The Pomp Podcast - #421 Mario Gabriele on Writing About Technology Companies

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Mario Gabriele is the Founder and Writer at The Generalist, a new publication that covers the technology industry from idea to IPO. He previously worked at a number of venture capital firms, including Charge Ventures and Red Sea Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss how Mario built The Generalist so far, why he enjoys writing so much, how he has handled a hedge fund bully who is threatening him, and his stories on Ant Group and Audience + Wealth.  ======================= Masterworks qualifies paintings with the SEC, takes them public through a Reg A offering, and makes shares available to their 100,000+ investors. So if you are already investing in your IRA every two weeks, make sure to check out Masterworks.io - and use promo code "POMP" to skip their 22,000 person waitlist. Again that's masterworks.io promo code "POMP" ======================= Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out http://www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ======================= Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100.

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. Let's kick this thing off. Mario Gabriele is the founder and writer at The Generalist, a new publication that covers the technology industry from idea to IPO. He previously worked at a number of venture capital firms, including Charge Ventures and Red Sea Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss how Mario built the Generalist so far, why he enjoys writing so much, how he has handled a large hedge fund bullying who is threatening him, and his stories on Ant Group and audience and wealth. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mario, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we get into the episode,

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guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i'm super excited i've got mario here thank you so much for doing this sir thank you for having me man i really appreciate it absolutely let's just jump right into uh your background before you started the generalist kind of walk us through what you did to uh to get to that point yeah you know i actually had a pretty weird path i would say i uh despite my very

American accent. I grew up in England, came to America when I was 18. My mother's American, so I always spoke in American accent at home. But coming to the States, I was very much interested in doing public policy, public sector stuff, and only really fell into tech after a few different weird career choices. So I went to culinary school, I cooked for a little bit, I worked at a law firm, I wrote a lot, working on a novel, and then coming out of grad school, basically went to a fund called Red Sea Ventures, which does mostly like consumer facing investing in New York, then a stint operating at a company called Andco. And then for the last couple of years have been at a firm called Charge. And Charge does pre-seed

seed investing, also in New York, a little bit more tech focused. And yeah, had the chance to work there before trying to emulate your solo success. So I saw this Italian culinary arts on your LinkedIn? And I was like, I got to ask him about that. What was that? Because that just fascinates me in terms of, it seems like there's this like creative element to it and a bunch of other stuff. So what was kind of the thought process there? Yeah. I mean, I always found my main creative outlet to be writing growing up. So always was trying to write a novel as a kid and stuff like that. But food in my family was definitely a big thing. My father was Italian, still a lot of family there. And just really respected the

ability to cook well. So when I was sort of in this period of wilderness, after working at a law firm and realizing, you know, I wasn't gonna want to be a partner at a big firm and then go try and, you know, win a Congress, a congressional seat. I decided to go to culinary school and like test that out as a different life for a little bit, and was lucky to do it and had a really good time. Absolutely. And then talk us through, so you were at Charge, right? Kind of doing what I would consider a pretty traditional venture capital type job and career path. And then you start The Generalist. And so kind of how did that begin and why the kind of focus or fascination with going out and doing this? Yeah, I mean, Charge is, I think, in and of itself, a little

bit of a startup. It's a super new firm. I really went because the partner at Charge, a guy called Rhett Martin is like this fascinating electric thinker and just person and so building with him was something I really wanted to do and loved getting to do it but for me writing like kept being the thing that I wanted to spend more time on so you know I mentioned I spent some time writing the first draft of a novel I did that probably in 2013 and then for the next seven eight years would wake up early in the morning work on it for an hour or two and then go to work and so always had this like muscle of trying to write more and realized that I should start applying it to some degree at least to the world of venture and tech and so starting in August of

last year I wrote this article about YC and how YC creates this manufactured urgency that's really bad for founders and investors and that was really prompted because I was talking to some YC companies and one of the founders in a LinkedIn message was like, cool, I'm happy to hop on a call, but can you make a decision in 30 minutes? I was like, no, of course not. Like, why would you want someone who could make a decision in 30 minutes? That's insane for a decades long relationship, potentially. And that piece like did fairly well for me at the time and really opened my eyes to like what it is like to share your ideas publicly. And bit by bit, I just kept doing that. And that became the generalist. It became like a product more and more. And as I started to see that

happen, I realized that I wanted to like give more time to it. So that's the experiment that I'm running now and we'll see if I can make it a sustainable business. Absolutely. And kind of this tagline of from idea to IPO, right? It's most people would focus on just early stage or just maybe growth stage or public companies. You really are trying to span kind of the full spectrum of literally from the earliest days of a startup all the way to the largest public companies. Why not focus on like one specific part of business? Why kind of go after the full stack? honestly just bad strategy like i should almost certainly do one um i've had lots and lots of people tell them tell me i should but the truth is the more serious answer is i think there's a

lot of people who actually love thinking across that stack um and i think that's more and more common simply because tech moves so fast companies move so fast that like you can be following a company one day and it's ipoing and not that long from now or it's you know suddenly a growth stage not that long from now. I also think there's just like a ton of overlap between the type of tools that are useful at one stage or another. So the folks that are looking at companies in the public markets have some amazing frameworks that, frankly, like I didn't see a ton at early stage investing levels, but that I think are incredibly useful. So my hope is that, you know, the generalist can be a community and a publication for people that want to go through the effort of

really learning how to think about the future and about tech across that span. And who do you find kind of this is most attractive for? Are there certain types of occupations? Is it a US focused audience versus international? Like, how do you think about who's actually consuming the content? Yeah, so I think there's probably a ton of VCs, at least from the emails that roll in, and that's probably just like a function of my network and reach. Definitely a lot of folks who work in big tech or at startups, definitely a lot of folks that work in finance to some degree or another who maybe like are in a TMT group and are interested in what's, you know, bubbling under the surface of the stuff they usually look at. Mostly US from what I can tell,

and then a big audience in India and China and to a certain extent, the UK. Got it. And when we say big, it's nothing as big, like it's big for you for the record. Like I'm a, you know, 12,000, 13,000 subscribers. Uh, and, and so still, still very much like chipping away. How have you grown that so far? Right. Like what have you done that's been successful in terms of going from, you know, no subscribers to now 12, 13,000. I mean, it's the classic startup do things that don't scale thing. Um, so, you know, so many of my early subscribers were me reaching out to the VC club president of Harvard's group or, you know, the Dartmouth MBA group or whoever it was and saying, hey, this is a free newsletter.

It's read by a bunch of your classmates. Like maybe you would like it and maybe you'd want to send it out to your group. And that like would get me 10 or 20 new folks just with a little bit of extra effort. And then, you know, bit by bit, I think honing the sort of content that I became a little bit better known for also helped a lot. So things like the S1 clubs that really had, I think, a clear positioning and were timed around a specific event often would like catch on in a way that, you know, maybe a piece about a startup that raised a series A would. Absolutely. And so recently you wrote this piece called the $6 billion stare. And, you know, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, wow, that's like a pretty good headline. I wonder what that's about. I click on it. And then I basically read this like really horrific kind of telling of a situation we've been going through recently. So maybe just kind of give us an overview of what exactly happened. Yeah, and I will preface by saying I'm really sorry that if my voice shakes a little bit,

because this gets me like, I feel my adrenaline pumping when I talk about it, because it gets me really frustrated. So apologies on that front. But basically, the situation is that on October 18, I with a collaborator wrote a piece on quote, unquote, compounders. And compounders are public companies, I guess they could be private companies too, but traditionally public companies that grow double digits over an extended period of time. So an example from the 2010s is Netflix, right? Like huge amount of growth over this decade. That's a concept that I thought was really interesting and that my collaborator had taken a class about at Columbia Business School. And so we worked together to give sort of like a primer on compounders, what they are, a few patterns they

might follow a few characteristics. In general, I think it's like a fun piece because we frame it in the lens of like Jay-Z's investing career and, you know, Wu-Tang rap quotes and stuff like that. But in terms of content, it's stuff that you can find in a bunch of Morgan Stanley pieces, T. Rowe Price pieces, podcasts, white papers, even like a lot of it's drawn from something like Investopedia. It's really not the most secret sauce that we're sharing. But regardless, the next day I heard from my collaborator that a fund he used to work at, contracted for, had ordered him to pressure me to take the article down. And they did that saying that we had relied on quote-unquote proprietary information. Now, I knew that we had not, but I also knew that

my collaborator was in a pretty tough spot. This is a fund he used to work at that he was going to rely on for a reference for a future job. He was out of work at the time. And out of respect for him, I said, I'll take it down, but let's find a solution because I know that we have not done anything wrong here. And I really wanted to find like a win-win here. I was sure there had to be some sort of misunderstanding. So, you know, I thought maybe we could do an interview with someone from this hedge fund. Maybe we could highlight some of their work. But when sort of I talked to them and this partner the next day, it became clear that they really had taken a pretty hard line stance and also a pretty confusing stance. I never really found out exactly what

parts of the article they considered proprietary, you know, and I really did try and find out. So for example, at one point in the article, we talk about how compounders sometimes follow a good to great pattern, simply meaning in this, in the classic Jim Collins sense that they, you know, start out good, they undergo some sort of transformation, and they become great. And the partner I spoke to mentioned that that was problematic to them. And when I asked, like, is it the phrase good to great that's problematic or the idea that companies sometimes improve? Immediately, the response was, I need to get the general counsel involved. And that to me just demonstrated that there was no real argument to this and that it was really

bullying or scare tactics. And so at that point, I really didn't know what to do. I think we sort of brokered a little bit of an agreement on the or what I thought was an agreement on the call which was delete the whole section about good to great and something else I just wanted to be over with it at that point um but even after we had agreed to that they then came back the next day um and said nope you can't even put the revised version up and parts two and three of this series that you plan to write you also can't write those even though I mean they don't even know what's going to be in them yet. But basically, they wanted me to cease the whole project. And so that was sort of the problem. And I'll take a break there because I know I've been talking

for a moment and happy to dive into what came next or anything else. So my whole thing when I was reading this is just like, it seems pretty petty, right? In terms of like saying, hey, we have not even ownership of a word, but an idea, right? And kind of like, I would think that if you understand how the internet works you want as many people writing about your ideas as possible and saying hey like this great idea came from this person or this group or this organization especially when it's something that is kind of out there and i could understand if it was like an algorithm or a formula or you know something that um could give you a specific advantage but when it was more of like a a mental framework right it's kind of uh i don't know it just seemed

very uh out of the ordinary that somebody would try to uh lock something down uh because ultimately what ends up happening is like you get the streisand effect right where like now uh there's much more attention on this there's much more um kind of uh eyeballs looking and being like wait who's the group that's being petty right and it just i don't know it seems like a miscalculation in my opinion i think it was definitely a miscalculation i think it was one individual who maybe saw something that she didn't like because, you know, maybe she felt ownership over the concept because she had researched this herself.

I mean, she clearly, I must state very clearly, did not invent it, but for whatever reason felt ownership over it, made a bad call, and then I think just kept doubling down on it. And, you know, I had never heard of the Streisand effect before this happened, but like, yes, I think that's exactly what has occurred here.

Yeah. And talk a little bit about kind of you write the pieces on Substack. Obviously, as you're just starting a business, you've got kind of, you know, we'll call them the bully in the room in terms of this hedge fund that is threatening to use their general counsel and all these things. it feels a little bit like your best defense or kind of the best tool in your toolkit really is to just shed light on the nonsense, right? And just say, hey, look, if you're going to be a bully, that's fine. I'm just going to tell everyone you're being a bully and I'll let kind of the market take care of this because I can't fight you dollar for dollar or anything like that, right? Yeah. I mean, honestly, in hindsight, that seems really obvious of like, of course, internet's undefeated. Put the people behind you and share the facts and people will realize that this is very, very silly and undignified behavior from a hedge fund with

a great deal of money. I would say that until I actually shared the story on Friday, I was insanely anxious about this and how it would go down. Not that people would disagree, but just that like, maybe no one would care. And maybe it would annoy them more and like bait them to chase me down harder. Because I hadn't seen a lot of behavior that seemed particularly rational or logical to me at that point. And so I was like, it feels like this is emotionally driven, even pushing a little bit, maybe could just like, force them to take this to another level. But what happened was obviously the opposite. And, you know, I still don't know how it's going to pan out i'm i'm optimistic at this point that it would just be like insane for them to keep this going

um but man people came out in full force shared a million compounder examples great resources offered to like chip into a legal fund uh you know just unbelievable so in hindsight like yes That was the only way to balance the asymmetry, uh, was to like bring the people into it. And so I'm like, you know, it's always annoying when people say they're really humbled by something, but like, this is one of the few times where I'm like, I really do feel pretty humbled by this. This was wild. And like, I feel incredibly grateful.

I just love the idea of the internet is undefeated. Cause I think that is, uh, is very, very accurate. Um, you also have written obviously many other great pieces. I don't want to spend all of our time talking about just that one. Two in particular that I found interesting was one you wrote about Ant Group. Maybe talk a little bit about kind of your process. Why did you write about this? How did you gather the information and what you learned from it?

Yeah, this was really fun because I like to try and do collaborations as often as possible, both from a personal learning standpoint as well as a strategic one. And I'd be really curious to hear how you think about this. But when you look at the YouTubers out there that scale audience effectively, most of them rely on collapse right like cross promotion is just so huge for distribution that it makes sense to do it um and so one i like doing it strategically for that reason and two there's so many intelligent uh brilliant people out there who are carving their own little niche that as often as i can like i want to try and find ways where we can furrow some path together

for a piece or a couple pieces um and so that was the plan with compounders and it was also what we did with ant group i worked with lillian lee who writes a substack um called chinese characteristics covering tech in china she reached out about one of my pieces um asked if you know we could connect we had a great conversation and on that call i was just sort of we were batting around ideas and since ant was coming up i was like we should just do a you know thoughtful teardown of this that hopefully can stand on its own. And so that's what we released today. And hopefully it's an interesting breakdown of a generational business that we just don't have the likes of in the US. It's really unique. What was the biggest surprise as you kind of

learned more and more about the business? Like, was there one kind of takeaway where you're just like, I did not expect this? The scale. I mean, the scale is just insane. the title of the piece is ant group of financial infestation and it really feels like that they have just managed to both create dominant positions in you know individual product lines but also create this insane scope across payments insurance credit and so forth um and you know when you look at sort of the transaction volume of ant versus a paypal it's really like orders of magnitude higher um and so and paypal's you know a behemoth it's a 200 plus billion dollar company um and so for ant to have reached this scale and and still for i think many in the west to not

recognize that um was shocking to me yeah the part two that is so uh fascinating is like i think in the united states many founders um they kind of stay very focused on the one thing that they're building. Maybe you could say like a Google or an Amazon, I think it's the point where they can kind of expand past that. And, you know, if you say, what is Amazon, you describe them as an e-commerce company. Now people are like, eh, kind of, right. But they have all these other things that they do and they do very well. It feels like Ant, one was early to that, but also two has done it in kind of a global digital scale as well. Right. And so I think that just from the American viewpoint, we just don't understand how important that company is. Because yeah,

maybe you could compare it to like an Amazon or something like that. But it just feels like it's much more ingrained in the everyday person's life than an Amazon would be, right? I think that's totally right. You know, it's by owning the payment channel, they're now able to serve customers in all of these other ways. It's the way that you check out on Taobao when you buy something. It's also the way that you like buy groceries at your local store to swipe a QR code. And, you know, one of the parts of it that I really loved is that it really initially began as essentially an escrow service for Alibaba, just so that, you know, buyers and payers money could be safe until a transaction was complete. And it happened almost exactly at the same time as eBay partnered with

escrow.com in 2004 and it's just insane to imagine that like these almost exactly similar features and products one remained essentially as as small as it as it always was you know a small piece of a much bigger puzzle and one you know got bitten by this radioactive spider and morphed into this financial mega company um so it's just yeah it's i think it's testament one to like the jack ma laddering up of products, as well as the idiosyncrasies of Chinese tech. Absolutely. Another series that you've been working on is this series around audience and wealth. Talk a little bit about that one and the process behind it. Yeah, I mean, this was really me trying to figure things out for myself. The generalist is 100%

free right now. But as I eventually realized I will have to make money at some point, I was like, cool, what are the models available to me? And who are doing, who are the people doing interesting things. So, you know, everyone knows that there are ads available. Everyone knows that there are subscription fees available. I think there's this sort of third wave that's happening that you're a part of, um, which is using your audience to build ownership, right? Like now you have your, your rolling fund, you're using your power of distribution to say to founders, Hey, like distribution is a really tangible benefit that I can give you. And honestly is actually quite differentiated from many VC firms in my view. Like VC firms are speaking the same language

so often that I think most founders can't actually tell what value they bring because they say, you know, we're your first call. We're, you know, good advice for you. We have some portfolio services. Whereas you can say, cool, but I have like 400,000 people following me on Twitter. Like if I tweet about you, that's going to make a difference. And so I think there are more and more creators like you who are able to compete with the best VC firms at early stage rounds or taking a piece of a later stage round and building their wealth that way. So one, I think that's really interesting. And then two, I think there are a lot of sort of modified business models that are happening that are really worth exploring. So Mr. Beast is a great example, right? Mr. Beast

He's a YouTuber who, instead of taking ad dollars and just giving a casual shout out during a clip, uses those ad dollars as the content itself. The $1 million that he gets from the Dragon City game, or however much, becomes the prize, which he then uses to bring in all of these other users to compete. And so it fundamentally changes the dynamic between creator, audience, and advertiser. advertisers suddenly become part of the content audience members suddenly become part of the content and it just creates a much more virtuous cycle where you can start to use that that um growing ad dollars to do more and more interesting pieces of content and i think there are lots of examples of this where you know there's a lot more we can do as creators to change and blur those boundaries in a way that ends up benefiting the people who are reading or paying attention or

or engaging with us. Absolutely. And it also feels like, um, not only are the lines blurring between, uh, kind of the audience and the creator, but it also feels like who is a creator is changing as well. Right? So we've seen, obviously somebody, uh, or a company like Substack be able to say, wait, if you're a journalist, you're just as much a creator as anybody else. We've seen YouTube take people, uh, you know, with all sorts of different interests, whether they're very mainstream or niche and say you're a creator, right? And so talk a little bit maybe about how you see that evolving. Yeah, I think we're seeing essentially the like entrepreneurialization of the creator as a pathway. So, you know, whereas someone who maybe had a very traditional career

path in mind, you know, was going to work at a bank or a consulting firm and then sort of rise up the corporate ladder. Like so many others, we're seeing the relationship between institution and individual untethered, unmoored, attenuated in some way. Often that's been, that's resulted in entrepreneurship, right? You're like, cool, I'm not going to work at a bank, but I'll start a startup and raise a couple million bucks and, you know, try and grow that. But I think we're seeing that creators are now a very legitimate pathway for that sort of ambitious person um who recognizes cool maybe i don't have one idea that is a software product that i really want to build and want to afford 20 million dollars into uh but maybe i have a passion that

i think is commercializable in some way um and so i think as a result we're getting like a different sort of creator in some fields it's like you know the business analysts in our world um who are excited to build like a personality business rather than, you know, down the venture backed route or, you know, just start a Patreon account and hope that something's going to happen for them. Absolutely. When you think about kind of the work you've done so far, talk through maybe, what have you found to be the hardest parts of kind of building this, you know, in this unique kind of new creator or solopreneur type model hardest parts are carving out time away from it um i think like when i mean this is this is a very privileged position but like when you're

doing what you really enjoy doing and also when you are reliant only on yourself of whether it works or doesn't work i think it's really hard to switch off either because you're excited about the project you're working on you want to just keep going and you know blaze through dinner and blaze through bedtime um or because you're like damn I did not get many subscribers this week like this sucks I need to fix this if I'm gonna you know get on the trajectory I've set for myself um and so yeah I mean you just kind of live or die by by your own actions in that respect and so I find that really hard um and then there's a bunch of stuff that like more tangibly is I think an opportunity for startups and builders where it's like, man, the creator economy gets

a lot of mindshare and a lot of attention because obviously that's what it's aimed to do. But the infrastructure is quite underbuilt for the most part. So I think there's a lot of things that people could do to streamline the creator's life in a really interesting way. And I have a bunch of ideas for any builders out there that want to work on them. I'll probably share them in requests for startups or something like that. What's one or two that you're just like, this is a no brainer. Every person, you know, would go and use it if they built, if somebody built it. Well, I'm curious if you will agree, but, um, I would really love a creator specific, um, like man, I'm blanking on the world where not CMS. What's, uh, what does Salesforce do?

Oh, like a, uh, like a CRM. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It took me a minute. Um, yeah. A creator focused CRM that basically aggregates all the data from every platform where you interact with people, YouTube, Twitter, Substack, et cetera, et cetera, can pull out interesting information about those people. So who's the person who responds the most? Who is the person who shares the most? How are people interacting? And then allows you to set up automations for rewarding or engaging with those people. So you can say, cool, the people who always answer the riddle correctly at the end of the generalist, like, I'm going to create a special, you know, offer of the hardest possible riddles for those people. Or, you know, here are the people who keep showing up

to my events, like, I'm going to host a private salon of just 20 people and do it for them. And I think there's a secondary element, which is like, I think you can also start to do interesting things around badging and rewards that are visible to say, like, cool, you're one of my super engaged people like in the slack channel here's some sort of visual significance uh visual token that i can give you to show to the rest of the people um so i would love to see some exploration around that would you use that yeah i i think that they're the big issue is just uh i counted one time you know on my phone alone what are all the ways that somebody can communicate with them there's like 17 platforms right that includes you know dms and social media and like

all this other stuff. Uh, and then two is like, uh, you actually may not realize, especially with like, uh, pseudonymous accounts on Twitter, um, or something like that. You may not realize that the same person who's responding to your email is that person on Twitter. Uh, so like that's completely lost to you. Um, and it is definitely weird when they think that, you know, but you don't know. Um, and then on top of that, like there's definitely this element of like, who are your kind of MVP, uh, consumers or audience. Right. And you can measure that a whole bunch of different ways. It may actually be different for you versus me versus somebody else. But being able to kind of identify that and, you know, treat those people how they deserve to be treated,

right? It's kind of, you know, the airlines do a great job with it, right? Where if you fly a lot, you get points. If you have a lot of points, then you get free flights and you get a better service on the plane and, you know, you can board first and all of those types of things. And so I think that um you know eventually these communities will figure out how to do that uh right now the people who are doing it well are literally doing it on spreadsheets yeah as we know you know being able to productize what something somebody's doing on a spreadsheet has historically proven to be uh quite valuable totally yeah i mean even the idea that like sometimes someone signs up to your email list that you're like that person is a g i want to like send them a personal note or try and arrange

a one-on-one talk with them but like I mean if you have any number of people signing up a day there's no shot you see it yeah I uh I actually don't look at who's signing up and uh Polina looks at everybody and uh there's a lot of people who have signed up and she's like you know been able to connect with them or whatever um and she's always like hitting me over the head being like you got to look at who's signing up and I'm just like it's like looking for a needle in a haystack right and uh and for me it's just one less thing i need to do every day but uh it is it's incredibly valuable so if there was a way to kind of just surface that information uh quicker more efficiently and with accuracy right that's the other thing a lot of times like people have tried to you know

rank social media accounts or something it's like sure you can do that but if it's not effective or accurate then you kind of lose the the value proposition of doing totally yeah 100 agree so Paulina sounds like she's much more evolved than us about this. Absolutely. What's the one thing that you can point to so far since you've been doing this and you're like, this is my favorite part? Honestly, my favorite part is just that I get to write every day as my job. I am obsessed with awesome sentences and beautiful sentences.

I mostly read fiction. Nonfiction, I think, can be awesome. I think I really care about that part. And so it gives me insane amount of pleasure when I can turn a phrase in a way even about like a Palantir S1 where I'm like, I'm proud of that. Like that sounded good to me. And so I feel lucky that I get to work towards mastery of that because that's what I'd like to get. absolutely um before i wrap up where can people go and find uh the writing that you've done uh or find you on the internet yeah so um read the generalist.com is is a website that you can sign up um most of the writing is actually on substack if you search uh the generalist substack you'll you'll find it um and then my twitter name is mario d gabrielli um and uh yeah would love to to hear from anyone you can shoot media is there another mario out there that stole uh without a d

oh dude it's an empty account with no one on it there's not been one tweet there's zero people following there's no picture i'm like please and i don't even think their name's mario they're like uh twitter handle is like mauricio or something i'm really confused by it um but yeah unfortunately i can't i can't seem to get it if you work at twitter and you're listening help the guy out come on do me a favor please i ask the same two questions everybody before i let them go uh the first one is what is the most important book that you've ever read oh man i love these questions that i ask these questions of people too um important is a good word but a tricky one i will say that

honestly the most important is probably uh fantastic mr fox by roald dahl because that was the book which i read as a child which i was like man i am obsessed with reading and i will always be obsessed with reading um and so i think that like cemented a love in my mind whether it was true at the time or not um more recently i would say my favorite books are invisible cities by Italo Calvino, which is like every sentence you could spend an hour thinking about for the most part. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, which is an amazing account of, well, sort of not account, a reflection of apartheid in South Africa and just incredibly written. And then I would say The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, which is essentially a prose poem. And again, just like

every sentence is insanely beautiful yeah those are great suggestions uh the second question is more fun and then you'll get to ask me one question to uh to wrap up the second question is aliens are you a believer or a non-believer i mean i sort of suspect there have to be aliens just from like the the sheer vastness of the universe and the various goldilocks zones that you know exist so yeah i don't see why not um there was there was a really interesting tweet a long time ago from strangely enough a premier league football or a soccer player um which was it's probably likely that we will interact with aliens technology before we interact with them because if you think about it that's almost certainly how they would interact with us

and so it's worth wondering like is there any technology on earth that could be from an alien that we're not familiar with um so yes i think there probably are mario don't go down that rabbit hole with this audience they they will start tweeting at you all of their speculation as to what the alien technology on earth is really do you that's so funny i would love to hear that if anyone's got any ideas go ahead and tweet at them but i'm just warning you that you're you're opening up a can of worms on that one. Ooh, fascinating. Okay. Excellent. All right. Last thing. Huh? You could ask me one. What do you got? Put you on the hotspot. Okay. Um, what is something that you think is important to know

about you that is not visible in early interactions? Uh, I don't really think there's anything that is important. Uh, the thing that I always say to people, I think that it's the most surprising is they're always asking me like weird questions like you know what is your goal what are you optimizing for like all this kind of stuff um and a long time ago like i reached this place mentally where uh it was just look we're all gonna die and you get to say you lived a awesome fulfilled successful life as long as you're happy like that's it and that can mean different things for different people but uh there's people out there who have financial goals who have status goals, who have kind of all these different goals. And that's not to say that those

goals are wrong or bad. It's just like my goal for a very, very long time has been just be happy. And that can take many different forms. But when you can do that, like you kind of just get to say like, I don't care about like all the nonsense in life. You know, it's like, look, there's a massive like political election going on right now. And if you go on certain TV channels or on certain social media feeds, it literally looks like people are about to kill each other, right? Like they really, really disagree with each other. For me, it's like, I'm paying attention, right? Like it has an impact, but like I'm personally happy. And so regardless of who wins, like they're not going to affect my personal happiness, right? Because like kind of I'm in

charge of that. And I think like in, that's a really extreme example, but like when you turn over the ability of whether you're happy or not to like who the president is or, you know, somebody down the street or a coworker at work or whatever, like you kind of just like lose control. Right. And for whatever reason, like I've always just thought about it that way. And, uh, I think that really surprises people because they don't expect me to kind of think that way. Hmm. Can I ask you one more? Of course. If you could moderate a discussion or debate between two people, who would you choose? Like, who do you want to mostly bounce off each other? so i'm gonna not answer that only because i probably can't come up with a good answer but

i will tell you one thing that i've always thought uh would be really fascinating is uh to get the two presidential candidates to sit down uh long-form discussion like kind of like a joe rogan style but instead of being like what do you think about this topic it's to force each one of them to argue the other side that would be super interesting like like trump explain why joe biden believes what he believes on healthcare joe biden explain why trump believes what he believes you know around taxes or whatever and what it forces them to do is one uh be able to articulate the other side's issue so like you can tell very quickly like hey who's paying attention who's listening right like have i taken enough time to kind of intellectually be honest and and look at

both sides or multiple sides of an issue and then come to a conclusion right and then you can almost followed up with like okay like why do you disagree with that and so i just think that we are in this world of like the intellectual debates don't happen right it's much more like you know name calling and kind of like the salacious who can get the headlines all that kind of stuff um it happens from both political parties like i know that everyone wants like virtue signal against each other but like just getting you to sit down and like have a very deep conversation uh i always like asking them you know argue the other side what would change your mind right you know okay uh trump you believe x what would it take to change your mind biden you believe y what would

it take to change your mind and you can very quickly i think just like peel away all like kind of bullshit right and just get to the like hey who knows what they're talking about and who has like the intellectual rigor to actually uh analyze situations and make sound decisions because that's kind of like what we want in a president, right? It's like just somebody who makes like sound or like reasonable decisions and they don't have to be popular, right? Like actually most of the more reasonable decisions

are probably not popular. But I just think that the entire process as I've kind of been watching this and like really trying to think through like, why is it broke? That's the thing that I keep coming back to is just like the entire process is built to avoid any sort of like intellectual you know kind of debate that would highlight

who is a sound reasonable decision maker and who's not yeah they're almost incentives to misunderstand then rather than to understand and there is such a weird human and maybe more in the u.s than elsewhere i'm not sure uh impulse towards thinking changing your mind is bad which is like changing your mind is a superpower like that's the only way development occurs but uh yeah for some reason like even the notion of a political flip-flopper right it's like well okay maybe that person just like changed their opinion that would be good wouldn't it like if they changed it based on evidence that was probably a good thing yeah and and i think that also uh like flip-flopping is a great thing right like there's a good side and a bad side to

it right so like if you're just simply every time you run for a political office you're just like pandering to one group or another and like you constantly change your position but you can't articulate why like what was the new information you received yeah but if instead you say hey look my entire life I believed x then I got pieces of information one two and three and now I believe y it's like hey whoa that's a rare thing like I would love that like who's that person um so I think again it goes back to like you got to go to like the the more deep layers of these conversations um and the formats are just off right you know network television is all about the you know kind of 60 second what's the most salacious clip that we can find and kind of you

know present that that keeps people's attention the debates you know at this point even with shutting microphones off and stuff are just i mean just not very effective right and so uh i do think that um you know kind of going back to like let's get long form human-based discussion like forget your talking points you know explain why uh could uh could do uh the entire country you know a pretty good service well said i'm i think that's a a stirring place to end absolutely all right mario listen thank you so much for uh for doing this uh best of luck as you continue to build this and uh if uh if big large bully corporations and hedge funds want to keep being assholes hopefully everyone who's listening to this can kind of chime in and provide a little bit of

relief for you so I appreciate you doing it and anyone who's interested go check Mario's workout at readthegeneralist.com thanks so much man been really lovely to be here