5 a.m you know have some coffee and read a little bit of a book and go to the gym before class and i might have gone to bed at like six o'clock tonight or at 11 o'clock the night before i was getting the least amount of sleep on memory

that i had but i actually i would get like a lot of sleep it was it was it was kind of crazy and i never put two and two together i always just made the joke about you know i slept in a 37 degree room for a lot of that winter which was nuts but maybe that had something to do with it because it's possible yeah i mean look it's a personal preference thing for a lot of people and if you're someone who needs to sleep cold to sleep deep i mean it's very possible that you were getting restful sleep uh from being that cold it's very possible yeah so when you you said you met Mateo through like a connection where you just networked yeah I I knew a mutual uh a mutual connection between us that sort of led me to to him um it was uh it was somebody that I knew through previous sort of business relationships.

Okay. So when you looked at this, did you have any previous understanding of like sleep science at all? Or were you just kind of learning on the fly? Zero. And how fast did you make a decision to work there? As soon as I touched the product. Really? Oh, that's awesome. Okay. So was that like within a week or two or? I went to the, I went to the office for an interview and it was right before like my, my, like the last round of the interview. Um, like I had interviewed before

and I was already like invested in the process but obviously like I was still sort of weighing options and figuring things out and I get to the office and I remember this the HR person comes up to me and we had an office on 26th street at the time um about a year ago Manhattan yeah um and she goes hey like you know what I'm X person, HR rep here at the company. Um, let me show you around. And, uh, you know, she starts showing me around and then, uh, she's like, have you seen the product? I'm like only on the website. So I go over the product. She's like, here, touch it and i she said put both put one hand on each side and i put my hands down and one side was extremely warm and the other side was glacier cold and i remember being like holy shit this thing works like this is next level um and from that point, I was sold. I was like, I mean, I have to work here. I love how the final decision came down to believing in what it is.

I got to ask this. Have there been any downsides to it, though? Have you had some things, I mean, as a company is coming up and you're improving the product, has anything not worked the way you expected it to go? I mean, I think when you decide to work at a startup, you expect that things aren't going to work out the way that you think that they're going to work out. But honestly, I think right now it's been a lot of learning. I think the past year, it's really been about putting my head down, working, grinding, and learning about how to really respond

to this different, fast-paced, and exciting, frankly, environment. And I think there's a lot of unknowns. I think there's a lot of things that, as I said, we don't know that we don't know. Yeah. But, I mean, I'm super excited for it what because speaking with you over the past sub year or so since you've been working there you sound to me much happier

than you did in your years at goldman and when you went to goldman like you were the guy coming out it was always like oh oro's a genius like he's the banker like like he's the guy who's gonna go in there and make the deals between the companies and tell them how it is and so it I always kind of like put you in that box and then you ended up at Goldman on this hot shot team I don't know how the hell you got that job but great job um and I was like all right he's good and then I remember like I would come in we'd usually meet at like Brookfield Place in the city back in the good old days pre-covid and you every time i came in there you looked more and more not tired just like over it like run down and you were working 85 90 hours a week for them and you always knew so much like you learned you were involved in such crazy shit while you were there, but there wasn't,

there wasn't like that spark with it. And it seems like, you know, when you first put out the feelers to me, like, hey, I'm, I'm looking around and I'm thinking of going towards VC. I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Even Horo's leaving the bank right now, you know, looking at my own situation, everything. But that process didn't, you worked very hard. It didn't take like that long you were working on it really roughly for what like six months or so um i would actually say closer to a year really i

didn't know that because so it did take a while yeah so there was another job that i was looking at that i'm actually in retrospect happy i didn't end up taking um well it wasn't my choice they they rejected me after the final round of interviews. In DC? No, it was another operating company, but more on the research side of things. Got it. But it wouldn't have let me do the same scope of things that I'm doing now, in terms of being more of a generalist. But yeah, I mean, it took about a year and you know

I think the reason why I was becoming a little bit dissatisfied with my position was just it was a little bit of just me looking at things and and I mean this is going to sound ridiculous

because I'm still super young but it was it was me looking at things and saying, you know, things aren't moving as fast as I really want them to move in my career. And things aren't, like, I'm not where I think I should be. And, I mean, maybe in retrospect, I was rushing things, but probably not. I mean, I ended up in an amazing place, and I'm super happy. But, I mean, that's just always been my personality. I'm just always just super driven, and I never really satisfied. I am right now because, I mean, they're giving me a run for my money,

and it's been great. But, yeah, I mean, it're giving me a run for my money and it's been great. But yeah, I mean, it boils down to a personality thing. I think I was getting, I was in a place of complacency and I don't really thrive in complacency. What do you mean complacency? How so? I was doing the same stuff and just sort of waiting for more advancement. Like, that's the thing with these big corporations. Like, you go and you work there waiting for more advancement.

That's the thing with these big corporations. You go and you work there, and if you're a stellar performer, you continue to do great work, but you still operate on their cadence of, oh, you got to wait X amount of years to get promoted, Oh, you got to wait X amount of years to do this. Oh, this mobility opportunity probably won't work for you. This one probably not either.

Like you still operate in these bureaucratic like constraints, so to speak. And so it was getting to the point where like I couldn't wait anymore. Like I was waiting for certain things to happen for me that I was trying to push, but they i couldn't wait anymore like i was waiting for certain things to happen for me that i was trying to push but they just weren't budging how much of that like you talk about the corporation yeah thing and i can relate to this and i've talked about this on this podcast but how much of that was based on even though like you were very high up especially for someone your age and the money wasn't the problem mean, you were making a lot of money and, frankly, deserving it in every way because you're spending your life there. Yeah.

But there's still – it's such a big organization. It's the most historic bank in the world. And there's the chain of command, and it's a big chain. No matter how high – once – really until you're like the COO. It's a big chain, and there's this guy that's got to talk to that girl that's got to talk to that guy that's got to talk to that girl all the way up. And how much of it was like you felt like, because as chief of staff of this company now, you're empowered to make a lot of decisions. And you're empowered to do a lot of things that support the business where you can kind of think outside the box just based on what you've told me and correct me if i'm wrong but how much of it was like man i'm constantly just i have an idea at goldman and it takes four months to see if i can even get like a slight yes or just a quick no i mean it was a lot of it was that i mean a lot of it were phrased

slightly differently a lot of it was oh i'm ready to take on all this responsibility. Like, just let me have the authority to make certain decisions and have a certain level of accountability. But it was, I wasn't allowed to have those things in a quick enough pace. Like, I felt almost like held back. And it's not because i wasn't performing um it was because literally in the the company like handbook like i had to wait until that time in order to unlock that like i literally like literally they they could you a.m., the day that I was eligible, they would have given it to me. But I had to wait.

And there was no, you know, the one thing about the corporate environment is precedent setting is really hard. Oh, my God. That's so perfect. You can't say it any better. Go ahead. And so that, I mean, that's what it was it was they people are reluctant to go out of their way to set precedents for you god forbid they have to go out on a limb there's no and and it's unfortunate because you do see

in politics now there's the common refrain comes from both sides where you know they were all against the corporations and and all that stuff And it's a shame because corporations create a lot of jobs and there's a lot of good and they do provide a lot of innovation. But when it gets to a certain size, the sausage factory aspect invades every single corporation there is. And it's why corporations die. Eventually, like you pointed out earlier, the way a lot of these things have survived and continued to find a way to grow to meet their quarterly nut is just buying ideas because they can't they don't even know where to start to invest in it themselves because they're so far removed like even even a company like facebook that's literally you know less than 15 years since the garage they're so

far removed from that like they don't remember that world. Yeah. I mean, I think, look, if you talk to a lot of people in tech, like the tech world, like the VC world, right? They talk about Facebook and Microsoft and Google and all those big companies the same way that we're talking about these banks they're places that you go when you get tired of the fast life um and you want to sit back coast make some good money get thrown a couple of shares here and there and you know live live on live on chill mode. It's where you accept. Yeah. Live in complacency. That sort of thing is something that a lot of people, frankly, in that world, they sort of laugh at.

But at the same time, like, fast life and, and, and, you know, moving quickly and working your ass off really quickly is not for everyone. And so for me, I understand wanting to work at a Facebook or a Google, um, for a lot of people, it makes a lot of sense. And if I, wasn't as driven as i as i am i would probably love to do that and i probably i probably would have stayed at goldman make a lot of money doing it yeah and and they and they take care of you too yeah yeah and it didn't seem to me in all fairness because you know some people take things the wrong way, so to give context, like I'm sure just based on some conversations we had, and you don't have to provide context to it. But I'm sure there were some things there and some people have frustrated you, but you weren't this – you see this a lot, the disenfranchised, angry soldier at all you know you really did your job you have a really to me a

really good perspective on the worldview that that opened you up to say nothing you know you made good money while you were doing it and it's a great experience out of college and i gotta tell you man like i know it was i didn't realize it was a year i'm sorry on that i thought it was like like a four to six month thing i didn't know that but you know you spending a year on top of all the work you were doing trying to get to the vc yeah there were a lot of guys that probably scoffed and said no no you don't work here like i don't even want to figure out how finance guy fits but kudos to you because you were you were very clearly able to seamlessly leverage what you did there and take it into what you do now and you're doing it for all the right reasons and you're on the cutting edge and you're very aware of how that space now works and what what constitutes that level of comfortability and acceptance that you don't want

you want that chase yeah you're constantly you're the kind of guy you'd sell three companies just consecutively and figure out where the fourth is at age 65 like you really strike maybe i'm wrong but you really strike me that way yeah look i mean i i hope that's the way things go you know i hope i have enough gas left in the tank by 65 uh you know but um but yeah i mean look i'm i'm never gonna stop and if you ask me right now, what am I going to do next? I mean, the thing about me is I'm focused on what I'm doing now. Key. You know, I'm super, you know, heads down.

And the company's doing very well, too. You guys are really, obviously you can't go into numbers, but this is no joke. Yeah, so, you know, I mean, if you asked me, you know, where do I see myself in five, ten years, I'd say ask me in, like, two years. I have a lot of work to do before I can start thinking about it. Listen, man, you're an iron man for this. This kid rented a Tesla, classic Huero fashion. I'm like, yo, can you come down Friday? He's like, yeah, I'll come down Friday.

Rents a Tesla, rides down to South Jersey in style, the temporary home of the bunker here. How do you like the bunker, by the way? I love it. The bunker's pretty good. Yeah, it looks great. This is where thoughts come to grow and get watered and and become great big trees from the seeds but you know you have blown me away all day today because we're gonna have like i said we just decided this on the fly we're gonna have two podcasts because we i think we recorded like

six hours i'm gonna have to cut the first hour literally but just thank you so much for coming down i really miss seeing you i I miss the New York guys. I look forward to getting this thing back up there. Absolutely. Look, dude, we talked about, we touched on Al Tucher and the Seinfeld thing and what the future of New York is. I'll hit on this a million times. It's the most important city in the world. It's the most important city in this country.

The energy is going to come back, and we're going to need people to do it like you and me and many, many, many other people in the Gen Z and millennial age demographic. And, you know, I think I got a lot of hope. I think regardless of where the politics are right now, where the election pans out, I think we're going to come out of this pandemic and the world's going to be different. It already is. But this is America and some great things are going to happen. And, and when I talk to people like you, when I talk to people like Mitch and some of the other people I'm bringing in here, I remember just how many diverse, great minds there are who are interested in so much different shit.

That's going to help continue really the tradition that we've built this great country on. So thanks for being a part of that, man. And thanks for coming down here. I really, really appreciate it. And obviously we're going to have you on again at some point. Yeah. It's been amazing. I had a blast, man. Thanks for, thanks for coming down here i really really appreciate it and uh obviously we're gonna have you on again at some point yeah this has been amazing i had a blast man thanks for

thanks for having me all right well everybody you know what it is i'm julian dory this is alexander horowitz give it a thought give back to me peace