The Pomp Podcast - #1123 Max Levchin On How To Be War Time CEO

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Max Levchin is the Co-Founder of Paypal and the current Founder & CEO of Affirm. In this conversation, we discuss building a new credit score, how to navigate market downtowns, and building company  culture in a remote environment, ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Affirm. In this conversation, we talk about building a new credit score, how to navigate market downturns, what exactly it means to reinforce culture in a remote environment, and whether Max believes in aliens or not. I really enjoyed this conversation with max and i hope you guys do as well before we get into this episode though i first want to talk about our sponsors this episode is brought to you by arculus arculus is the next generation crypto and nft cold storage wallet that combines one of the world's strongest security protocols

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all the volatility spikes. LMAX Groups' liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology means that LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services. LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Go learn more at lmaxdigital.com. Again, that's lmaxdigital.com. This episode is brought to you by Masari. Your days of spending hours scouring the internet for quality crypto insights are over. Masari is your one-stop shop for all your crypto data and research needs. With Masari Pro, you gain access to exclusive, industry-leading, long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news, advanced asset screeners, and curated sets of charts and protocol metrics.

You can try Masari Pro today, and listeners of this podcast will get 25% off the Masari Pro membership by visiting www.masari.io backslash pro and entering promo code POMP. Again, that's Masari.io backslash pro and use promo code POMP. Navigate the market with confidence with Masari Pro. purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Max here with me. Max, I thought a great place to start would be this idea of a new credit score. Obviously, the idea of the old credit score, most of the financial system is built on. You've had personal experience and also built an entire company around this idea of creating a new one. Help explain what you think the problems are with

the old one and why we need a new one. That's a rich question. Lots of fun things to pull on. Probably the most problematic thing with the old credit score is that it just doesn't really take into account that people's borrowing habits and approaches have changed. So this is very recursive, but the NPL itself, majority of the paying for products that you see are just not included in the calculation of your FICO score or your Vantage score. And so that alone is a bunch of people's significant borrowing activity now. And even if you've paid every one of those loans back on time, the paying for just doesn't even appear in your credit history or your credit score. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently sort of opined on it and basically said, hey, it would be really good if the industry would start reporting that. So I think it's going to change for the better relatively soon. But for this to really change, the companies that use those scores and compute those scores actually have to change their behavior.

But even before BNPL, the FICO score, which is the traditional Fair Isaacs company, the lingua franca of borrowing, just would update very slowly. I mean, these days, actually, I think it updates a little bit faster, but back when I had my own brushes with the credit scoring problems, if you will, I think it took me something like 10 years to get rid of a black mark I had caused to myself in college by running out of money and not being able to pay my bills. So just the slow updating, lack of data sources that really should be included, lack of familiarity with how younger generations use credit, and the fact that an enormous number of people, probably the most important because I should have started there, something like 30 to 50 million americans have something that's just not really reflective at all of how they behave and who they are and there's many different reasons why the information

is inaccurate there are mistakes in reporting their data doesn't get included correctly etc etc but ultimately there's a tens of millions of people literally whose credit history and therefore credit score just doesn't actually reflect how they have behaved in the past when they borrowed money or in fact maybe just doesn't have any information at all and they're completely excluded from a standard borrowing systems. So what's interesting about this is you're highlighting a disjointment, if you will. There's people who are doing activities and then the old systems don't account for that. Either they're inaccurate, they're slow, they're whatever the problem is. What I'm fascinated with and I've been talking about for two years now or so is we see

this across the economy. It's not just in the credit score. So think of inflation as an example as well, where we still have people going into the grocery store with like a pad and paper and writing down, you know, what the change in prices are. But it seems like whether it's a company like yours or other companies in the fintech sector, you have much more real-time information at point of sale. You know what people are paying, you know, at the cost of change month over month, year over year. When you zoom out, and so not just credit score, whether it's inflation calculations or whatever, is the market ripe for just kind of like, hey, we have to digitize, we have to modernize and like real-time information should now be the foundation for all of these different

calculations and kind of data points that are being presented and people are using to make decisions? Yeah, that's a very good observation. And I think about a decade ago, I had this thesis that the transition from analog to digital will create incredible opportunities for companies. And Affirm is certainly one version of this idea in credit data. But the reality of analog data it's just really irregular and error prone and fuzzy around the edges and highly likely to be inaccurate, even if it seems accurate. And so I think it's very, very hard to have a wholesale replacement of analog systems with digital systems. And so we're doing it piecemeal, which creates opportunities because if you figure out a clever way of accelerating

part of the industry a segment or just a a flavor of analog and push it into digital wholesale you'll suddenly be in possession of an information advantage which you know again at the six thousand sixty five thousand foot view just gives you an opportunity to to to arbitrage that but i don't know if there's a way one can imagine to go from our still pretty analog lives to fully digital just really really quickly and i think we're just going to keep stumbling through it And in many ways, one of the things that makes China so interesting as a society, they came from a truly analog economy, so analog that transition to digital wasn't a choice. It was a sort of moral imperative. You can't have a country that big with that many changes, that many systems, and just slowly move from analog to digital.

You just have to do it wholesale. And combined with a centralized government, in that particular scenario, I actually think it helped them. But when I talk to my friends in Shanghai, we talk about payments, of course, and it's shocking the level of innovation they see there. And it always falls right back into this idea, well, they have access to all this data and it's really accurate and everyone's on board with it. There's no cards, it just all comes from your phone and so on. What's fascinating to me about you specifically is that you're working on a very hard problem. There's the problem in front of you and then there's the broader thing that we just talked about. but also you have been able to navigate good times and bad times over and over and over again and so

you 2000 uh tech boom and bust then you've got the 2008 global financial crisis we now are in this thing i don't even yet know if people can really describe what it is how long it'll last how bad it'll be whatever um what are some of the lessons maybe from the past uh market downturns that you now are implementing whether it's personally or at a firm in terms of actually running the organizations that other people could learn from definitely uh lots of learnings um you definitely have to be made of a certain high density fiber to survive the ups and downs i think that there's no there's no getting around that the knocks sometimes are very hard and sometimes they get even harder and if you're not prepared to take the beating and get up and go back to

fighting um you should stay on the floor and it sucks to fail and i failed enough times to know just how painful it is and how frustrating it can be to be on the floor and realize that you really aren't going to be able to get up. But I choose to get up every time, even sometimes it means a failed company or two. So that's sort of the hard knocks advice, I guess. A couple of maybe more practical ones. As a leader, I've realized that everybody approaches kind of the punch in the face scenario differently. And sometimes a punch in the face is like this happened and now we have to deal and we have a day left and et cetera. Sometimes it's kind of the dread of, oh, wow, the recession is really coming and people are going to have a harder time paying

their bills. And well, that's going to be interesting. And in both of those scenarios, you kind of realize that there's going to get a lot tougher. Whatever hard you think you're experiencing right now, the future is not going to be easier. And the only way to cope with that is you kind of have to step back and try to get through the first two stages you know why is this happening why is it happening to me and quickly get to all right so what does the solution look like and in the ideal world even okay is this an opportunity if it's really difficult it's probably really difficult for everyone so am i going to be able to extract a competitive advantage or something might change for the better for us more so than our competitors and you as a human you

can't completely shake off the, why is this happening? Why is it happening to me? And why is it happening to me now? What I do to deserve this? You have to develop skills to cope with that moment. And everybody does it differently. In my case, I trained myself over the years and decades to sort of say, all right, just do nothing for a few minutes. Just let the information sink. it is not going to be good it's not going to go away it's not going to get better but any emotional reaction in the moment isn't going to fix it for you and so just let it wash over you for a moment or two it's probably the case you're missing some information anyway give yourself a chance to absorb it and you'll move right on to the what's the solution and might

this even be beneficial and so that that's a really important skill that i actually have to train myself for because in the past certainly being the personality of entrepreneur is that this happened, jump into action and you may well miss a piece of data that will later on prove crucial. In terms of just practical advice for how do you cope with downturns, assume they're always coming, raise enough money, deal with the realities of unexpected loss of revenue, loss of growth, whatever the metric you care about rationally. You can't allow yourself to be emotional. You can't allow yourself to wallow in, you know, the sort of looping unwise is happening to me now is the worst thing you can do because then you're not acting. And two other

most important things. People are the most important thing in the world by far. And so if you compromise your relationships with people you care about in the moment of impact or as you deal with impact, you're ultimately going to regret it very much. And so that is just a really important thing. It doesn't mean that you can't and won't have to make hard choices, but if you do it by putting aside your feelings and thoughts about humans that surround you, your team, people that you work with, your partners, you're absolutely going to regret it very badly. And so that's just a thing to be very mindful all the time. Most people don't need reminding of that, but some people feel like they need to act extra tough and ruthless in moments of difficulty. And you have to

be tough and you have to be ruthless, but you have to continuously remember that you're not the only human on the planet. And two, you have to try to ask the question, what does it look like if i compromise any of my values to to accomplish the whatever survival goal i have and nine times out of ten the answer you will deeply regret that and so in in sort of my absolutist rule book people and values are immutable can't change them i think that's maybe too maximalist of an advice and so you have to uh you have to ask the question you know what am i doing and why am i doing it but ultimately if you're poking around your core values and thinking like might i relax one of those things that that's that's a real problem and i strongly advise against that it's a very

long-winded answer no it's great and i think that you've learned a lot one of the most interesting parts of these market downturns is you have to transition from like uh what many people would call it the peacetime ceo to the wartime ceo and you're hinting at this a little bit what do you do inside the company itself like is there like a day where you declare okay i'm now a wartime ceo and everyone's like, Hey, we're going to, to war, you know, essentially, or is it somewhat more of a slower transition as you realize things are getting worse? Uh, so it turns out, um, I am actually much better as a wartime CEO than a peacetime CEO. I found over the years that, uh, if it's really peacetime, I start getting very restless and I kind of look around for war and

I, it's a little bit of a, uh, samurai complex. I'm a big fan of samurai genre and stories and, and etc. The noble warrior is something that I at least pretend to identify with. But there's lots of stories from medieval Japan where samurai would get restless and they would have to go find an enemy because otherwise they just start slaughtering each other. And I don't slaughter my team or certainly self-destruct, but I'm definitely more restless in peacetime than I am in wartime. It's actually a really important skill for a CEO. So the thing that happens in peacetime is the team becomes comfortable with the level of crises that they have to deal with kind of at a retail level.

The difference between peacetime and wartime is fundamentally just the frequency of crisis and the wholesale nature of it versus the retail nature of it. And so if most CEOs I know really struggle in this transition where you're like, hmm, more and more hits on the sidewalls of the ship, is this a crisis? Is this a war? And for most of us, I think the tendency, even if you sort of enjoy the wartime intensity, say, well, OK, this is problematic, but we're not going to quite declare DEFCON 5 or whatever the number is.

And I found over the years that it's actually much healthier to just say, OK, things have changed. The pivot to wartime mentality isn't going to be careful and deliberate. We're going to have to declare that this is, in fact, wartime. We're fighting for our lives. there's lots of problems out there and we're going to beat the enemy or survive the storm. But it's happening now. It's not happening slowly. And I've experimented with messaging over the years. I found that if you try to peanut butter it a little bit more carefully, you just ultimately get very frustrated. Not everybody's on the same page. So you kind of

have to bring everyone along. And as a wartime CEO, the number one thing you have to do is communicate and communicate clearly, communicate well. And so long as you're clear about why certain things are no longer true and certain behaviors are no longer going to fly some people might say well that's not what i came here to do but those that thrive in kind of this sharp black and white scenarios will probably appreciate you for for being clear and appreciate the moment to to shine and embrace the uh embrace the struggle ahead as you're doing this you're a publicly traded company. And so there's everyone and their mom has an opinion. There's plenty of critics out there. They're looking at a stock price that moves hour to hour, day to day. Your reaction alone is

kind of, hey, that's very antithetical, I think, to like somebody who has a long-term vision trying to solve a big problem. How have you as a public company CEO really balanced? If I was just building a company or building a solution, you know, there's this long-term mentality, but you do have to manage the public expectations and the critics and all that. And so like, what lessons have you learned there over the years? I've been public for less than eight quarters. And so, uh, it's probably a little too early to ask me for a rule book of how to be a public company, um, CEO with a, with a great plan. Um, I think probably the most important thing as a public company CEO anyway, is to understand who your major shareholders are. I think I'm still one of

the larger shareholders for sure. And so ultimately, I have, if not the most, quite a lot to lose or gain from the performance of a firm as a long-term investment. I think my heart goes out to day traders that lose or make money on a firm, but I spent less than a nanosecond actually thinking about them. I very much care about making return on investment for my long-term shareholders, of which I am one, of which many, most of our employees are. And so the notion that, well, I got a vision and I just got to go there and I don't care about the stock price, I think it's disingenuous. This is a capitalist enterprise. We've raised quite a lot of money. A lot of those shares are still owned by people who gave us the money to build this company. And it's my duty and

job to give them an excellent return and that's i certainly intend to do the good news or the comforting news is that when we raise the money we told them the same story over and over again the very vision that we put in our s1 was in our first financing deck it's actually sort of insane i don't think i've ever run a company that did not pivot except for every single project i've ever had and this is i lost count but this is in the teens of companies that i started and everyone except for this one at some point said ah we're really not going to do this we're going to do this something else and not a firm a firm has always been in this honest financial products mission and we continue to do so so the story has never changed people that bought our

shares in series a through the ipo have all heard the same thing we promised them that we will do our absolute darndest to make an exceptional return on their investment and that is the plan and they have seen the plan and have seen the story that we think will get us there. We keep on growing, we keep on printing really good results. The vicissitudes of the stock market are sometimes frustrating in a sense that you feel disoriented by the dizziness of we post a great quarter, the market penalizes it for it. There's some other random signal and suddenly the market rewards us for it. And like, well, Did I do this or did some external factor have had a hand in this?

And ultimately, I keep myself focused by being frustrated with features that are not shipping fast enough or conversion rates that are not as good as I want them to be and pennies that we leave on the floor when we should be picking them up, things like that. And so I'm very, very internally focused and goal-driven for the company in the service of the strategy that comes from the mission. it doesn't hurt to have total conviction that what we're doing is important and believe that we're pursuing the mission in with the right strategy i think once you start losing faith in your strategy or your mission that's when you get really really tailspun like at that point you really should rethink everything and that's when you start listening to the voices outside her screaming at you saying you should do x or y because obviously you're an idiot and i'm pretty far from feeling that way. So I'm quite sanguine.

So as you built this business, one of the things that I've seen talked about publicly is a focus on building the right culture. And I think of culture as something that attracts the right talent. It kind of rejects certain types of talent. How do you think about building that in today's day and age? It's 2022. There's all kinds of chaos going on. How do you kind of stay true to what that culture is over years where many people, I think, would argue just like society has been changing as well, right? So kind of everything's moving around you. How do you keep a culture that attracts the people you're looking for to help you on this mission? It's a great question. And by the way, I think in that particular domain, I'm still very much

in learning mode. And everything I thought I knew changed with the pandemic. And everything I know changes with every hundred employees, maybe every 500 employees that we had. When we were tiny, it was really easy to enforce the culture. And I built the AffirmCard culture very, very deliberately. I had obviously lots of experience with building teams in the past. Some I thought were spectacular. Others were less so, and I had to fix culture. It's really, really hard to rewrite your culture. It's basically a mass layoff if you end up thinking, my God, the culture is way broken. More than half the people are not interacting the way that you think they should be. And so I was very fortunate. Our firm was very deliberately built.

We wrote down our core values before we incorporated the company. We wrote down our mission, which has never changed. So all of that, the foundation is right. As you get larger, you have to over-communicate it. You have to continuously reiterate what it means. And the amount of drift in interpretation of the core values in the mission is staggering. like you literally look away and people say well you said this in our core values and here's how i interpret it and when you're a hundred percent company you can say no no that that's just silly like that's not actually what i mean if you have 2600 employees which is roughly where we are you don't get to hear that you don't get to say well wait hang on a second that's just not right

and so you have to over communicate as much as possible what do you really mean and a lot of times it comes down to, all right, so here's the situation in front of us or in front of an employee that you may have never met or I have never met. And they're thinking about making this really tough moral choice. And they think they fully understand what it means for the backbone of our company to stay straight and narrow. And I think those, we have done an exceptionally good job just hammering like, no, we will never screw our consumers. There's lots of ways to make money in this world and there are things we will not do and some others do it and others even have really good explanations for why they do it and we will not we just don't think it's right and

that's off limits and i would be shocked if people within a firm were like well but like one day we'll do those things like no we won't like i think pitchfork will come out as soon as somebody suggests that and they'll be carried out from from their zoomer but in more subtle matters like you know one of the really interesting uh things to to debate is when so one of our core values is people come first and it's really tempting to say it's all the people and then you have a sorting function well so i'm a people and you're people and we have some employees that are people and most of them all of them maybe and then we have consumers and lots of others And the original meaning of the core value people come first is very, very, very clearly articulated in the first set of writings that I did about Affirm.

And that is we put our borrowers ahead of ourselves. We will not take advantage of them. We will not make money when they are in trouble and so on and so forth. And just explaining that very, very clearly and making sure people really understand very deeply that ultimately we are a service organization. We are serving a consumer that has needs, and we choose to place their needs ahead of ours. That's just how it's meant to be. And that's not the easiest thing to absorb for some.

I think you have a, and on the other side of this is actually this notion of, all right, well, if that's really true, like, why aren't we a nonprofit? And I have some very strong words to describe why we're not. and and so so anyway so these are all kind of maybe very low level examples of how the stuff gets harder and harder as you get larger in size because inevitably these conversations occur when you're not in the room and so it's it's my job to teach all of my directs and their job to teach their directs and so on and so so long as the conversation keeps going and the messages are repeated in consistent ways then it it does really well and survives and i

think we've done a good job i think it's a lot harder in zoom rooms because you just don't quite have as much interaction in real time i was just gonna ask uh i worked at facebook for a couple years and uh what has now become somewhat of a joke but there was literally posters you know move fast and break things done is better than perfect like you would walk down the hall and it was like an indoctrination of certain whether they were actual values or or like certain phrases that kind of reinforced what the company was about that's great when you actually have hallways but if you're on zoom, uh, I don't see any posters behind your head that are like reinforcing the company values. So how do you do it? Um, I think that's, uh, April, I was going to show you

my virtual background early days of the pandemic, but I think that this is a different laptop. I, uh, when pandemic just began and we suddenly went into the zoom land, I was like, what do I do to sort of tell people something you know this this is all these pixels behind me and um um i i had the uh hitchhiker's guide uh cover with the big don't panic on it as my as my background for quite some time it's been long enough in the strange world of zoom that uh i don't even have the file anymore i'm not sure where the uh the image map went um so i think the couple of thoughts on how How do you preserve the culture or amplify the culture in a world where you don't have always, which I think is a pretty great, important question.

It's easier. The cheat code on preserving the culture is you make it very explicit in your interviewing process and your recruiting process that there's a certain flavor of how we do and do not do things here, that we really care about certain decisions a lot and maybe don't care about others as much. You self-select or you pre-select the people who join to understand what this place is all about. like we are building a profitable capitalist enterprise we take great pride in it and yet we also are very very hell-bent on treating our borrowers right delivering value to immersion

partners and not cheating by creating fees and hidden charges the way the industry has sort of chosen to cheat and you have to go through the trouble of explaining that and for some people I think it might be a, well, maybe I don't want to work here because you want to maximize profit by any means necessary. And that's outside of my core values. And maybe it's equally the proverb of people like, well, wait a second, why are you insisting on making profit? And we insist on that. So making sure the culture is self-perpetuating through the interviewing process is one of the ways you can maybe make it a little bit easier in a world with no hallways. the other way in the world with no hallways is has been certainly my my play for the last

several months since the pandemic has been a little bit easier to navigate is you travel we have a lot of offices around the world now my next week will be in poland where we have an office which will be really exciting i haven't seen that one yet but the week before was in chicago and the one a couple of weeks prior was in new york and in even in the world where most people are in their office sort of Tuesday through Thursday these days, as opposed to a full week, it's just really, really great to have a moment to interact with real humans and to do my part and help them reinforce the culture. And I don't know if we will ever have too many posters just because not enough time to look at them all, but conversations are more valuable

than posters on walls, in my opinion. So we encourage people to travel, we encourage people to get together in person we have lots of off sites where teams get together and spend as much time interacting just kind of reinforcing the culture with each other as they do working so i think that you in aggregate i don't think it's an impossible task but it's certainly something you have to be very deliberate about one of my last questions for you uh you are incredibly intelligent you're very kind of thoughtful i think in a lot of uh your public appearances and our conversation here um and you have been part of a number of different teams i think people really look up to and they say hey you guys have been successful you've been able to attract other

smart intelligent hard-working people what do you personally do to learn are you reading books in your free time are you listening to podcasts are you uh doing you know something that no one's ever heard of before like what are you doing given that you have this day job that obviously has all this pressure associated with it but how do you learn on a day-to-day basis it's a great question. Probably the single most useful predictor of success that I have discerned in my decades hanging around this planet is curiosity combined with intelligence is just a really, really good predictor of success. Maybe more so curiosity than anything else, really and um i am naturally curious so it's helpful i don't have to work too hard at wanting

to learn more um i do i do a fair amount uh i read quite a lot we used to uh used to publish what max is reading newsletter to affirmers just to uh keep them guessing what the next book will be i'm fairly omnivorous um uh for when we did have hallways we had a a bookshelf where it'll be a couple of copies of whatever it is that I was gorging myself on. I tend to read multiple books at a time. One cool pro tip. So if you read books on Kindle, you should buy the Kindle plus Audible bundle because Kindle plus Audible tracks where you are reading digitally. And you can literally go from, I'm reading this on my phone. Now I have to drive. I'm going to flip it over to Audible and have it read to me. So you can go through a book very, very quickly. Of course,

listen to things on one and a half times speed or faster if I can help it. I found that there's an incredible amount of really great content on YouTube. So I watched tons of lectures on YouTube and other sources, but YouTube is mostly free. I listened to a lot of podcasts. I actually quite enjoy the genre. I thought I would hate it, but it turns out that it's quite nice. Good work there. I definitely rabbit hole into Wikipedia way too often. It's a pretty fun pastime. And then I tend to try to find creative outlets for myself that require learning. So for example, I studied music as a kid and I hadn't really gone back to it in quite some time. And And then recently I decided that to sort of exercise the other side of the brain, I have

to go deep into music. And so I've been learning how to use various digital audio workstation software and reading and watching music theory lectures and all kinds of stuff, which there's only so many minutes per day to do it, but it just forces you to exercise a learning muscle in the other part of the brain that is not related to things like discounted cashflow and machine learning based underwriting and like all the stuff that i do day in and day out for work and that that seems to help you can sometimes draw parallels where you say oh i saw this really interesting random thing about music theory and it's nothing like underwriting except there's some similarity

maybe i should go pull on that for a little while and so that i i try to learn as much as i can every day i highly recommend it being curious is really good um maybe the other one one last random bit of advice, and this is applicable to every question you ask perhaps. Maybe two parts. One, being cynical is just a loss proposition. It's like a lose-lose proposition. There's no way to win if you're a cynic. The Greeks had it right. Cynic means dog-like. And there's nothing good about being cynical. That said, cynicism is kind of an approximation for the valuation of risk. You sort of look at the world and say, oh man, nothing's going to work out. This sucks. Like we're already done. And like sort of the ultimate cynicism, you know, like

where's the nearest bathtub? I need a razor blade. And that's a terrible way to live. And I strongly advise against it. That said, you have to be eyes wide open. Like when you're looking at the world and you're saying a big iceberg is floating in the water, you can't say full speed ahead. You have to figure out a way to get around it. And so I found that the posture of short-term risk averse, trying to figure out how to not hit the iceberg that's right in front of you while being extraordinarily optimistic about the future and taking outsized risk bets on the future outcomes has worked really well for me, where you basically just assume that your job today is to survive and your job tomorrow is to win in a really, really big way that hopefully benefits

the world. That combined with curiosity, you can get reasonably far. I love that, uh, in a way you've basically made learning a hobby. Like you're to do all of that, right? You're just constantly learning. I tend to find myself doing the same thing and it really upsets people in my life who are like, I don't want to watch YouTube anymore. Right. And I'm like, no, no, no. But like why would we watch the other thing? Like the other thing is making us dumber. Uh, I do, I have a young daughter and, uh, uh, I'm trying to train her. Like, why don't you also watch youtube rather than cartoons that that's uh yeah i have a i have an 11 and a almost 13 year old and they are unfortunate victims i'm like oh my god i just saw this amazing obscure video that

taught me something that you really really have to know let's watch this together it's this crazy chess opening you've never heard of what are you talking about there's tiktok yeah exactly uh my last question for you is a fun one uh i i'm always fascinated by uh people's belief do you think aliens are real and not only yes or no but like how do you kind of think through that problem which we may never get an answer to or maybe we're going to get an answer you know sooner than we'd like but how do you think about whether aliens are real or not i can't say i spent too much time thinking about the binary answer to the question so i'm a huge fan of science fiction and in my copious spare time i read an inordinate amount of science fiction

i'm quite a big fan of quite a hard sci-fi where aliens are real and rocket ships travel from world to world i think the world would be so much more boring if this all turned out to be not true like i just don't want to learn today which fortunately i think it's impossible to really learn that there's nothing else out there it's just us the point of view that no it really is it's just us and there's no one, nothing intelligent, lots of cold rocks and elements floating around in nothingness. And we're in a very, very center of it all sitting around trying to solve our petty little problems. It's very boring. And I choose to hope that it's better than that. I've obviously read all the various thought experiments, sort of how do you convince

yourself that at a certain scale, the probabilities approach 100% and on all of that. I'm not sure we understand our surroundings so well that any of those approximations are really to be relied upon. But from the sort of a, what would be more interesting, like what would satisfy my curiosity? You kind of want to believe they're real, right? I mean, yeah, it would be one, boring but also too uh it kind of feels like that's the last new world right like kind of earth is uh to some degree discovered yeah sure there's still maybe some pockets that we don't know as much about and things like the ocean or whatever but it does feel like the the frontier of space and whether there's life or not and other planets all that kind of stuff um aspiration is important

for humanity and it gives us something to look forward to and build towards and stuff like that So it would be kind of depressing if all of a sudden it was like, hey, actually, it's just like a wall, like you can't go past it or something. I think that would be a sad, sad answer. Yeah, there's also really good literature that shows that at least attempts to prove that what we've had here, assuming you believe in some version of evolution, it's just not that special. Like there's all these things that happen, but they're all kind of basic chemical reactions and lots of time and not even that much time. And so if you kind of subscribe to well understood principles of basic physics, there's been enough time in all sorts of places to have variants of evolution take place. the fact or the idea hopefully not the fact that we are the one branch of the decision tree the possibility tree that actually got to intelligent life is depressing and boring and would be a lot

more fun if if it were not the case now there's all the obvious well and then aliens show up and they don't like us and we have to uh deal with independence day scenarios uh the infamous movie um i think my this is another belief but uh i think generally speaking most intelligent species even as they approach our intelligence assuming at the moment at least we are the smartest ones we know they trend towards good so if you sort of the smarter you get i think the more benevolent and you replace your aggression with curiosity and if that's true we're certainly not capable today of interstellar travel and to do that the energy you have to muster is roughly equivalent to sort of the planetary energy sources like we could probably travel interstellar if we could

gather up all the energy on earth and and start propelling ourselves that way so whoever shows up here if they do so first they'll have to be a lot more intelligent than us and if that's the case my guess and belief is that they will have progressed to being more and more benign and so maybe they'll show up and you know we'll teach us interesting things or we'll make great pets one or the other i love it uh max listen thank you so much for taking the time to do this uh it is awesome to see what you guys are building with the firm and then you have decades and decades of experience i think a lot of people can learn from so hopefully they got something out of this uh and we will definitely do it again in the future so good thanks for having me

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