all right today we were sitting down with one of the smartest people that's ever been on this podcast his name is elad Gil and he is a prolific angel investor he's a guy who has invested in something like 40 plus billion dollar companies all at very early stages like Airbnb air table and real retool ripling companies that we've all heard of down the tech space he was a entrepreneur he got acquired by Twitter he was one of the first 100 employees at Twitter he was early at Google and he's been very early to waves he's he was doing longevity longevity was cool he was doing AI investing before chap GPD came out so we love talking to people who are like this that are both very brilliant very accomplished and seem to be skating where the puck is going they sort of know what's coming around the corner and they've proven that in their career so we talked to him about how he's been such a good investor what he's looked for and his approach and how it's pretty different than most investors we talked about his ideas so things he wants to see built and projects he's working on right now and then a little bit of Life advice at the end where he left us with kind of an amazing tid or a nugget about what's made him such an interesting person so enjoy this episode with El [Music] Gil and so the intro for you is basically you're a super angel investor uh you've invested in a bunch of companies I think you have something like 40 plus unicorns in the portfolio and impressively at least 20 or 30 of them were very early stage so seeds stay series a precede some somewhere there that's wild as somebody who's invested in I don't know 100 companies myself I look at what you've done there and that is prolific and so first question it's like you know there's a block of wood and I don't really know how to hack how to how to chop into this so I'm just GNA swing one blunt swing here how the heck are you doing this why how have you had this this success in Angel Investing yeah I mean I guess it's um it's probably two or three things number one I think I was just lucky you know so I think I started investing in a good time when there was a lot to still be done in SAS and consumer and a variety of areas now obviously that's also true in AI I think secondly I tend to take more of a market first approach um than most early stage people I focus on the market and product Market more than the founders and obviously Founders are incredibly important I started two companies myself so I hope that Founders are incredibly important but I also think that what you're actually building and which market for who matters a lot and I've seen great people crushed by terrible markets and I've seen reasonably mediocre people do really well um and then lastly I think I really try to follow the technology um and the changes that are happening in technology and so I got I got involved with a lot of generative AI companies quite early you know perplexity and Harvey and things like that simply because I was really keen on generative Ai and sort of ml related stuff so so I started investing in all those things three years ago before chatu BT was out and before mid journey and before these things really became a trend and so I think sometimes you end up early in some really important areas simply because your kind of Technology first or Market Chang first were you just doing your own money at first or did you have a fund from the Geto no initially I was just investing my own money um and then I ran out pretty fast you know I hadn't made that much money at gole and I I invested almost all of it I invested like over 50% of it and so I just started running out as I started what does that mean running out like how like uh I guess you initially had wealth from selling your business I guess and then like you just put all of it into private companies how much do you I put a huge amount of my own money into private companies yeah so you know one of my big regrets is um somebody pinged me on the SpaceX round when it was like a $500 million company and I really was excited about it I thought it was such a interesting game and I just I didn't have enough money for the minimum that they had as check sizes and so what' you do because you know I I had that point early in Silicon Valley where I initially had no money so I was like I was helping friends I was like man I can't believe people aren't investing this but I myself didn't even look at myself like an investor because I just didn't have a bank roll then I realized wait stupid I got to think like a Founder here and get resourceful and figure out how to get money to invest in these companies so where did you go once you deployed your own Capital where'd you go to get the money right away yeah you know I started um effectively raising small sort of what are known as spvs and then that morphed into funds and now I kind of have a a TI misuk cake of different things where there's like different layers that I can do in terms of personal Investments fund Investments you know very large things would be fun plus SPV so for example I led Andel series D or I co the last two rounds for um applied Intuition or you know I've L rounds for all sorts of companies at this point how many other are there any other partners at your like shop basically or you the guy you know I've I've recently hired a few people to kind of help me in different ways I think fundamentally what I want to do is um continue to build things work on things think about technology like just take I would to call it almost like the anti- BC approach and be Builder first and so there's a lot of side projects that I or me and my team are now working on you know we're working for example um sh's helping me with um we're trying to take the the the Thousand um most important books that are off of copyright and translate them into dozens of languages using Ai and then create audio books off of any of off of all of them so people can download the great works of um history from anywhere in the world in any language you know we're doing stuff like that and so that also forces us to really use different AI tools and let's look at 11 versus CIA versus you know open Ai and let's let's how do you actually translate a long form book with high consistency and how do you QA that are you doing that because you're like this could be a business or are you doing that because you're thinking to yourself just this is an interesting project and in doing this I will discover interesting things I'm doing because I think it's like cool and societally useful I mean like there's multiple aspects of why to work on something like this and I think it's um a little bit less shortterm and more like this seems useful and interesting but were you always that way because like I just recent I'm I guess I'm I could say I'm financially secure and it took a few years before I just recently started feeling like I want to do blank because it's cool I don't really care necessarily if it's good for the world but it seems like you have a little bit of that mindset of like this is good for the world are you wealthy and successful because you always had that attitude or do you have that attitude now because you have security do you know what I mean uh I've always been that way and so you know I started off I you know I did degrees in math and biology and I did a PhD in biology because I thought it was societally useful like you're not going to make money as a PhD in biology you know unless something magic happens and so um my my driver has always been what is useful societally I think the one other thing I'd say about it is it forces you to go deeper than um people tend to go on some of these things that they're just kind of oh this is an interesting investment or what whatever I think you actually go to that next extra level of depth and using things Hands-On and all the rest of it that I think also matters just in terms of gaining real intuition for certain things and I don't think you need to be a practitioner of everything to understand the thing that you're you're a practitioner of but I just think it in some cases it can help a lot or it really um allows you to hone in on what's important and that's true of many businesses usually most businesses have one or two things that are the fundamental aspect of that business that matters and everything else is just noise or check the box or whatever and I think that where people tend to sometimes either start the wrong things as Founders or invest in the wrong things as investors is they get too wrapped up and what are the five things that matter for this business and usually there's one maybe two what what's an example of like I'm not sure which industry you're you're you care about most but what's an example of one of these things where people care about five things but you're like no this is the only thing that matters well I mean I guess early on with stripe their their one Insight was how do we just get every developer using this product we're not going to worry about mid-market and Enterprise we're not going to worry about and other things how do we get every early stage technology company that matters on us that that sounds great when you tell that story I'm like yeah I'm on board with that but I own a business now and it's really hard to come up with that Insight I think it's hard but I think this the flip of it is that's that's usually the key question and again different types of businesses may have that characteristic or not right and so sometimes it's two things or you know some complex bus business that may have more you know and invested in andell there was a very clear there's kind of like five things I thought a nextend defense tech company had to do in order to become a prime which is you know one of the really big companies in the market and I thought without it you're just not going to make it and so sometimes it's more complicated but I think I think 90% of the time plus it's it it boils down to one era of belief or maybe one thing that you just need to see happen in the business to believe that everything else will fall into place all right so when I ran my company the hustle I think we had something like 2 Mill million subscribers and we made money through advertising and we didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model and so I remember sitting down and I'm like what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising and so to make sure that you don't make this mistake Sean me and the hbot team we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business and we put it all together in a really cool document Where We Lay It All Out along with our research and we call it very appropriately we called it the business monetization Playbook go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that uh business monetization Playbook it's completely free you just click the link and you can see it back to the episode it's also like it's also hard now but easy later right if it's hard to figure out what the one thing is okay you take some upfront difficulty to to sort of make a bet or to figure that out but then from there on out your operating philosophy can be a lot simpler because you're now striped you know who you're focused on you know who you're catering to and you don't have to have these like the Val the decision tree becomes very very simple later if you make if you did the hard thing and it evolves over time right the complexity of these businesses often comes later as they become multi-product and international and you know all the rest of it and that's that's normal it's just um early on usually there's there's a key Insight that drives it you said you invest in markets and andrel when it was first started most people still don't have any idea about the about that industry when you're trying to like Master a topic like that what is your process yeah with with Ander um you know the main reason I got interested in defense Tech was because the big tech companies were running away from it right Google shut down Maven and I was like well of course we're going to need National Defense whether you're a Democrat or Republican like of course you know like you want to protect Western values there's conflict in the world there's Bad actors but to push back on that I'd be like yeah but there's like I'm I'm ignorant to the industry which is why it's easy for me to push back I would say yeah but there's like 10 other companies in that space you know they got it covered like how do you how do you learn enough to know that there's like an interesting opportunity yeah I mean I guess it's a bunch of stuff one is obviously you just read what you can right two is uh in some cases you look at Market structure and growth rates and that that kind of stuff third is you look at technology shift I want to break down on that what's your resource for the second one uh we just go and do the work I mean you look at what are the companies and obviously there's like analyst reports and market research and all that stuff but you can also just ask okay how many players are in the market is it consolidating or not what's the growth rate on it what is the margin structure and the approach that they're taking as a business right so for example um the traditional defense tech companies or what are known as Cost Plus which means if you have a million dollar drone they charge 5% so they can't make more than 5% margin they make 50 can a drone your andreil you can sell 10 better drones for a million dollars you make 50% margin which is traditional Hardware margin you make 10 times the margin dollars and so one of the things that people don't appreciate about Andel as a business is it's a market cap expansion in the defense world because you have a higher margin higher leverage business right and so you need a different business model which they they've come up with um there just a bunch of stuff like that right did you how early did you invest in Andel I think you were like the first round it was just the founders yeah and so was it you hear Palmer talking about this then you go research the market or had you just independently been curious about this market and then no it's it's back to what I was saying earlier which is Google shut down Maven and I was like oh my God the big tech companies are running away from this what a wonderful opportunity for a startup and so I actually called one of the people at Google that I knew who was working on Google Cloud which the maven team was part of at the time and I said hey did all the people who wanted to do Maven quit and protest and he's like no no no it was all the people who are against Maven who quit the rest of people are still here so I like okay where do I find somebody who wants to work on this um and so I just started poking around and um I met I ran into try at something and we started talking and he mentioned he was working on it I got super excited about it so I invested in their first round or they were kind enough to let me invest in their first round I should say that's way more impressive than meeting Palmer like the fact that you came to that a similar you guys were sniffing around the same stuff independently that's pretty impressive well yeah but I'm also you the best people I get to interact with they sort of have the same uh laid-back approach as you which is just like I don't know I just kind of do the work I think I was fortunate blah blah blah then you start to peel back layers and you're like oh so this thing you called luck was actually you I read that Maven story too I didn't think to myself wow what a wonderful opportunity I just moved on with my life right so uh you know I don't know if you've read the four levels of luck thing but I think number two or three is uh luck favors the prepared the prepared mind meaning because you know what you're looking for you can actually spot luck when it presents itself whereas the average person might see that same thing and not understand what they're looking at and so when you saw that Maven story you saw the opportunity that wow if the big technology players are running away from defense this huge category that means there's an opportunity for a new technology company in defense and so what you know what I find fascinating is is peeling that back uh and actually understanding like wow that was incredibly intentional and I get what you're saying that not every one of those rabbit holes you go down leads to an andil seed round uh but the fact that it ever did is is remarkable because that's like a career- making you know single investment even let alone the other 40 that you did like that I also want to go back to like you said something about uh you know Market first and there's that great quote like uh when a great entrepreneur meets a bad Market only one of them keeps their reputation um the bad market and so how uh what's another example from your portfolio that you can think of that drives home this kind of like Market first where the market first approach LEDs you to do something that um that worked out uh you know I did a lot of crypto investing in like 2017 is 2016 through 2018 and that was because there was such an obvious C change from an adoption and sort of Technology basis there you know the AI stuff is another one you know all the AI companies I invested in was a little bit like hey the Market's Shifting the technolog is Shifting the fli side of it is there's lots of things that I invested in that only in hindsight could I come up with a theme right I invested in notion air table and retool within I don't know two years of each other whatever the time frame was but at the time there was no low code no code kind of thesis it was just these are really interesting Founders working in interesting areas and so in hindsight there was a market or at least there was a trend but at the time it was just like these are smart people working on good stuff and so it's a little bit of that um how do you balance both of those perspectives and sometimes your thesis driven and sometimes you're just like you know what the thousands of great Founders out there working on ideas are going to come up with better ones than I am and so you know let's let's have a open mind on everything I think it was on the information or something like that they talked about how you had just raised like a billion dollars and that you famously didn't have any employees and Sam mman has this or I don't know who said it I thought it was Sam Alman where he said something like a one or two person billion dollar company is going to be a thing now because of AI but that's kind of what you've already done um you know it already existed before that Minecraft was like I don't know what three people when Microsoft bought it but that's sort of like what you're doing like you've got a pretty huge business with two or three or however many people you have or up until recently I think according to these these articles you had like two people um I mean I think there's a long history of this kind of stuff and if if you look at the world's biggest hedge funds or you look at a lot of later stage firms they tend to have that structure right and so if you look at a traditional investment firm there's usually one or two people who do most of the good Investments I think in general there's this odd collapsing down to a handful of people in many types of Endeavors but the reality is there have been multiple businesses that have hit enormous scale that have been quite small and I think Minecraft is really a canonical example of that again there's also the need to go big sometimes right sometimes you want to win the market and you should hire a ton of people and so I think the future of T person companies at least in the medium term is very overstated I think AI is largely going to be business as usual and certain types of teams are going to shrink a lot right I'm an investor in a company called decagon for example that's working on the customer success side and that's an area where I think there'll be enormous leverage to existing customer success reps but probably there's an overall shrinkage in that industry if you look at things like what Clara announced around their use of AI and customer success right so I think certain teams will get impacted first versus others through AI I think the two person AI company is largely in the future but there are historical precedents of this happening before AI right do you measure um I mean obviously you measure but I guess like what is the metric that you keep track of for your own investing so like you know at the top of this we talked about you know number of unicorns but you know you can look look at irr you can look at your DPI you can you know I did a deep dive on YC the other day and there's like some insane number I'm going to butcher it because I I don't have it right in front of me but like Sam I don't know if you know this but like the first 10 years of YC they basically turned like something like 12 million dollar into like 10 billion dollar of value for them from themselves because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically like was 7% 7% but it even diluted down like the airbnbs the drop boxes like just the F even just the the top five companies they let's say they net own like 2% of these when they go public I mean they basically had a you know 320x on their money in that first decade and then a lot of people now think that they're you know maybe have they've sort of lost their touch or the batch size are too big or the valuation is too high and actually like their hit rate has gone up even as the batch size has gone up it's pretty pretty wild Eli do you do you have a metric that you look at that you kind of you're proud of or that that's the main metric for you of how you've done in terms of the actual money and money out you know the most important thing to me and obviously you know I want to be a fidu Sherry for other people's money a lot of my own money is in the funds I invest Etc so obviously there there's a financial return aspect of it but to me the most important things are probably twofold one is um making sure that founders of Yumi is a useful and positive resource and two is being involved with the most important Technologies and technology companies in the world CU I I think that's how you drive societal impact so I view I view technology as a lever on the world right I'm not an angel investor but you're such a hard person to compete against because you're like you it just you it's very strange that you're an investor because you don't seem like you're Money Motivated you know what I mean and that's a really challenging person to compete against because that's the type of person who wins in a lot of stuff it's the one who's not actually caring about the money but who's caring about mission AR versus mercenary type of vibe do you know what I mean yeah I know what you mean I think Nala has a great framework on this um because you know John dor used to ask you know are you a missionary or mercenary to Founders in the 90s and of course you had to say I'm a missionary right like how could you possibly say you're mercenary and the's streamwork is um is like well of course early in your career you're at least partially a mercenary otherwise you're never going to find the opportunity and go in it and then later in your life you're a missionary right you're not Zero Sum you're trying to do things for the greater good and then uh once you've made it in your career you should become an artist you should be doing it for the love of The Craft and now for each person there's a different mix of that over time and I think you know for me the motivator is very much technology is a lover on the world right that's why I was trying to do biology that's why I detect that's you know it's like how do you do the important things in the world now if you're working on the most important problems in the world with the best people then probably you end up with a good Financial return because you're in the middle of the stuff that matters right um but that doesn't have to be the motivating goal and that's why sometimes I don't know if you've ever sat at a dinner which is allc is it's like really boring because you're surrounded by at least a subset of people who are very money-driven and the conversation I'll give you an example one time I was sitting at a friend's um wedding dinner and I just happened to get seated at a table where a lot of the other people were um his board which meant a lot of investors and I sat next to somebody from a wone firm and um I said hey what are you interested in these days and he said crypto and I said oh great we can talk about distribute consensus and trustless systems and censorship uh resilient products and all this stuff and I said that's that's great like what are you excited about in crypto and he looks me in the eyes and he says you can make a lot of money at it I was like H I thought he was joking right I started laughing I'm like oh that's so funny no seriously he's like no that's that's it that's not a really interesting conversation well one of the things I liked uh is that on your website you publish some ideas that you're interested in or you're working on right now or you want people to come help you pull off I'd love if we could rip through a couple of these uh let's start with one that caught my eye he said I want to do a new chain of K through 12 schools inspired by ancient Greece what's that all about yeah I mean I think uh fundamentally um anybody who has kids realizes that you know there may be certain as aspects of um the education system that are emphasized and deemphasized and it feels like there's four or five things that are really useful for kids to learn and I think it'd be great to um try and help establish something that could be used broadly um across you know uh cities or regions across the country that would really focus on some of those basic aspects of learning what did the ancient Greeks do what what do the ancient Greeks have to do with this uh it's just use as an example really what you need to find is what is the framework that you're going to use to apply so that you have some compass and consistency and there's a certain emphasis on reasoning and logic and thinking and discourse and debate that I think was was resident in that time there's an emphasis on mathematics there was an emphasis on writing there was an emphasis on trying basic forms of understanding you know that's when you had Archimedes and lovers and that's when you had early um interesting mathematics emerge and um that's when you had great philosophical treaties written so you know I think there's a lot of that's also when you focus a lot on beauty and art there's a lot of emphasis on the physical and being physically fit and resilient so there's there's a lot of stuff there now a lot I I remember when I I lived in SF from 12 to 20 and I think there was a a handful of schools that were started for elementary kids it was alt school one of them and was there a Wonder school is that does that ring a bell those were more kind of like Hey we're gonna use technology Etc I don't think there's any need for technology I think you just need a couple good teachers and like a reasonable curriculum and so again I I think it's not that that I'm not trying to reinvent the school system I just think you could go back to certain types of Basics it's interesting there's a school in San Francisco called proof school which I think is fascinating um I think their their line or motto is like for kids who love math and they have a very strong emphasis on mathematics and their curriculum and you know kids are doing machine learning in like 10th or 11th grade and um you know I I find things like that kind of inspiring where they're like okay we're going to take a different lens on it and our lens is just kids who love math and let's find out what's the right curriculum for those kids and maybe some of the early literature classes emphasize sci-fi because those are the types of books they like and maybe the the history we focus on is XYZ versus something else and so I just think um that's a good example of like a really smart approach to schooling um there's a variety of people who've done these differentiated approaches what's your plan with uh with this school thing is you're you're looking for kind of an entrepreneur to spearhead it what what are you looking for uh yeah I need somebody to spearhead it I think um you know traditionally there's this directly responsible individual or drri problem right it's really easy to come up with ideas and then usually you need um help executing them and so you know it's something that'd be happy to sponsor uh but I I really would need to find somebody who can drive that sort of thing dayto day you know my kids are very happy in the schools that they're currently in so it's more just something that I think would be societally useful to do more broadly um and then uh especially if you can do it as a chain then you end up with some sort of consistency and the ability to bring it to different populations that may not have access to this sort of schooling and other things and so I think there's a really interesting project to be had there what other ideas Sean did you have listed there uh there's one cool one you you said you I think got a PhD biology and you talked about longevity you've looked into a lot of longevity you funded clinical trials and you said something that um I was curious about you said there's some exciting things that are going on in longevity uh you mentioned a company called bioage and how they have a new drug for muscle okay you have my attention what is the new drug for muscle and generally what's exciting to you about that space yeah I mean biow is a company that just went public um and is in their quiet period so there probably isn't a 10 I should say about them I was an early investor there and a board Observer and um I think I was the first investor in that company actually it's a the the CEO is this really exceptional PhD and post talk I think she did her post talk at Stanford biocomputation of aging and you know they now have um different uh drugs in different phases of clinical trials or pre pre-clinical work and all that should be in their S1 and in their public Financial materials that I would encourage people to go look at but in general I think that aging is an area that's been dramatically underinvested in and part of that is because of the structure of big Pharma and you know that that industry tends to have very old companies right sort of driving the agenda which has its own implications then obviously it's it's highly regulated uh but also if you just look at for example the National Institutes for aging which is a very small budget relative to the NCI for cancer or other parts of the NIH and most of that budget just goes to Alzheimer's and so actual fundamental Research into aging is quite sparse we know that aging is a developmental program that can be perturbed right I actually worked on that for my PhD I worked at the intersection of Aging longevity in um excuse me longevity cancer and Insulin there's certain evolutionarily conserved Pathways that if you tweak them you end up with organisms that'll live a lot longer right you can knock out a gene and SE allans that lives two three times longer for example as a healthy adult and and we know that there's drugs that do that in mice Etc genes that do that in mice which means you can do drugs um I like how you're saying we know as if uh me or Sam know anything we don't know this you you you smart PhD people know this and uh can you explain in Lay from what you just said you said there's like we know that every He he'll say like a sentence and there's like five things and I'm like wait what yeah five tabs need to open in my browser okay seans they're living 2x longer uh you said that aging is a something driven thing a developmental program so basically there's a few different theories of Aging one of the theories of Aging is you just accumulate a bunch of damage over time and systems break because of that damage mechanical damage type of it's just mechanical damage you get hit by sunlight and UV and whatever um and then there's another view of Aging which is this more almost like a developmental program that's regulated by signals in your body just as you know when you go from a baby to a child to an adult or whatever that's just a developmental program and if you look at different organisms different organisms will have different clocks for aging right and so why why can turtles live so long or why why do certain animals die so young right and you're like it's just a developmental program they have a set lifespan that's genetically defined and why would that be the case like why would we have an off button uh you know there's all these theories and who knows I mean I don't I'm you know I don't know uh there there's theories but I don't know which theor is right um and uh the the other piece of information that we have is that we know that there's certain drugs that will extend lifespan in multiple organisms you take a drug and or you give a drug to something and it lives longer rra a mice in to be example where in mice um mice will live 10 to 30% longer based on actually their sex right so female mice I think will live longer than male mice on Rapa m and then there's Knockouts that you can do in genes and if you knock out a gene certain organisms will live a lot longer and that means that you can develop a drug for it right that's how the drug industry works you can do a drug that mimics a gene knockout or a gene up regulation and you end up with the same effect and so we know that you can make things live much longer and there is very little being done in people around that and so the question is why right and imagine if you had another 30 or 40 or 50 healthy years and when you say the question is why what's the answer is it that uh it's not funded enough it's not safe enough there's some other commercial disincentive for three things it's not funded enough uh for all sorts of reasons um second is from a regulatory framework perspective until very recently the FDA did not have like a a good definition of of what it means to build an aging drug right uh because in general this sort of three in the broader medical world aging is not considered a disease it's considered a natural state and so why would you develop a drug against a natural state and so uh there's a company called Loyal which is doing aging and dogs and they actually defined a series of like end points is that Kevin Rose is that the thing Kevin Rose invested in I think he talked to us about it I don't know that's like my favorite like longevity company he like yeah forget the humans let's save like I'm all about it let's save the dogs I think it's both uh going to have an easier regulatory pathway but also uh good for society like uh my dog living longer I I I support nothing more than than that um does that what have they found is that working I haven't kept up with the like actual science of the company yeah I I I I don't know I'm not an investor though I think the founder is quite good um I just haven't uh been involved there um you know as I mentioned one of the main things I've been involved with in that is a company called bioage which again just went public and there's all sorts of information there in the public domain now about them that is worth looking up you uh you know there what was that crazy quote it was like um what Silicon Valley nerdy people are doing for fun that's like what everyone else is going to do in the next like 10 or 15 years or something like that nerds do on the weekend I hope not because then there's going to be a lot of veganism which sounds awful well that's what I was going to ask you which is like you uh you kind of fit that stereotype you have a lot of resources and you're in the know with a lot of like interesting new things are you taking any like interesting Pharmaceuticals are you doing metformin what do you think is interesting uh right now that you think will be a little bit more popular in two three four five years yeah the honest answer is I don't know i' I've tried to stay away from taking anything chronically unless I think it would have a huge impact and so far there isn't anything in the market that would really map to that you know a lot of it honestly is like do exercise do sleep do eat well you know there's there's reasonably good data around rap ayon that people should work with their doctor on and sort of figure out if it but you're not no yeah I haven't done anything there so again I've I've tried to ask Let Me Wait until there's something that I feel is big enough impact some people for example in the Aging Community will take a certain subclass of statins um for heart disease and neuro and then they'll take um I think a subset was taking some baby aspirin similarly for heart disease so there's some people have done some things that um uh again you should talk to your doctor about if if you want to consider stuff like that I haven't done anything like that because I just don't want to take things every day when Sam says that quote about you know what the Nerds are are doing on the weekends and what they're tinkering with in their spare time is what we'll we'll all be doing you know 10 years from now I'm just going stra to hardcore gene therapy so I'm just gonna yeah I'm just kidding I'm gonna crisper my genome but are you kidding I mean it sounds pretty cool I'm kidding yeah yeah I think um a lot of that stuff feels very premature to me there are some people doing self-experimentation like that in the public domain I I just don't know that some of those things will work it's it's kind of interesting because I feel like when people talk about Gene delivery there's like three or four aspects of it that matter and everybody focuses now on sort of the crisper side of it which is can you modify a gene in a in a Cell versus can you target it to the right cells will your immune system Target those cells and turn it off like there's all this other stuff that H can you hit enough cells for it to matter there's all this other stuff that traditionally have been the real issues of gene therapy that are aren't being addressed as effectively as sort of the crisper Casta so you um you've been interested in longevity earlier than I would say like this current current kind of wave of interest you know I think you not not only did you study it in school you it's I saw on your site you said you personally identified a gene that's involved in a lifespan you funded your own clinical trial at Stanford it didn't work but you're like it's okay I'll try I I'm happy to try again um I'm curious what do you think of Brian Johnson and what he's doing you know I've I've never met him um I haven't looked deeply into what he's doing so I think it's great that people are raising awareness for this kind of stuff but I don't have any specific Insight or opinion like I just haven't looked into it I'm surprised how come you haven't looked into it that seems like it's right up your alley I've been busy in terms of just focusing on like hardcore biofarma for this stuff right like drug development that can benefit Society at large that's that's what I V so it's just a different area of Focus right what I want to know is are there any ideas on there that are just they're just cool but not necessarily like a world changing serious thing like do youever his monuments thing can he talk about The Monuments thing I think that's dope oh um so one thing again I need I need somebody to come work with me on this and I'd happily uh fund it is um if you look at every society is sort of its peak um they they would build large scale monuments towards progress and so it's like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World honestly I don't know if you know the the origins of the Eiffel Tower but it was built in the late 1800s for a world fair in Paris to show off French steel making prowers right it was an O to technology and an O to steel making cuz steel was like modern tech and it was very controversial at the time people ugly and all this stuff right a lot of bridges were were built in America at that period you know with Andrew Carnegie they were built with that idea of like let's prove so like the eids bridge in St Louis it was the same thing where they would do these they would build these amazing Bridges and then they would do like all these funny things like they would get an elephant to walk across it to prove to prove that it works it's strong you know what I mean and uh but yeah but so like these like flexes uh like existed there's a there's a Flex side of it and there's an inspirational side of it like where are the large scale inspiring pieces of beauty and art in society anymore like where have they gone why aren't we doing those anymore Vegas sphere that's the last one no seriously the sphere I think I think that's a real example of large scale societal Beauty right well you know what another example that sounds silly is the Blue Angels and um I was having this debate with someone the other day about how much money the American government funds air shows uh and I was like that's totally worth it because whenever you go to one of these things you definitely feel a sense of patriotism and you're like this is awesome like this is like I'm in awe of this and and same way with going um going to the Moon um you know in the 60s and 70s we've we spent a significant amount of money on this uh a lot more than you would AR You could argue that we've spent on longevity which is actually a shame but we we you know there is a history in America of doing things just CA you know just to like Flex or just to like CBR us to but what was the last thing thought that we did it's been decades right it's been decades and I actually find it to be quite saddening and and that's actually sort of what you said is once you get to a point where you're financially secure uh on a human basis on a human level you do things uh for art for artistic reasons because it makes your soul feel good I I do wish we did that a little bit more as a country um but there was a period between like 1870 right post Civil War up to like 1960s or so right around when JFK passed like where there was this like Series in America America where we did a bunch of like interesting experiments where you could just say it was just C you know what I mean and I and I really appreciate that yeah I'm part of that is going to be regulation and then part of that is this odd post-modern cynical thinking right there's a very strong anti-progress movement in the US you know basically the idea is um you buy land and you construct giant monuments that are inspiring I don't know I mean it's pretty simple-minded but imagine if you walked out in San Francisco and you looked across you know to the The View with the the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz and there's a giant statue that's kind of an ODed to the future why you have that how much of these things even cost you know the land it depends on where you do it and it depends on the regulatory framework um the land uh in in major metros tends to be the more expensive part of it actually versus the construction on a ratio basis and okay let's walk through an example what's one that you you fantasized about you're like okay what if we did this that would be cool I would be there was actually an island for sale in the bay um that ended up selling I can't remember for how much $29 or something just recently was that up by Stockton uh no it was in the bay it was actually in the in the in the water it was like a little island and um you know you you um it was on the market for a while I actually looked at it a couple times in terms of thinking H maybe this is a thing maybe this is an anchor thing but I just think it's going to be so hard to do anything in the Bay Area right I mean it's it's hard enough to construct a public toilet like are they really going to let you bu build a beautiful Monument uh right um on any reasonable time frame uh but there there's lots of other Metro areas that are much more amenable to this and there's a global version of this and there's a US version but often in in major metros it's the land and then the construction actually isn't that bad because really what you're building is a big statue and in some cases you're building out a base or Foundation under it that may be part of a building maybe you want to build an elevator up if you have a big view or Vista but you're not building a large commercial property with all the plumbing and electrical and you know all the extra stuff that goes into it right often these things are kind of like Hollow shells with and what would it be of like you know what's our equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower that's like you know for just to demonstrate their their steel prowess like what do you think would be the modern equivalent that would have some meaning I think there's lots of stuff you can do I actually think um you know one of the things that the the intention around Monumental which is what we're calling the project uh is to also solicit ideas from people who live in locals and what do they want right what do they view as inspiring and what do they want to drive their children their children's optimism forward right this is in some sense an Ode to progress but more importantly it's a way to encourage the future how do you encourage inspiration and young people right how do you get people jazzed about the future and technology and optimism and doing things and Building Things and moving Society forward and I think part of this lack of ongoing societal Beauty and ongoing great works is a reflection of cynicism that to your point came in in the 60s and 70s and is really kind of spoiled the W well yeah I mean that's my that's one of my favorite erors to read about basically like in the mid-60s uh Malcolm X JFK RFK there's a b there's a series of assassinations and like one can argue that that was like the death of innocence in America and so it's like kind of like an interesting period to to to read about maybe I mean you look at all the stuff that happened in history before that a pretty awful stuff happened roughly every couple decades right I mean World War II was not a Happy Time World War I was not a happy time the Civil War was not you know there's a lot of that's gone down no doubt I feel like maybe the the Boomer self- internalized things in a different way because they were self-absorbed as a generation and so maybe for them it was a big moment but it just seems like there was just a shift there was some mindset shift and I maybe that is what it was attributed to I don't know what it's attributed to have you ever uh I don't know if you guys Sean you definitely have well maybe you have actually Sean driving to Duke do you guys ever remember seeing um all these crosses on the side of the highway in the South I bet Ari has but like you know there was this guy who was um he when he uh he was old and he had saved up roughly three or four million doar and he spent all of that money building crosses on the side of the highway now regardless if you like dig Christianity or not it doesn't matter but I always thought it was so interesting that like this guy dedicated that money to that if you you guys don't remember seeing this it was like a big deal in the South it would like you'd be driving to the South and every 50 or 100 miles you would just see this huge cross and that's all you saw or you would see these Billboards that says Jesus saves you you remember those yeah seen those I never understood what that is dude and it has a phone number that you could call and I would call that phone number every once in a while just to see what would happen and and at this point a lot of it goes to dead a dead phone number but it was basically a lot of it came down to this one man who had saved roughly $3 million and he spent it on that then other churches started following following it and started doing it and I always thought it was really interesting uh the idea of just spending money just for this cause and and your logical brain is like that's silly but then like your heart is like oh that's actually kind of an interesting idea how much of your own money would you spend on doing this Monument project um I don't know I mean I think it'd be good to try and get the first thing up and running and then you know do it as a joint effort with lots of people because again the hope is you actually feed the needs of local places um you know another example where I think there's this sort of craft craftsmanship applied uh there's a park in Oslo where um somebody spent I don't know was a decade two decades building statues in this one park it was an artist who went in and you just and you go in and it's all this consistent this consistent series of statues from one person right one artist who spent a big chunk of his life making them uh I think he made something like 200 sculptures over a few decades right and so there's other forms of this in terms of people people trying to contribute works and the question is why AR again why aren't we doing it like what happened what what happened to us Society to stop doing all this really inspiring amazing stuff yeah well I think the good news is it only takes one right like I think Elon showed that when when he started doing projects that none of the other entrepreneurs really wanted to do and no investors really wanted to fund and then it created this wave and it just kind of sparked inspiration where now a bunch of people do that right like I think the closest thing we have to that is like Tesla and SpaceX to be honest of of these like that's our moon mission right it's like wow this guy just poured his entire talent and net worth into these like super highrisk low probability you know useful for society hard but awesome projects and he pulled it off and you know that changed the wiring in every Founder's brain you know it doesn't even matter what you're doing you might be doing some boring insurance company but you still that example still lives in your brain right and I I think that's that's pretty powerful you're a pretty serious person you take serious like you you like you see problems and you're like I want to solve them is it what do you do just for shits and giggles like just to unwind before you have kids there's all sorts of things you do that the time goes away for once you have them but you know I used to do I don't to call it like intensive travel you know so I'd go to India for two months and do yoga for two months there with a guy who learned from a guy in a cave kind of thing or you know just just different forms of very immersive travel was one thing I used to do a lot lot of if somebody today had the freedom to do that what what would be your what's Gil's guide to uh to that intensive travel what would you tell what was really transformative for you or like what was your approach to that yeah I think it's basically um spend at least a month in one city and adopt decide to learn something there and so you know maybe you want to go learn how to draw or maybe you want to go to France and learn to to make pastries or maybe you want to you know in my case it was go to India and do this very int yoga experience or maybe you know and um especially if it's part of a community that you join you get really immersed in interesting ways and not just the topic but also the people around it and the local people right because then you're really forced to be part of something there's actually a a a person I know who was about to start a company and I convinced him to go do this because he had an extra month or two and he said it was like the best month he'd spent he went down to Brazil and um uh enrolled in some classes down the air and you just spent a month doing it and so I I personally think it's super interesting and how often in your life can you actually get a chance to do things like that but also it is a different form of travel than hey I'm going to um you know I went on a Chinese tour group of Italy once and on these Chinese tour groups they try to see as many cities as possible in as short a time as possible that's check the box right okay there's the Leaning Tower pza check we saw it it's like you stop for 10 minutes and then you run to the next thing you know that's very different from hey I'm just going to sit in one place for a month or two that's awesome uh yeah I've I've had great experiences doing that we used to go to Bren ireis for you know basically four to four to five weeks one live in one city live like a local and everywhere I would go I would do two things I would play basketball uh because that was like something I grew up doing so it was like a a native fluency I had even if I couldn't speak the language I could always kind of make my way in there but also I would go um if I ever travel with my brother-in-law he loves Jiu-Jitsu and I I'll never go with him to a Jiu-Jitsu class here in the States but Jiu-Jitsu has this like really intense camaraderie and openness and inclusiveness if you go to so we went to jiujitsu gyms in Spain and and you immediately feel like you're one of the people and you're learning from them and they have actually different techniques and again we don't even speak the language but man it's like an incredible fast way to bond or get actually feel like the jiujitsu community is one of the most vibrant ones right now along those lines yeah and to your point it's basically you go anywhere in the world and you plug in that's how this type of yoga I used to do was it was the same thing you just show up and you knew how it worked and everybody was kind of in the same uh they had the same Vibe and they were part of the same kind of crew like you were instantly adopted and my sense is that Jiu-Jitsu Community today is a good example of that where you just you show up you're instantly part of it they pull you in everybody has a common thing to talk about everybody has common interests in a really positive way even though it's a very diverse group around the world right um and there aren't that many communities like that and I think there's almost these interesting questions of like how did these form and why did they persist and and all the rest but this is back to my point on doing quote unquote a hobby or learning something that it's actually plugging into a community like that I think is important I love that I think of all the things we talked about today that was the most useful uh surprisingly right I wanted to learn about investing from you but I got a totally different Golden Nugget out of this where should people find you if they want more uh I guess they could find me on Twitter um you know I'm at a l Gill and then you know just uh hope more people go and build interesting things I think you know there's a lot to do we appreciate you great yeah thanks so much for the time all right well take care [Music]