Clay Talks With David Sacks

This week on Wins & Losses, Clay Travis is joined by entrepreneur and partner at Craft Ventures, David Sacks. The two discuss his move from South Africa to Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 5. Clay and David talk about his life in business, and they also discuss the county's current inflation issue, how we got here, and much more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Fox Sports. Welcome in the latest episode
of Wins and Losses. I'm excited to be under way
here because I think we have got a fantastic guest
that is going to take us through a lot of
really interesting things about the rise of the Internet, the
rise of business based on the Internet, and also big

(00:21):
tech in general. And he is David Sacks. He has
got an incredible history. I don't actually know where you're
from or where you grew up. He's a partner at
Craft Invests in all different sorts of tech companies and
beyond out there. But where did you grow up? David? Like?
What was your background? And thanks for coming on with us. Yeah,

(00:43):
great to be here. Clay Um, I was born in kipt, Africa,
and my parents immigrated the United States fast five years old.
We actually moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and that's where I
basically grew up until I left for college. All Right,
I had no idea. So Memphis, Tennessee. How much of
a culture shock can you member? I can't imagine. The
conveyor belt between South Africa and Memphis, Tennessee is very common.

(01:05):
How did that end up? Your location in the United States? Yeah.
You know, it's interesting. My dad's a doctor and they
wanted to immigrate from South Africa. They didn't agree with
the political situation there back in the nineteen seventies, and uh,
he got a job at the University of Tennessee Medical
Center practicing and teaching, and so that's we end up

(01:25):
moving too. Yeah, it was a pretty big culture shock.
Are you a sports fan? Did growing up in Memphis
in any way sort of an embed itself in you
as a college football college basketball fan or you sort
of not that interested in sports as a kid growing up? Well,
there are only two real sports in Memphis at that time.
There was Memphis State Tigers basketball. That was huge. Um,

(01:49):
everyone looked forward to that. I remember one year we
went to the Final four with I think Keith Lee
was sort of the start player then. And the other sport,
if you want to call it out in Memphis was wrestling.
Every money was wrestling at the miss South Coliseum and
those are really the only two big sports in Memphis
at that time. Obviously it changed, but did you go

(02:12):
to those old school wrestling matches? You know, my parents
would never let me go, unfortunately, but I remember, you know,
Jerry the King Lawler was time and I would watch
that stuff on TV. And you know, as a fan now,
as a kid growing up in Nashville, the Nashville Memphis
rivalry was very real. Did you feel it in Memphis
when you were growing up? Were you aware that as

(02:32):
a Memphian you were feuding constantly with Nashvillians a little bit?
You know, our high school football team would eventually, you
know what, sometimes going to the state finals and play
against teams from Nashville. So yeah, there was a little bit.
Where did you go away to college from Memphis? I
went to Stanford as an undergrad, all right, So how
much of a culture shock was that? All right? So

(02:54):
you you come from South Africa, you then end up
in Memphis and you make the trip out to Palo Alto.
Stanford was a lot different place then, certainly than it
is now, but that wasn't a very common route. How
did you pick Stanford? Is the place you wanted to
go to? Yeah? It's interesting. I mean Stanford, I mean,
to be honest, this is the best school and that

(03:14):
I got into, and I had a great reputea and um,
it seemed like a great place to go to school.
The campus is sort of really idyllic, like you said,
being in Palo Alto, fantastic weather. Uh, it seemed like
this an amazing place. And yeah, it was a pretty
big culture shock because the campus was very liberal. In
Memphis is uh or Tennessee in general sort of a

(03:37):
little bit more conservative. So there was a difference there.
But um, but the you know, the important thing about
going to Stanford in the early nineties for me was
that it got me into the whole tech scene when
I graduated, and that that end up being very important
for my career. By the way, I wanted to go
to Stanford Law School. They didn't let me in. I
had never been to California until I was in college,

(03:58):
like twenty one or twenty two, and the first time
I went to the Stanford campus, it really is heaven
on Earth. I mean it is an incredible, uh incredible place.
So so you graduate from Stanford, and do you remember
the first time you ever got on the Internet? By
the way, good question. Um, I don't remember that. I

(04:20):
guess you know, it must have been in the mid nineties.
People are starting to use Yahoo. Um, maybe I was
in law school, you know. After Stanford, I went to
law school at the University of Chicago, and it must
have been around that time. And you know, I thought
I had missed the whole internet thing because I had
friends at Stanford who graduated, which that was the year

(04:42):
that Netscape went public, and it kind of ushered in
the commercial and there were a bunch of you know,
really interesting companies getting started around then. There was you know,
eBay and Amazon and Yahoo, and if you went to
graduate from Stanford you would get easily pulled into all that.
But because I graduated ninety four, I kind of felt

(05:03):
like I missed it, and I actually ended up in
law school. And it wasn't until when an old friend
of mine from Stanford called me up and told me
about a startup he was founding, uh called Confinity but
eventually got renamed PayPal, and that was Peter Teel, and
so Peter kind of pulled me back to paol Alto

(05:26):
in um so Stanford. It actually ended up being very important,
but it took five years from me to come back
and do internet stuff. How did you like law school?
Law school was great. I mean your Chicago was a
very serious place and um you know, it was rigorous
and a lot of great teachers and I enjoyed it,

(05:48):
you know, but by after three years of it, I
felt like I was ready to do something else. It
wasn't a desire of mine to do law, but inell
actually I thought it was really interesting, and you know,
I enjoyed experience. Did you ever practice at all as
as a part of a big firm? Did you do
anything legal related? I also obviously went to law school
at Vanderbilt, as as most listeners will know, and I

(06:10):
kind of had the sense early on that law was
not for me. It sounds like you kind of did
as well. But did you go into any sort of
big firm lifestyle or any actual practice of law after
you graduated? You know, I spent a summer at a
at a big law firm, and that kind of reinforced
the decision for me that I wanted to do. You know.
Part of it was always that I was interested in business,

(06:32):
but I always felt like I wanted to be the
decision maker, you know, and not not sort of the
person carrying out the instructions. And you know, lawyers are
ultimately advisors to the principle, uh and you know many
of them do, you know, fantastic work. But I always
felt like I wanted to be on the other side
of the table and and do something more directly in business.

(06:54):
Would you advise, because I get asked this question all
the time, would you advise kids who think, hey, I
don't necessarily want to be a lawyer to go to
law school. If we got a one year old who's
listening right now and they're going to college, is it
a move that you would make again? Would you advise
your own kids or kids who ask you for advice
whether it go to law school or not. No, I

(07:16):
would tell him not to because I think the only
reason to law school these days is if you really
enjoy the law and want to be a lawyer. You know,
maybe you want to practice law, or you want to
be a clerk for a judge, or you know, maybe
become a judge or an elected official or something like that.
I think the reason to go to law school today
is because you're really just in the law now. Back
when I did it and you did it, there are

(07:37):
a lot of people who did it because I think
there weren't as many options or it wasn't as clear
what you should do. There are a lot more people
back in those days. We're talking you know years ago
who went to law school knowing they'll go into business.
And I just think that today there's so many more options.
If you want to do that, you can just do

(07:58):
it directly, you know, spending three years of law school
and all the expense of that. Uh, there's just much
more direct ways of getting into business now. You know,
in the mid nineties, even though I had some entree
entrepreneurial instincts and desire to do something in business, I
really had no idea how to do it. It wasn't clear,

(08:19):
like how do you start a company? And so as
a result, you kind of end up going to law
school as the next step. Uh. But but but today
I wouldn't encourage it. Okay, So you mentioned you leave
law school and go back to work for a company
that would become PayPal. I imagine a lot of people
are somewhat familiar with PayPal. I've read a lot of

(08:42):
the corporate history of PayPal because I find it to
be pretty fascinating. What how would you describe it for
people out there? You go in at nine, what is
the experience? Like? Who were you working with? I think
you mentioned Peter Teal uh and what did you guys
end up achieving. Yeah. I mean, it was a really
incredible group of people who today are kind of known

(09:04):
as the Papal Mafia. That you know, people like Peter
Til and Elon Musk and Max Levchin and Reed Hoffman,
and the list goes on and on. Chad Hurley and
Steve chen who founded YouTube Rule off Photos our CFO
who went on to become the head of Sequoia, was
a famous venture capital firm. So a lot of really

(09:26):
incredible people were part of that founding team. And um
and you know today Papals a hundred billion dollar, you know,
publicly listed company, so it's, you know, twenty years later,
it's a very important company still today. But it was
really a pretty incredible group of people. When I joined in,
it was about six months before the dot com crash,

(09:47):
and Papal was primarily built. Although it was founded the
year before the dot com crash, it was primarily built
after and in the wake of the dot com crash,
And it was a very tough environ ronament lots, you know,
all these other startups are going out of business all
around us, and somehow we managed to persevere and create

(10:08):
you know, a successful outcome, and by early two thousand two.
We were the first company, first tech company tai Po
since the dot com crash. Uh And like I said, today, it's,
you know, a hundred billion dollar publicly traded company. Okay,
So what do you attribute um there being such an
unbelievable amount of talent? The so called PayPal mafia. You

(10:31):
ran through a lot of those guys who not only
were successful in building PayPal into a company that could
go public in two thousand two and survived the dot
com implosion when everything else crashes, what attracted that amount
of talent to that particular company at that point in time.
It's interesting. I think the most important thing to realize

(10:52):
is that although these people and these names are sort
of celebrated today, they were kind of nobody's back then.
And you know, we were all pretty young at the
start of our careers. You know, when PayPal I p
owed in two thousand two, the I was the average
age on the S one, which is the sort of
corporate finaling documents, and I was twenty nine years old,
So you know, we weren't even thirty years old yet.

(11:14):
This this executive team, this founding team, and one of
the ways that we all came together is through friendship networks.
You know, Peter Teal recruited his friends who had worked
at sorry who had gone to school with him at Stanford.
That was the case with me. Max Levchin, who was
the CTO, he recruited fellow engineers that he had gone

(11:34):
to school with that you have I And that was
pretty much how the team was collected and came together.
Is we recruited our friends, and the main reason for
that is nobody else would would work for us. Joining
a startup in the early two thousand's was considered a
very risky thing to do, and it was really hard
to convince people to join this fledgling company. So how

(11:57):
did you meet Peter Tell at Stanford? Do you remember
the first time you guys met? What drew you together? Yeah?
So I met Peter at at Stanford. I was undergrad.
He was actually in law school at that time because
he's a few there had founded the Stanford Review, which
was the conservative, you know slash libertarian student newspaper on campus.

(12:17):
And I ended up becoming a writer and then the
editor in chief of the Stanford Review. And um, so
we you know, sort of bonded initially over politics and
our take on what was happening on campus. And then,
as you know, after that back in we ended up
writing a book together about what was happening at Stanford,

(12:40):
and that was sort of the beginning of a friendship
that you know, Persevers took to this day. What's your
favorite thing that you guys published as a part of
the Stanford Review? Was there an article you wrote? Was
there an article somebody else wrote while you were an editor.
Do you recall something where you thought, man, we really
nailed it here and maybe had an impact that we
weren't anticipating being able to us. Well, you know, back

(13:02):
in the this is going back to the late eighties
early nineties, there was this huge debate at Stanford over
the cannon the reading list, and there was a big
protest on campus that became very famous where the protesters
started chanting, hey, hey, ho ho, Western culture has got
to go, and there was this sense that there was

(13:23):
this protest movement to overturn and throw out what they
called the dead white males of the curriculum. And they succeeded.
I mean, they really ended up kind of purging the
cannon of these classic works and replacing it with something
very different, and that was really the beginning of this
sort of cultural revolution on campus that kind of persists

(13:47):
until today. And I think a lot of the political
changes that you've seen in our society over the last
you know, thirty years, or really downstream of the changes
that happened on campus, because what happens the last thirty
years is that they've been successfully graduating waves of um

(14:09):
of students who've been in doctrine into the cityology, and
those students have gone on to populate many of the
institutions in our in our culture. And so if you
think about you know, whether it's will capitalism or you know,
any of these other institutions that are kind of pushing
this idea of wokens today that all started on campus

(14:30):
in the late eighties early nineties. We called it political
correctness back then, but it was the same idea. Two
thousand two, PayPal goes public, Uh, stock took off. I
remember I went back and look before we talked, because
I was like, man, I think that stock was still
because people, what, you're right, the dot com implosion had happened,
but you guys had built back up to a really

(14:50):
impressive spot. Was there something that you bought or something
you were excited to buy. Do you remember a purchase
after I'm assuming you had some decent wealth, probably for
the first time in your life, certainly on that level. Yeah.
You know, Um, Peter and I both did the very
cliche thing which I now cringe a little bit at doing,

(15:11):
which is buying a Ferrari. Um. Yeah, you know what
kind of Ferrari did you get? Like and and and
and this is before like it was kind of probably
commonplace for a lot of these Silicon Valley companies to
be going public, Like did you just go into a
dealership in Silicon Valley? Yeah, pretty much, I think I
got I got a three five five Spider. It was

(15:32):
like one of those you know, it was like a
black convertible. It was a really cool car. Um. But
you know, it's like I felt like it was like
driving an egg, you know it was. It was so delicate.
I felt like, you know, I was going to mess
it up every time I drove it, and uh, you know,
eventually eventually got rid of it. But what was the
girl reaction to you having a Ferrari? Like was that

(15:53):
something that was impressive? Did you always hear about rich
guys driving fancy cars, and sometimes you got poor guys
who drive fancy cars to try to look like rich guys.
Net positive or net negative return on value in terms
of impressions on women when you have a Ferrari. Yeah,
you know, I don't think it really helped me that much. UM.
So I don't Yeah, I don't think it helped me
that much. Um. But you know, you know, I was

(16:17):
only thirty years old at that time, so it was
a kind that that you do when you're young, and um, yeah,
you know, I guess I enjoyed it for a couple
of years and then, uh, you know, I ended up
ended up selling it. I actually got instead, uh one
of the first test loos that Elon made, um, and
that that was an interesting car. Hey, what's up everybody?

(16:38):
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(17:00):
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don't even know anything about that. When did that? Was

(17:20):
that like an early model Tesla? I mean he's like
kind of almost making out of the back of the
studio somewhere. Yeah, I mean the first version of the
Tesla was called the Roadster and it was the first
car that Ellen made, and it was more of a
sports car and it it was in the body of

(17:43):
they used like the body of I think it was
like an old I want to say, Fiat or something
like that. It was a really small car. It was
a two seater and didn't have a lot of features.
It didn't even have power steering. It was pretty hard
to draw, I've to be honest, but elon. But it
was very quick. It had that speed from the electric batteries. Basically,

(18:08):
you know, the torque was there was no gear shifting,
and the torque felt, you know, almost unlimited, and so
it was a very fast car. But it was small
and kind of hard to drive, but it got test
off the ground. What Ellen did is I think he
sold maybe thousand of those cars, um and you know,
the idea was, we're, you know, we're going to sell

(18:29):
a sports car because he could charge a lot of
money for them, and then on the heels of that
he would make a mass market car. And that's what
he did is you know, I think he stopped production
of the Roaster after maybe a thousand they sold about
thousand of them, and then use that money build the
Tesla Model Less, which was their first real mainstream car,

(18:49):
and that was a really fantastic car that was easily
the best car I'd driven till that time. And you know,
since then they've gone on to the Model three and
not a lie and Tesla has become the most valuable
car company in the world. Tesla is an interesting story,
and I think, and I'm curious if you were the
same way. One of the things that fascinates me about

(19:11):
a lot of the guys who made money at PayPal
is many people make tens of millions of dollars and
they throw up the peace sign and they say, Okay,
I've got money to be able to basically do whatever
I want for the rest of my life, But I'm
not interested in pushing all that money back into the
center of the table and make bigger bets going forward.

(19:31):
It seems like a lot of the PayPal guys and
maybe it's the psychology of the company in general, the
risk taking culture. I'm curious how you would analyze it.
Almost looked at the money that you guys made at
PayPal as table stakes that allowed you to up your
wagers on things that were even more important to you.
Did you have a conscious decision about making that kind

(19:52):
of choice, because certainly you've gone on to other companies,
and it's easy for somebody who has a success on
the level of payper how to say, Hey, you know,
I've made my money. I can have a really comfortable life.
You guys, it seems like a lot of you said, Okay,
I've got the table stakes to do what I really
wanted to do. Conscious decision, unconscious? Am I analyzing the

(20:12):
larger culture in your mind correctly? Yeah? I think that's right.
I mean, nobody felt out of that original PayPal crew.
Nobody felt like, oh, let's just retired now. They all
went on to do, you know, greater things, And I
think that's why the paper Mafia's kind of remembered today
is not just for PayPal, but what they all did afterwards. Um,

(20:34):
you know Ellen famously that really his entire fortune on
Tesla and SpaceX. He was, you know, a few weeks
away from going bankrupt and you know, ended up just
back in two thousand eight in the financial crisis and
put his last dime into Tesla and SpaceX to save
those companies and then ultimately succeeded. And that's why he's

(20:57):
the world's riches man today, or one of them, is
because he really double triple down and kind of risked
every penny he had on those ventures. But everybody else
in the group really went on to do really impressive
things as well. I mean, Peter went on to become
of VC. He wrote the first check as an angel
investor into Facebook. I think it's a five mins houseand

(21:19):
dollar check, and then that turned into billions. And then
he was the founding investor at Volunteer, which is now
a successful public company, and you know, also founded Founders Funds,
a VC firm has done very well. Mass Love Tune
is the CTO of PayPal, founded a firm which is
now publicly traded company, went publishing the last year that's

(21:39):
worth you know, billions, um, and so on down the line.
I mean everyone went on to do different things. I
after PayPal, created another internet company called Yammer, which was
an enterprise software company. It was one of the first
enterprise software companies to use viral tactics that I had
learned at PayPal. So yeah, we all went on to

(22:00):
do different things. And I think it's partly a function
the fact that we were all very young and still
had a lot of ambition, and nobody felt like they
had hit some number or something where they were just
going to retire. Is it difficult to when you have
a big, big hit like you guys did with PayPal?

(22:20):
Is it difficult to decide what the next step you're
going to take is in any way because you're almost
over analyzing it and trying to equal or have that
same kind of success you mentioned Yammer. How many things
did you look at in a significant way from a
business opportunity perspective before you made the leap there? And
what was it that made you make that choice? Yes?

(22:44):
So for me, I mean I think you raised a
good point, which is, you know, once you've had a success,
you know, is there a danger of kind of over
analyzing the next thing and being reticent to have a failure,
you know, because now you've had a success and it
could be the opposite to right where you expect everything.
I mean, it's just you're going to be uh analyzed
in some way based on your prior success. And I'm

(23:07):
just kind of fascinated by how you make the decision
to take the next opportunity. Yes, So for me, it's
it's always about the product. And what happens is I
get a product idea and I start, you know, turning
it over my head and start developing the idea, and
I get kind of obsessed with it. And so it's
my passion for the product that drives everything else, and
I don't worry so much about what the business outcome

(23:31):
is going to be. I just try to design the
best product and try to figure out how to get
it into as many fuel as hands as possible, solve
the distribution problem, and and kind of let that drive
it and then let the shift fall where they may
in terms of the actual financial outcome. I think it's
not healthy to be thinking so much about, you know,

(23:51):
how much money you're going to make, because that's not
something that's going to fuel you on a daily basis when,
especially when times get tough, you really want to have
passion for the idea and the mission of the company
and the product, and that's the thing that's going to
motivate you on a daily basis. So you sell uh
yammer for over a billion dollars basically four years after

(24:14):
its founding. Microsoft buys it. And then I'm kind of
fascinated by your move into venture capital. But before we
talk about that, are you noticing along the line you
get to Silicon Valley in ninety nine, you're right there
at the heartbeat of this culture. Zuckerberg is gonna move
Facebook out there, uh, and it continues to grow and

(24:37):
become an incredible incubator of so many different ideas. Is
the culture substantially evolving as you see it? Do you
like the evolution that you're seeing in Silicon Valley? Do
you dislike it? Well, the culture Silicon Valley is always
a really important contributor to the sasum of all the
companies that were there historically. And so you know, I

(24:59):
really sell when when I moved back to Silicon Valley
back to PayPal, it really felt like the center of
the universe. You would drive along the one on one
freeway and you would see all these office buildings, these shiny,
gleaming new office buildings that had just been constructed in
the last couple of years, and they all had the
logos of companies that didn't exist a few years before.

(25:24):
And it really felt like something magical was happening where
you could build these incredible companies so quickly, and there
was nowhere else in the world you could really do that.
There was, you know, there was nowhere else where you
could find the money to do it, where you get
vcs to write you these checks so quickly, you know,
without spending months thinking about it. They could do it

(25:44):
in days or weeks, and you could find the talent
that you needed to build these companies. So it was
really a magical place. And what happened between say two
thousand and over that twenty year period is that looking
just kind of getting it got bigger and bigger. If
you go back to the ninety nineties, it was sort

(26:06):
of clustered around Palo Alto, but you know, it got
it kept growing to the point where it included San
Francisco and the East Bay, and then it went south
to San Jose, and so Silicon Valley really became Silicon Bay,
and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and it created
this sort of bounty of riches for the city of
San Francisco, even though the city itself had really done

(26:29):
nothing to encourage Silicon Valley, and in fact, I had
a lot of policies and politicians who were hostile to
the tech industry. It you know, made San Francisco this
beneficiary of these incredible riches. And we can talk more
about that. But then what happened, I think during COVID,
and this is really new, this is the last couple

(26:50):
of years, is that because of COVID, and you know,
that started this whole era of remote work and distributed work.
People started doing their jobs from home and then they
realized that they could do these jobs from anywhere. And
so this whole tech industry of the last couple of
years has decentralized a lot, and you started to see
the rise of tech hubs in places like Austin and Miami. Um,

(27:14):
you know, New York City has gotten strong. L A
and Seattle were already somewhat strong. But you're seeing now
tech emerge everywhere and it's not just Silicon Valley anymore.
And I'd say maybe fifty of the companies we invest
in today are still in Silicon Valley or the Bay Area,
but the other fift are increasingly in a distributed number

(27:36):
of locations. And I think it's really good for the
country actually, that this wealth and prosperity that's being created
by the new economy is not just going to be
in the Bay Area, but that's going to be all
over the United States. Yeah, I'll give you By the way,
we're talking to David sachs Uh, this is wins and Losses.
I'm Clay Travis. I'll give you an example of that, David.
I spent a lot of time going out to l
a UM obviously because Fox was based there for Fox Sports,

(28:00):
and spent months and months out there, and I would
go around and look at everybody's houses in l a
and then I, you know, you see how much they cost.
And then I'd come back to the Nashville area and
I would be like, you know, my house that that
we initially bought here, uh, would cost millions and millions
of dollars in l a and it was a fraction

(28:21):
of that in Nashville, right. Um, And what I've seen
with COVID is it accelerated things to such an extent
that now there's not as big of a difference. You know,
a lot of people are cashing out in California, in
New York, in the Chicago area and moving to where
I live in the Nashville area. And the prices have
skyrocketed in Nashville. And I think that's because the top

(28:43):
ten percent of income earners, to your point, have realized
that they can basically live anywhere in the United States
and do their same job, and absent COVID, many of
them would not have risk that, right. You would never
have said, oh, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and relocate
and do my job that I had been doing in California,
in Nashville or in Austin or a place like that.

(29:04):
And uh. And certainly people who are running hedge funds
in New York are finally saying, screw it, I'm not
gonna pay you know, fifteen percent state income tax and
I can go to Florida pay nothing, being better weather,
get a bigger place. But it seems like in many
of these areas that lack of similarity in housing prices
has vanished, right, Um, And I think it's reflective of

(29:24):
what you're saying, which is people with high level talent
and frankly high level incomes being more evenly distributed across
the country than they might have been in the earth
in the late nineties and the early two thousand's for sure. Yeah,
I think I think that's right, and I think it's
all been enabled by this cultural shift that we don't
all have to meet in person almost all of my
meetings these days or by zoom. Yeah, you know, the

(29:47):
factors that I invest in, they are fine with meeting
by zoom and in fact, they like it better. It
saves everyone, you know, a bunch of drive time and
I can be wherever I am and um, and they
can be in a different city. So everything kind of
moved to zoom in in the VC industry. I'm not
sure that's totally true. If you're if you're trying to

(30:07):
build a company, I think there is some value in
having people under the same roof working together, but certainly
for a VC everything's moved to zoom And so if
that's the case, if if you're somebody who who's kind
of a knowledge work and do your job remotely from anywhere.
Now you're kind of freed up to live anywhere you want.
You don't have to just live in the in the

(30:27):
in your sort of industry town and um and so yeah,
there's been a lot more decentralization. I mean, it used
to be that if you wanted to do tech in
a serious way, you have to go to the Bay Area.
If you wanted to do entertainment in a serious way,
you have to go to l A or finance was
in New York, um, and so on down the line.
But now people are liberated. And so I think cities

(30:50):
are starting to realize that they're competing for knowledge workers. Um,
you know, not just companies anymore. You know, cities used
to compete to get the company headquarters is to move
to their city. Now they're kind of competing for individual
knowledge workers to make that decision. And the low tax
states or no tax states like Florida and Texas um
are just seeing you know, there are incredible beneficiaries of that.

(31:14):
And if you look at the migration stats across the
United States, all the states that are growing right now
are basically the zero tax or low tax states and
the states that are seeing the biggest outflows, or California,
New York and the other states that have very high taxes.
So it's it's a it's a really big change. We're
talking to David Sachs. All right, so you now do

(31:36):
venture capital. I'm not an expert at venture campit capital
at all. I know just enough to be good enough
at content that I can build a business and be
able to sell it, but I wouldn't be great at
spreadsheets or anything like that. Um, what percentage of companies
that you look at do you end up investing in? Uh,
by the time they go through their fundraising rounds, Like

(31:57):
what kind of hit rate would have fund like yours have?
In terms of the personage of companies that you're investing in,
I mean, if you probably one in a thousands. But yeah,
but I mean obviously that's not me. I can't take
a thousand meetings without doing crazy. So we have a
we have a team, you know, close to forty people

(32:17):
now and between all of them, they look at thousands
of companies every year for us to make you know, um,
one to two dozen investments at various stages. So it
might be a little better hit rate than that. It
might be more like one something like that. But that
doesn't mean that every company we go deep on, right.

(32:38):
It might mean that we take a meeting, or it
might just be that they send us their information. But
our top of funnel, when we measure it is is
thousands of companies. Um, what is your biggest hit? What
is the company that you invested in as a venture
capital investor? And it has been an absolute home run
well before. So I started Craft in two thousand seventeen,

(33:01):
about five years ago to institute size and professionalize what
I was doing. But I've been investing, you know, pretty
much since you know, after we sold PayPal in two
thousand two. Probably the biggest hit to day would be
investing in Facebook back in She's Camember exactly what year
it was, and it was like two five or two
thousand and six that you know, what kind of valuation

(33:22):
would Facebook have had at the time that you invested. Well,
I invested in a in the growth round, So I
wasn't as early as Peter Peter invested like at a
five million dollar valuation. I think by the time I invested,
it was sort of at a at a five million
million dollar valuation or something like that UM and then
it went public at fifty fifty billion dollar valuation. Today

(33:43):
it's about five billion. You know, there were some other
ones too. I mean I invested in UM, Valanteer, invest
in Airbnb, slack Um, SpaceX you know Elon's company, which
has done phenomenally. Would you invest in Tesla? You know,
I don't know how I missed that, but I bought

(34:03):
one of the original tests by the non investment company,
and that was did you look at the Tesla? I'm
just kind of curious. Did you look at any of
the VC money when they raised and say, hey, I'm
consciously not going to make that choice, Like, yeah, I'm
just kind of curious. You liked the car uh and
obviously your friends with Elen. I'm just sure curious how
you didn't end up in there. Well I didn't. I
didn't look at it. I wasn't a professional VC or anything,

(34:25):
so I didn't look at it. You know, he never
presented it to me. He certainly could have called him
up and said hey, could I invest? I actually did
that with SpaceX UM. I emailed him and said, you know, hey,
can I invest? Me? Said sure, so I invested personally,
and then we invested as a VC later. Um. You know,
I don't know why I didn't occurred to me. I
just I guess I just thought that the idea of
a new car company was so far outside the realm

(34:49):
of what I thought I knew about investing, you know,
because all the other investment selves making were software investments
or tech investment. And I guess what i'd realize is
that was basically creating an iPad on wheels, and I
should have just seen it as a car company. I
should have really seen it as like a fundamental tech innovation.

(35:10):
And so I guess we has to have the innovation,
the imagination to see what a radical innovation it would be.
And I'm curious. So those are a lot of hits, obviously, Tesla,
maybe not a not a hit. What's the worst decision
you've made in terms of not investing or investing in
your like? So I'll give you an example, small level.
I don't even know if you know this. I decided

(35:32):
that I would get into the pants business early on
when I launched out Kick, and the idea I think
was the right one, which was I don't want to
be uh reliant upon advertising dollars to monetize my business.
I would rather my content business. I would rather own
businesses that I could advertise against instead of having to

(35:54):
go out hat in hand always selling ad dollars, right,
and so find things that over lap with, uh, the
audience that I'm already reaching from a content perspective, things
that they would want to buy. And you know, at
some point when you're staring trying to tell the difference
between you know, one pantone color and another one, like
the difference between auburn orange and Tennessee orange for somebody

(36:15):
frankly who maybe a little bit color blind and also
certainly is not is not fashion savvy, uh, you know,
and and shipping them in and tie dying and the
sizing and pants are really actually a complicated business. So
I lost like fifty thou dollars pretty fast in pants,
and I was like, this is such a stupid idea.
You know, you see athletes who go broke, and you know,
if they did a documentary on me, wo'd be like

(36:37):
Clay Travis decided going to the pants business. He lost money.
Was there anything you got into on a bad perspective
or you were like, this is just such a stupid
business that I ended up getting involved in and or
something that you looked at, looked at heavily, then passed
on and it ended up being wildly successful. Yeah, I
mean there's definitely things that I've invested in that haven't worked.

(36:57):
I mean, this is this is absolutely a bad average game.
And nobody that's you know, a thousand what's a good
what's a good batting average? In the VC business? Like,
what are you shooting for? I know, your returns overall,
but what kind of hit rate should you have if
you're doing a good job in VC investing, Well, it's
probably like baseball and if you're batting three something, you're

(37:18):
like Hall of Fame r um. Yeah, I mean really,
although it's not just um, I mean, you'll appreciate this.
It's not just batting average. It's also slugging. Slugging because
you can hit you can hit like a thousand home
runs on one swing, right, as opposed to just being
able to maximize, you know, one run. You can get
a thousand runs on a swing exactly. And and that's

(37:39):
and that's really what that's one of the biggest um
things about the VC business that's kind of nonintuitive to
people is that it's not about how many losers that
you have. It's about the magnitude of your winners. And sometimes,
you know, you can be wrong about everything, but that
one decision you were right about ends up with turning

(38:00):
you know, ten times your funds. So, um, that tends
to be that if you look at kind of the
great VC funds, it's not about how often they were right,
it's about the magnitude of their winners. And UM, so yeah,
but I mean I think we've had a pretty good
batting average. You know, I've been in about twenty five
unicorn companies. Um. You know, we defined unicorns companies that

(38:24):
end up being worth a billion dollars or more. And um,
you know that the most recent one for us was
was crypto. Um we you know, we made some crypto
investments back in two thousand, seventeen, two eight, and they
returned our first fund. So you know that was sort
of like a forty or fifty x investment in five

(38:45):
years based on making you know, based on investing in crypto.
I think you also invested in a movie, right, Um,
thank you for smoking am I right about this? How
did that happen? Uh? And and have you gotten involved
in other creative endeavors, which are certainly different than trying
to analyze software companies or tech related funds. Yeah. Yeah,

(39:07):
I guess that you're If you're looking for me to
identify a bad investment, I'd say anything in the movie industry. Now. Actually,
we didn't lose money on Thinking for Smoking. We actually
did fine. It ended up being one of the big
hits of I think two thousand five, two thousand six. Um,
this is an independent movie. I financed it along with
a few friends. Peter and e la On all contributed

(39:29):
and they were executive producers. This was a script I
found that was written by Jason Weightman, who ended up
directing the movie, based on a book by Christopher Buckley.
And um, I just thought it was a fantastic So, yeah,
this is this is amazing to me, Like, so, how
do you find a script? Right? Like? So, uh, you
are thinking, after you've made some money in PayPal, hey,

(39:50):
I like movie. Certainly at Stanford you've talked about the
culture of political correctness and whatnot. Were you thinking, hey,
maybe I'll get involved in the entertainment industry in some way. Yeah,
I mean it was just sort of an unfuneral venture
for me where I decided to create a movie production
company and it was like a startup, you know, We're like,
let's let's see, let's understand what it takes to make

(40:10):
a movie. Let's try and make a better one. And
we went out looking at projects and we probably looked
at a thousand scripts, and I thought that Jason had
written the best one I had seen, and someone had
given it to me as a writing sample for him actually,
and the question I asked was, wait, why is the
writing sample? Why why don't we just make this? And
the reason why is because the lights have been fragmented.

(40:33):
Warner Brothers owned the book and Jason script was actually
owned by Milk Gibson's company Icon, And anyway, we spent
something like two years trying to unravel the right situation
and acquire all the rights, and we finally did that.
Then we could make it as an intendent movie, and
we did that, and we took it to the Frounto
Film Festival and Sun Dance and ended up being a

(40:55):
pretty big hit um in terms, you know, as a
hit creatively want a lot of awards, and it did
something like the box office on an eight million dollar budget,
and you know, it's one of these kind of cult
movies that's and it launched Jason Reitman's career. He's ended
up becoming a very very big director in Hollywood. The

(41:17):
you know, my takeaway from it though, is in terms
of business is that you know, we did a little better,
but not much than just get our money back. And
so it made a lot of money, but it mainly
made money for Fox, uh, you know, the Fox Searchlight
movie studio. And that kind of taught me a lot
about the movie business, which is is controlled by gatekeepers.

(41:38):
There's a handful of studios and they really make all
the money. And you know, we as this sort of entrepreneur,
as the producer who took all the risk, this is
not really a reward for that risk, and um, you know,
very it's very different than the internet business, where you're
taking you're taking a similar kind of risk, very hard

(42:00):
execute you know, a huge chance of failure, but at
least when you hit it, there's a giant reward there.
And so that was a big lesson for me. And
on the heels of things for smoking, that's what I
actually created yammer is. I was like, well, look I'm
gonna do something super risky. At least I want to
be in a position to get rewarded for it if
it works. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk

(42:23):
lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at
Fox sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart
Radio app. Search f s R to listen live. So
let's talk big picture. Now, you've been in Silicon Valley
for a long time. And by the way, that's fascinating.
Do you think you'll ever fund any other movies? Maybe
because you're just so committed to the idea that it's
getting out there, um, as opposed to the you know,

(42:45):
remunerative return that you might be able to recoup. Yes,
And I think that's the way you have to look
at it. I actually have another movie that's um in
the can, so to speak. Um. It's called dolly Land.
It's a movie about the painter salvad Or Dolly Ben Kingsley,
you know, the multi Academy Award winner plays Dolly. It's
directed by a great director named Mary Here and it's

(43:07):
actually done. We made it as an independent movie over
the past year and we're taking it too film festivals
later this year. And I think we've been accepted to
Toronto Film Festival, and there's a couple others we're looking at.
So it's exciting. I mean, we're gonna take to the
Film Festival and try to sell it and see what happens. Um,

(43:28):
you know, I hope it makes money. But you know,
I've I've gotten used to the idea that, you know,
it's very, very hard to make money in the movie business.
It's not why I do it. I do it because
I love movies and I like the subject matter, and um,
it's a passion project for everyone who's involved. So so yeah,
I you know, I'm still sort of interest in the
movie business and do it. But it's you obvious see

(43:49):
it as a hobby or you're going to be disappointed.
I think our actors harder to manage than other employees.
It's case by case. Um, most of them are very
professional and are a delight to work with, and then
you have a handful who are known as difficult. But
to be honest, UM, the ones who are difficult, they

(44:09):
don't last that long. I mean there's a kind of
old uh saying in Hollywood is a life's too short list.
And if you're an actor, you really don't want to
get on the lots too short lists? Are you? We're
talking to David David Sacks about wins and losses in
his career across a variety of fields. All right, let's
talk um, big picture here on tech. One reason I'm

(44:32):
so excited to talk to you and I appreciate all
the time you've given us, is for what I do, UM,
and I testified in Congress about this, uh, in front
of the House Judiciary Subcommittee. I can see the power
of Facebook for what they can do. I can see
the power of Twitter just for the content that we
created OutKick. You know, I can go in and look

(44:53):
at the charts and tell you basically, hey, the algorithm
is favoring us today or this month. Hey, they decided
they don't like what we're writing, and they are writing
us off of the algorithm page UM. And it seems,
based on my experience, that the bias always runs against
us whenever we write something favorable. I'll give you an example.

(45:15):
When we had Donald Trump on for the first time
on my sports talk radio show. We wrote a bunch
of articles about it at OutKick. Our traffic basically vanished
on social media literally within a day. Or two of
all of those articles, and it was Trump primarily talking
about sports going up on OutKick. It was clear that
we have been flagged in some way. Certainly the same

(45:35):
thing has happened when we wrote about masks or we
wrote about covid um. From a business perspective, not from
a political perspective. Does that make sense that they would
be behaving, these big tech companies, and I'm talking about
OutKick specifically in a way that clearly is discriminatory in
terms of the distribution of articles from sites like mine.

(45:57):
Does that make sense to you from a not from
a you know what's better for the country perspective? Does
it make sense from a business perspective? No, I don't
think so. I mean, I think they're doing it because
for ideological reasons. And um, now what I think what
happens is they start with a business rationale that seems

(46:17):
to make sense. So for example, they will let's say
you're a social media site, and uh, you start with
the content moderation department, because there's a certain kinds of
content that just shouldn't beyond there. I mean, people threatening
violence or you know, harassing other users, or using profanity
or obscenity, and they don't want that to be part

(46:39):
of their social networks. So they create a content moderation
team to basically take down that stuff, and you know,
no one really has a problem with that. But then
the problem is that the people actually doing the content
moderation have an ideological bias and they start indulging that bias.
And the fact the matter is that if you're in
Silicon Valley, you know, the for failing orthodoxy is everyone

(47:02):
kind of drinks from the same monocultural sound. They all
have the same political views. This stuff has been pulled
many times and you can sit and so half the
time ton't even realize what they're doing when they indulge
in in this bias. But yeah, the bias absolutely creeps
in and then it starts to become official policy. Um.

(47:22):
I think something similar has happened that at Google, where
you know, you've got the search algorithm, and the search
algorithm might produce some results that seem offensive to people,
so they introduce, you know, what they call human interventions.
But then as soon as you allow humans the process,
they carry with them their preconceived biases and they start

(47:44):
indulging those biases, and the problem is that none of
us have any transparency into those decisions. And I think
we have a right to know when we're being down
ranked or the algorithms sort of supporting our content we
should ever right, or or we've been kicked off one
of these networks. There's no explanation that comes with us,

(48:06):
and I think we should have due process rights to
at least know why, to know when and why we've
been down ranked or downvoad or something like that. And
is that the idea behind the idea of an open
algorithm marketplace effectively so that we could go in and
I'm just using out kick as an example, which is

(48:26):
owned by Fox now. But when you're down ranked, if
you are a business that is reliant on advertising, that
can take money directly out of your pocket, and the
lesson that they are instructing to business owners is you
play games and share content that we want to be
shared or else. Right, there's an implicit threat from a
business perspective that is hanging over the algorithmic problems that

(48:50):
can arise. What's a solution? Not necessarily again from a
political perspective, but you just kind of kind of walked
through us if you were just trying to be as
open and trans parent as possible. Is it a public
algorithm so that everybody could see what results are occurring? Well,
this is what Elon has suggested with respect to Twitter,
as he says that he wants to open source the algorithm.

(49:11):
And so the idea is, yeah, you would be able
to see how the algorithm works, and if there's a
human intervention, you would know that. And so that does
give you, well, first of all, it gives you an
assurance that they're not putting their thumb on the scale
and discriminating against certain people because of their their viewpoints.

(49:33):
But also it would give you some due process to
know that when there's an intervention against you, at least
know what's happened. Um. So that that's that's why Elan
has been pushing that idea of of open sourcing the algorithm. Um.
I think it's a great idea. I mean, we need
more transparency around the decision these big tech companies are
making because frankly, they have enormous power. I mean, by

(49:54):
and large, they are monopolies and they controlled the public square.
The public square has been privatized. Um. You know when
the founders at the trainers in the Constitution started the country,
the town square was a place you would go to
it like the courthouse steps, and you pull out of
soapbox and could talk and people gather around to listen.
That's what the town square meant today. The town square.

(50:15):
All these giants social networks. I mean, that is where
people assemble, that is where political speech occurs. And yet
there are no limitations on their ability to you know,
to d platform you or discriminate against you. And they
don't even they're not even obligated to provide any transparency
around that. And so I think we need more to
process on these big monopolistic companies when they restrict our speech.

(50:41):
I'll give you an example. By the way, Google News
obviously drives a lot of traffic. Um No, people out
there may not realize it, but Google News is wildly influential.
When Fox bought out Kick, they went back through all
these social media relationships and I've been saying for a
long time, yeah, we're registered with Google News, but never
our store. He's come up even stories where we might

(51:02):
break news other people right will show up on the
Google News alerts. We won't. Fox did a deep dive
and they said, oh, you've been mischaracterized, and you hadn't
been showing up in Google news for years. It's amazing
how often the mischaracterization seems to only run one way, right,
like uh, and and so I'm incredibly skeptical that at

(51:22):
some point someone at Google wasn't it was you know, unhappy,
and they just decided, Hey, I'm gonna move the OutKick
algorithm you know, feeder or whatever over into this little
box where it will kind of disappear. Um. And if
you're a independent business, you don't have the resources or
the relationships to even get things like that rectified. And uh.

(51:44):
And that's why I think the idea that Ellen is
trying to put in place could be so potentially influential,
which is just, hey, we're gonna have content neutral policies
and people will have optics on things. And and David,
I don't know if you paid attention to it. I'm
sure you did. But you know, the day that Ellen
announces that he's reached acquisition terms, suddenly my Twitter feed

(52:05):
comes alive and I'm adding tens of thousands of followers
at a rapid rate. It's hard for me to believe
that in some way Twitter is not trying to bury
the evidence of what they've been doing. So when neutral
engineers come back and start to look at the algorithms
they have in place, there's not necessarily the same evidence
that there would have been if somebody like Elon weren't

(52:26):
acquiring the company. It's gonna be really interesting to see
what happens if Elon is able to close this deal.
I guess they're still still up in the air with
us going to happen, but it'll be really interesting to
see what comes out after he acquires the company because
we just don't have any visibility into how they moderate
content or upfold or down rank content, how the algorithm

(52:49):
works with them. Again, the manual trending topics is wildly influential,
and I think that's a total cesspool. By the way,
for somebody who does what I do. Uh, they decide
what trends, they decide how they are going to characterize
what trends in a positive or negative fashion. Um, it's
just such a rigged game. And do you think that one?

(53:09):
See my theory is one unrigged game, right. So if
Elon is able to acquire h Test, sorry, acquire Twitter,
what I think would happen is if there are wildly
divergent results that suddenly start to happen at Twitter, and
we can see a discrepancy between what's going on on
Twitter and what's going on on Facebook and what's going
on on Instagram and all these different social media outlets,

(53:31):
then it puts a lot of pressure on these other
companies to also be honest and transparent about what they're doing.
Is there a logic to that, based on your knowledge
of how tech companies work, that that could occur, that
that influence could become substantial. I think so, because Ellen,
I mean, this is what's so important about what Elon
is doing is that he's drawing a line in the

(53:53):
sand here and he's opposing censorship, and he's also setting
an example for all these other companies. One of the
things about the censorship that's taken place that's so discouraging
is the way that it all seems to be done
in unison. So when Trump was sent off Twitter back
in January, they all did it. Every site did it
within days of that decision. So they all seem to

(54:15):
be acting in concert, in lockstep. I've called it a
speech cartel. If they were getting together for the purpose
of fixing prices, let's say advertising prices, everybody would be
up in arms saying that's illegal. But if they get
together for the purpose of fixing speech and what you
can't say or what you can't which, by the way,
is so much more dangerous than from a from a
democracy perspective than fixing advertising costs. Absolutely. I mean, look

(54:39):
at the employees of these companies have enormous power over
our public discourse and public debate. They were never elected
to have that power. And back twenty years ago when
I was doing Internet stuff, we never believe when we
were creating these platforms, we never believed it was our
job to put our thumb on the scale and prefer
certain views over others. We just thought it was our

(55:01):
job to let the users communicate with each other. And
somehow that mission changed, And now the employees these companies
have gone from being umpires to basically being participants, to
being partisans in the marketplace of ideas. And I think
what you hear from Elan is listen, I'm a moderate.
I'm going to restore the balance. I'm gonna let the

(55:23):
users communicate the way that they want to. I'm gonna
be nonpartisan. I'm going to be a fair referee, and
that's what's so powerful about what he's doing, and hope
it will set an example for these other companies you
mentioned dolly Land, which I'll be interested to see as
well as a passion project. It's not necessarily being done
to make money. One of the arguments that I've made

(55:46):
for a while. And maybe Ellen is doing this, I'm
curious if you think he's doing it is in the
passion project being brought to bear. In the world of
larger media, I think, to a large extent me media
in the United States is broken. And what I mean
by that is you've got the CNNs, the msnbc S,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their narrative

(56:08):
bias to me is so clear, and you have one alternative,
which is basically Rupert Murdoch and Fox. In fact, if
Rupert Murdoch didn't exist, there would be almost no It's
crazy to think about, but there would be almost no
full fruition of media outlets in the country. Right. It's
basically one man and his family who said, Hey, we're

(56:31):
gonna create Fox News, and we're gonna buy the Wall
Street Journal and we'll run the New York Post and
now they bought out kick and they have these different
assets that are trying to fight back a battle, not necessarily,
in my opinion, on a right wing basis, but just
for the seventy of the country that isn't gone insane.
It feels like to some extent there is an opportunity
for passion projects and media which may not return a

(56:53):
lot of money, but do have massive influence. Do you
think that's what Ellen is doing with Twitter? Is it
his passion project? Is it a version of dolly Land
for him? Or do you think he's looking at it
as a big money maker. I think, first and foremost,
like you said, it's a passion project. I think that
this is about the principle of free speech for him.
When he says that he's going to restore Twitter to

(57:14):
being an open town square, that really is his main motivation.
And it always starts with the mission for him. I
think he's got enough money, you wouldn't just be doing
this as a business deal. Now. The history of Elon's
ventures is that he starts with the mission and you know,
the passion project, as you say, but over time he
figures out how to make them a great business certainly

(57:36):
that's the case with Tesla. The passion project there was
to move the world to sustainable energy. So but in
the process of doing that, he's created the world's best
car with SpaceX. He wants to get people of the Mars.
I mean, that really is the mission. But in the
process of doing that, he's figured out, you know, Starlink
and how to make that a great business. Um so
I think he will figure out how to make Twitter

(57:58):
into a great business. But I have no doubt that
it's all about the passion rim politics. Obviously, you're involved
in donating money. What's the best thing that national politics
could do in your mind to advance American business interests?
How much like the Biden administration to me is just
a disaster in all respects. But a lot of politicians,

(58:20):
it seems to me the best outcome would just be
don't do anything. Unfortunately, because of where we are, what
can and should America be doing to advance entrepreneurial and
capitalistic interests so that we maintain uh leadership in risk
taking around the world. Well, the the entrepreneurial energy in

(58:42):
America is strong. I mean, this is historically our great advantage.
It's our d n a right our cultural DNA exactly.
I mean Americans are willing to take risks, are not
afraid of failure. If they do fail, they kind of
dust themselves off and try again. There's the huge stigma
in our culture the way there is in Europe. If

(59:03):
you fail and you got vcs people like us who
are willing to write a check and if it's a zero,
so be it. We're not going to come break your
kneecaps or even be too upset about it. You just
don't have that mentality in other parts of the world.
So that's what's strong there. And I think what you
need from government is to create a stable environment with

(59:25):
sound money and low taxes and reasonable spending levels just
to not break the golden goose. And you know the
prominent washing right now is they're really threatened to break
the golden goose. I mean inflations out of control as
a result of this hyper spending um and the money printing.
I mean, you had the FED and if you were
running so sorry to cut off that, you're exactly right

(59:47):
on this. If you're a business guy, you have to
make a profit in order to that's how capitalism works.
If you were running the government, and you saw the
books that the government is putting out on a yearly basis.
I mean, obviously the business would go bankrupt with the
books that the government is putting out right now, how
long can this continue? You know, modern modern monetary theory,

(01:00:10):
the idea was, Hey, we can print as much money
as we want, there's no consequences. We're seeing consequences. We've
got a thirty trillion dollar national debt now and we
basically added twenty trillion dollars in the last you know,
ten twelve years. When you look from a business perspective
at the nation's books, where are we in and how
troubled would you be? Purely from a business perspective on that,

(01:00:34):
I think it's terrifying. We owe something like a GDP now,
I mean we basically, oh more than the entire amount
of the output of our economy in our national debt,
and what do we get all of that debt um?
So it's it's really pretty scary. And I agree with
you about m m T. I mean, that's the latest
group of so called experts that I think are gonna

(01:00:55):
be massively discredited. Uh. They claimed for years that we
can print as much money as we want and spend
as much you want, because I guess we were the
world's reserve currency. That be no price to pay for that.
And it's true that interest rates stayed low for a
long time, but now they've rocked it up, and inflation
has rocketed it up, and you're seeing it. Ordinary Americans
feel a lot poorer because their wages is not kept

(01:01:16):
up with inflation. And we've had a stock market crash
because now the stock market is starting to price in,
you know, much higher interest rates that are gonna be
necessary to tame the inflation. So it was just very irresponsible. Um.
I mean, it's the fun at a law that you
cannot spend more than you make, not for very long
and um yeah, we just need fiscal sanity to return

(01:01:38):
to Washington. You mentioned experts, uh, And I appreciate your time,
and I know how busy you are. To me, one
of the great lessons of the past several years has
been how wrong experts can be. The experts who told
this modern monetary theory there were going to be no consequences,
certainly the experts surrounding so much of COVID. Uh. One

(01:01:58):
of the reasons why I love capitalism is you really
do have to put your money where your mouth is,
and you have to place bets based on things like logic,
based on numbers. Um, where are we in the field
of so called experts right now? Were you someone who
believed I think probably the answer is no. On conventional
wisdom in the first place, which is a business opportunity

(01:02:21):
is really about recognizing that the conventional wisdom is wrong oftentimes,
or else everybody would be doing what you're doing isn't
isn't what you do basically the exact opposite of what
experts do. Yes, because if you listen to the experts
with respect to any business opportunity, they will always tell
you us a bad idea that because yes, they are

(01:02:41):
fully ingrained in the old way of doing things and
they they don't have the imagination to see that things
could be done in a completely different way. I mean, look,
we would never have found it PayPal if we had
listened to all those payment experts back in and in fact,
part of the reason we created PayPal is because we
didn't know that much about payments. We weren't beholden to
the old way of doing things. So you're listening to

(01:03:04):
experts is something that really runs against the grain of
an entrepreneur. And this whole idea of listening to authority
because those people in power have some sort of credentials,
and that you should automatically listen to them and not
consult your own faculties, your own common sense. That's an

(01:03:24):
idea that I think is gonna be offensive to any entrepreneur.
And I think we've seen that now with politics over
the last couple of years. I mean, everything the experts
told us about COVID, for example, was just completely wrong.
And I mean we're told so many things and then
they also not not to be right. So you know,
having a healthy distrust of experts is a good idea

(01:03:45):
in business or politics. I think it's also the case
that everything that they told us and allowed us to
discuss on social media very often ended up being wrong.
And when I kind of diagnose it, I'm curious what
you think about this As we come to a close here.
We've been talking with David Sachs. A lot of this
comes down to risk analysis. Many people are really really

(01:04:08):
bad at analyzing risk, both financial and personal. And it
seems to me that you talked about the American DNA,
and I agree with you is based on taking risk.
I mean, you don't get on a ship and decided
to come to a new land and then get in
a covered wagon and go all the way to the
west coast because you have a high if you don't
have a high risk tolerance. Right, it seems like our

(01:04:31):
national risk tolerance in a social media era is being
totally destroyed to the point where you saw all the
time in the early days of COVID, well, if it
saves just one life, well, if it saves just one life,
we would have never committed airplanes. We certainly wouldn't have
emitted cars. Um. How much of this is just a
failure to understand basic risk in both personal business and life. Yeah,

(01:04:55):
I mean I think I think you you saw this
during COVID as there was a total suspension of cost
benefit analysis in favor of this sort of zero COVID
thinking this idea that we can completely stamp out COVID,
which was just not possible, very clearly not possible, And
there was a total refusal to to to apply cost

(01:05:16):
benefits on any of these lockdowns. I mean, we I
think it's very clear now that that whole policy of
lockdowns it cratered the economy was devastating the economy, but
it didn't do anything to stop COVID. And no one
about the or the kids in school with the mass,
you know, and and the remote learning. I mean, we
lost an entire year of schooling for so many kids

(01:05:39):
in this country, and no one really thought to apply
cost benefit to that, you know, negligibile benefit if any,
and the costs I think we're gonna be feeling for
a generation. So yeah, we need to bring back benefit costs.
I think we have to bring back as assumption of risk.
You know that there's a tradition this country that you're
allowed to do risky things. Uh, you know, if you're

(01:06:00):
willing to assume the risk. And and we saw this
workout I think very well in Florida, where they basically
got on with their lives so much more quickly the country, Um,
because they allowed people to make their own choices. And
if you wanted to go out to a restaurant and
risk get in COVID, that was your choice. Um. So
we've got to bring back these basic ideas. And I think,

(01:06:23):
you know, I don't know if it's just that the
media culture doesn't really get it but but you're allowed
to do whiskey things in this country. You know, if
it doesn't work out for you, that's your choice, such
as buying our ferrari. Alright, last question for you, uh uh,
what advice would you give. There's a lot of people
who are young that listen to these podcasts, this Wins
and Losses podcast because they're trying to build their own culture,

(01:06:46):
their own idea, their own worldview. For someone who wants
to get into business today, let's say that they are
out there and they're sixteen years old listening to this
right now, what do you wish you had known when
you were sixteen? What would you be telling young people
they need to be doing today to prepare themselves to
make the kinds of decisions that you had the opportunity

(01:07:06):
to make in your twenties, thirties and forties. I mean,
the main thing I would have done differently was just
get into business faster. Like we talked about, I kind
of I took some time and went to law school,
and UM, I just didn't know how to get into it.
And I think that what's great about UM entrepreneurialism today
is there's so many opportunities. There's incubators. Now there's young

(01:07:30):
startups you can join. I just would have gotten into
it a lot sooner, and so I still think going
to college is probably a good thing to do. I
wouldn't necessarily encourage anyone to drop out, although certainly a
lot of great entrepreneurs have had success dropping out, like Zuckerberg,
like Bill Gates, so on. But but I would say
just get into it as quickly as possible. What you

(01:07:50):
really want to do is go work at a startup
where you can really learn, where there's some great founders,
and it almost doesn't matter what's the job is that
you get. The important thing is who you're associated with.
And you know, I learned so much working with people
like Peter Till and Elon Musk at my first startup

(01:08:10):
at PayPal, and that enabled me to go on and
then found my own companies and become an investor. So
you really want to just work with the smartest people
you can possibly find and do that as quickly as possible.
Outstanding stuff, David Sachs. This has been a phenomenal discussion
wins and Losses with Clay Travis. I hope everybody enjoyed it.
Thank you guys, there's now forty seven of these, I believe,

(01:08:33):
so if you enjoyed this one, check out the other
forty six. Thank you, thank you, quite appreciate it.