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This isn't your average.
Podcast.
And he's not your average host. This is the James Alteger Show.
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One of the best episodes ever. was when I interviewed Peter Thiel. Obviously he's the billionaire founder of PayPal, Facebook, Colantier, so many other companies. This episode I had done a while ago, but in this episode, he gave me so much great advice. Here it is, a decade later, and it's still probably among the most valuable advice. I've ever gotten on this podcast. The same exact advice and stories apply now. Here's Peter Thiel, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of history.
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Hello, this is Peter.
Hey Peter, this is James Aldesher.
Hi, how you doing?
¶ A Note from James - Why this conversation still ranks among the best.
Good, Peter. Thanks so much for taking the time. I I'm really excited for this interview.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on your show.
Oh, no problem. So I'm gonna introduce you, but first I wanna mention your book, Zero to One, Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. And Peter, we're just gonna dive right into it.
That's awesome.
So I wanna actually like break down the title almost word by word. But before I do that, I want you to tell me what the most important thing that's happened to you today. Because I feel like You're like every other day you're starting like a Facebook or a PayPal or a SpaceX or whatever. What happened to you today that you looked at? Like what interesting things do you do on a daily basis?
Well it's I don't know if there's a single thing that's the same from day to day, but there's always an inspiring number of great technology ideas, great science ideas that people are working on. And so even though there are many different reasons that I have concerns about the future and
trends that I don't like in our society and in the larger world. One of the things that always gives me hope is how much people are still trying to do, how many new technologies they're trying to build. Spent today looking at a variety of financial technology opportunities this morning and met with
¶ Zero to One, in one line - "Do something new, different, fresh, strange."
brainstorming in that space, which is an area where there's probably a lot of opportunity for reinventing what banks are, what finance does, even though it also has the challenge that it's going to face more regulatory headwinds in the decade ahead.
So what's an example? Like you were brainstorming, like how do you run a brainstorming session and uh what does it mean?
I met uh a guy who's a founder of a finance tech company called Wonga in the UK, which is a sort of payday loans business and then there's sort of a question, you know, what what we could be What one could do from there. It was an extremely fruitful conversation. And you know, there's always sort of a question, what's working? Are there certain models that you can look at to copy and then there's of course always a sense that
Once people are already doing things, uh you can't quite do it. So the you know, one of the critical things in in starting businesses is this need to do something new, different, fresh, strange. This is sort of the zero to one ethos.
Well, and and I want to get to that. So first off, just as as intro, I'm talking to Peter Thiel. You're the founder of PayPal. You're the first investor in Facebook. You've invested in, I don't know, dozens of other companies, including SpaceX, Palantirs, one of your biggest investments, all very impressive stuff. And the book Zero to One.
I I feel it almost it blew my mind. It almost turned up the whole mechanics of starting up a company upside down. Because I think a as you point out in the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, you basically say that over the decades entrepreneurs, particularly lately, have become more risk averse. So rather than come up with a completely new innovative technology, they want to incrementally improve on old
technologies and then just I'm gonna be extra cynical. Then they just wanna kind of flip or sell their company and move on to the next one. And zero to one sort of says, Look, we've gotta we've gotta b start with zero and build s build a monopoly so that this is how we take over the world. Build a monopoly and then scale it if you wanna take over the world.
Yes. My book is an exhortation against incrementalism, against
¶ Competition vs. Capitalism - Why perfect competition kills profits; aim for uniqueness.
small incremental businesses. You do not want to start the one hundredth online pet food company or the five thousandth restaurant in San Francisco. Extreme competition, extreme undifferentiation is not synonymous with capitalism. I think there's sort of many myths that I take on, but perhaps the biggest myth is this idea that capitalism and competition are synonyms. I believe that capitalism and competition are antinymped.
A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect competition is a world where all the capital gets competed away. I think the greatest idea in business that does not get articulated is that great companies
uh do something unique and because of this unique thing that they do have monopoly like pricing power. And so there's sort of a question how can one go about creating a new business that creates a valuable monopoly for oneself and for the rest of society because it If you if you've done something new, it also creates value for all the consumers.
And Peter, just to mention, I feel like this is sort of a a philosophical way to look at startups, but you can also look at like Facebook, for instance, you can argue was an incremental improvement over other companies like Myspace and Friendstore, but It started off as a monopoly on like Harvard students. So that's the the monopoly way to look at it.
Yeah, although it there's always it's always a question of what counts as genuinely new. I would argue that Facebook genuinely solved the identity problem because it was about people's real identities on the internet. It was not about fake identities or alternate identities which MySpace started in Los Angeles. Its core audience was people in Hollywood who pretended to be someone other than who they were.
Facebook started at Harvard and it was about people representing themselves accurately on the internet. And so much of the early attempts at social networking had been about creating alternate worlds, virtual realities in which maybe
I'd pretend to be a dog and you'd pretend to be a cat and we'd sort of interact in some strange new way in this different medium. And uh Facebook actually was the first company to mirror the real identities of the real world onto the internet, which gives it both its power
¶ Facebook's original edge - Real identity as the breakthrough vs. MySpace's alt-persona culture.
It raises some of the concerns people have about privacy because it is so real.
Yeah. So it's interesting like a lot of the uh interviews you've given in the past, you sort of say technology came to a standstill like in the late sixties. And you and I are about the same age. You're about three months older than me. And I sort of feel like when we were born, everything was finished. Like the highway system was done, plumbing was done, all the tunnels and bridges were finished.
computers were made and they were just getting a little bit better every day. And even the internet was sort of created around nineteen seventy two or so and then just got better and better, but nothing blindingly new. And you point out in one interview that, you know, even like Twitter's just a simple web page, really. So where do you think the next kind of huge technology innovations could happen?
Well, I'm a little bit more positive on the history of computers and the internet in the last forty years. So I do think there's been a lot of innovation in that area. Certainly some of the foundational technologies were developed in the fifties and sixties. But I do think a lot of the applications, whether it's web browsers or search engines or social networking sites.
I I would consider as genuine innovations that have happened in recent decades. The story of innovation I tell is one that we've been in a world where there was innovation in bits but not in atoms. And so we've had a lot of innovation in computers, not so much outside of information technology. So there's been less innovation in transportation or energy or even biotechnology, medicine, nanotechnology.
space travel, all the futuristic technologies people envisioned in the fifties and sixties have done less well. You know, when one looks at the decades ahead from here, the straightforward prediction is to say that the computer revolution will continue.
¶ Bits vs. Atoms - Stagnation outside software and how biology could become an information science.
And I I do think that's true. It will continue to improve living standards, not as dramatically as one might hope. And so I think it's been a era of relative stagnation the last forty years because we've only had computers and nothing else. And then the more optimistic hope is that we will at some point start to see uh information technology, the world of bits, get reintegrated with the world of atoms and that we will see things like
genomics where there's a potential of biology becoming an information science. And when we when we think of biological systems as informational, we will be able to do far more than we could under the existing paradigms or other
Like what?
Well if you th if you think of a cell as a computer that can be programmed, there probably are all sorts of ways to it. That one could program it to turn off diseases, to kill to self destruct if you have a virus in it, you could figure out it would give us a mastery over biological systems analogous to what we now have over computational systems. And I think that that's a way that you could have tremendous progress on some of these
areas where where a biotechnology's been relatively stuck in recent decades. So again, this is not I'm not certain this will happen, but I think that's the optimistic thing that could happen. I fundamentally believe that the sort of slowdown we've had is not because we've run out of Ideas, or it's impossible to do anything new. It's not that nature is such that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and there's no low-hanging fruit left.
I think it is more of a cultural problem. It is that we are not trying as hard or we've regulated technology to death. There was never any low hanging fruit. It was always of intermediate height and we always had a reach for it to get to the next level. And I think we've not been trying as hard in recent decades.
And why do you think, not as a society, because I I think a lot of your analysis is societal, but why do you think individually, like what what what qualities do we need to cultivate as an individual to reach for those intermediate or higher hanging fruit?
Well, I I think there are a number of different ones, but certainly one that I you have to be willing to persevere on doing something that's not conventionally seen as working. I I start my book with this question, tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on. That's like an intellectual version, but then there's, you know, what great business is nobody doing, or what important research are people not working on?
And we've somehow become very egalitarian, very incrementalist, where we take our cues from other people around us. and we take as what is possible what other people are already doing. And so that's where you sort of end up going in circles. You know, one of the strange things in Silicon Valley is that so many of these successful entrepreneurs suffer from a mild form of aspirers or something like that.
¶ Personality and perseverance - Why mild contrarian wiring helps founders ignore status games.
And I always think of this as a incredible indictment of our society. What sort of society is it? where if you don't have Asperger's, you will pick up on all these subtle social cues that will discourage you from pursuing creative original ideas and that will tell you not to do it. So I think That's what we you know, I think we have the ideas, we have the ability to do them, and we can't let ourselves be uh discouraged by the conventional system which tells us not to pursue things.
It's really funny because there's almost like an evolutionary psychology component to this, which is that we think incrementally because we're concerned all the time about status.
So you're not c necessarily concerned about your status vis a vis vis the alpha male. You're concerned about your status vis a vis vis the person who's directly higher than you. So you just wanna make incremental improvements till you're directly higher than them. Whereas someone with like an Asperger's like quality, their chances are they're gonna be out of the whole chain and they're not gonna have
descendants a million years ago. So th these evolutionary characteristics we inherit now in terms of our ability to invent. I mean, you look at a lot of the people, even not just now, but a hundred years ago, people inventing things were totally Outside the norm of conventional society.
Certainly the archaic context was one where you had like a hundred fifty people in a tribe and so there's sort of certain ways in which you'd be conformist, certain ways you'd deviate that make sense within a hundred and fifty people. And we're now dealing in a global society of seven billion where maybe a conformity of what the other
millions of people or billions of people are doing is just overwhelming. And so I think maybe the calibration is very different. I do think the communications revolution on the whole is a good thing. I think connecting the world is a good thing. But I wonder whether it has had this effect of discouraging people too quickly because you quickly get feedback. Someone else has already worked on this, someone may have already thought about this.
And when you get that feedback you stop trying it. We're in a world full of anti theories, of theories that tell you why you can't do things. And so I think a lot of potentially good ideas get shot down a little bit too quickly.
I love one of your first rules where you're describing kind of the opposite of what the conventional rules are. So you have four rules that are the opposite of the conventional rules. And one is where people should be encouraged to form a monopoly and have a proprietary technology and you have what I call the ten X rule.
Which you basically say a company should start when they have a technology that's ten times better than their closest competitor. So this way they're so far ahead, it's almost like a monopoly. And I think that's a very powerful way to look at it.
Just in any meaningful dimension. Certainly there's a technological dimension. You could say Amazon started with more than ten times as many books. as the next largest bookstore. So that made it very differentiated and very unique. And of course, when you have a real technological breakthrough, then you just have something that didn't exist at all. So you could say the Apple iPhone was a smartphone that worked.
before that there'd been no smartphone that worked. In some sense that was infinitely better than what existed before on on if you define it that way.
I wonder if it applies also not just of course to companies but to anything. To like, you know, if you write a book, it makes sure it's ten times better than, you know, the other books in your category or if you make a work of art is
¶ "10x or nothing" - The technology and/or experience must be an order of magnitude better.
Andy Warhol ten times better than the artist that came before him, and that's why he blew up so big. I wonder if that can uh that ten X rule can be applied to anything.
I like to apply it in context where you could at least have a axis on which you can measure things. I think it's difficult to measure what makes art ten times as good or a book ten times as good. And so in something like art or writing it's always a bit more qualitative. But yes, I think the qualitative version of the question is nevertheless important is
How is this differentiated in a way that's positive? What are you saying that other people are not saying? And if you're not saying something that's meaningfully different from what other people are saying, maybe there's not that much point to it?
I really do think in the beginning of your book, what was so interesting to me was the way you posed the monopoly versus competition question. Like we're almost brought up to think that monopolies are not so good for society. And you come up with a really great argument that monopolies are essential for innovation. Because in in a sense A monopoly is kind of storing up innovation for competition in the future. And so that's why you you encourage people when they're starting a business.
Obviously you can't be a monopoly over the entire United States, but find your small market where you can be a monopoly. And I think that's a very powerful concept.
Well there's several different concepts. I think one concept is certainly that if you're in a world of perfect competition, you will never make any profits on what you're doing. The key thing when you start a new technology business
¶ Monopoly thinking, ethically done - Create abundance by creating something truly new.
It's to create something that has value to other people and then to capture some fraction of the value you create. So you create X dollars in value, you capture Y percent of X. And X and Y are independent variables. One of the disturbing things in science and technology is that in many cases people have created incredibly valuable things for society, but they could capture no more than 0% of it.
Um this is true of a lot of science, a lot of basic science. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane but they didn't make a fortune in in air travel or most inventors find it very hard to capture any fraction of the value. And so it's you really need to think about both how do you create something valuable and then how can you go about capturing some fraction of the value you create.
Our legal system is very schizophrenic on this question of monopoly. On the one hand it's seen as something bad that's to be regulated, and then in other instances such as with patents or intellectual property, it's something we actually celebrate and protect. And I think great technology companies are like
It's the same idea as behind a patent or intellectual property where you're doing something new. And so it's not monopolies, not artificial scarcity, but it creates something new and therefore creates plenty where nothing had existed before.
Do you think part of the stance on monopoly and competition comes from the Puritan ethic that in order to get some value for ourselves, we need to compete in order to justify our reward?
I don't know if it's narrowly Puritan. I think that uh you know, the word already in a time of Shakespeare, the word ape meant both primate and to imitate, and so there is something very deep in In the human and you know this is how we learn language, we we learn culture by copying our parents, the people around us.
And so imitation is sort of very endemic to the human condition. And I think that the competition always involves a lot of imitation because you're the people you're competing with are people w where you're imitating them, they want the same thing, you're trying to do the same thing as they're doing. And so I do think the same thing.
tendency towards imitation is very deep. And that's one of the reasons people are so attracted to competition. They they find it strangely validating. If if you don't know what you want, you look to what other people want, you copy what they want. Everybody ends up copying everybody else. And this is how you end up with the hyper tracked education system where it's the most ferocious competition from K through twelve.
for all the same slots at the same few elite universities later. And that's sort of a paradigm of runaway competition.
Yeah, it's interesting because uh ultimately like look at you, you went to Stanford, then you went to law school, and then you didn't become a lawyer. Why compete against the billion other lawyers out there?
Well it was certainly my personal I I always like to say that I had sort of a rolling quarter life crisis from age eighteen to twenty eight where I had been tracked in all these ways and I gradually came to believe that the track were not the right things to do. And probably the really cathartic moment was when I worked at a large law firm in New York where from the outside everybody wanted to get in because it was seen as this prestigious job. You'd be set for life.
And on the inside, everybody wanted to get out, but people had no idea what else to do. And when I left after seven months, three days, one of the people down the hall told me that he couldn't believe I was leaving. He didn't realize it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. Which was odd, says you only had to go out the front door. But psychologically people could not imagine anything else because so much of their meaning of their identity was defined around competing with other people.
And were you scared when you walked out that door th that last time?
I was I was certain it was the right thing to do, but as I came into office that day it was like, Am I out of my mind to be doing this? Nobody quits their job this quickly. What will people think?
Like were your parents upset at you?
My parents realized that I was very unhappy and so they were confused. But they weren't that upset, you know. But I th I think in most cases you'd be encouraged to continue doing this in all sorts of ways that are probably questionable. And I I think if you sort of take this as a microcosm for our society writ large, the crisis of two thousand eight can be understood as a point where tracked careers, simply copying existing forms had somehow become exhausted. It had sort of run its course.
And we're now in this very perplexing time in our society where there's a need for a reset, there's a need to do something new, and we've not done this for I think forty years in a way. I think it's been the increasingly tracked, increasingly static society for forty years. So the need to do something new is very perplexing, very strange.
a way in which people are trying to do this in Silicon Valley, there are ways in which they're trying to do it in other contexts. But it's it is it is radically divergent from the way people have been taught as kids. through college and and so uh it's you know we we we have we're very schizophrenic on this. We we celebrate entrepreneurship in theory, but in practice it's it's it's not something people really wanna do.
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Well, and you know, you make this you you make this very interesting thought in the book that uh, you know, all these businessmen quote Sun Tzu's the art of war all the time, but what they're really the reason they're really doing it is because of competition, but that's not real business. It's the competition that's like war and business is more almost more cooperative in some sense. One of the things that was really great about your career is not so much
¶ The PayPal pre-history - Why long-running trust among teammates births more companies.
your particular arc, but then the arcs of all the people around you. So you started PayPal and then all of these ex employees of PayPal went on to form other companies. And so what kind of characteristics of PayPal led to this PayPal mafia.
Well, it's always hard to know exactly what was in the DNA. Pay PayPal was probably the single company in Silicon Valley that produced the most entrepreneurs, the most startups, with the possible exception of Fairchild Semiconductor itself, which was sort of um from which all the great semiconductors came out and the companies came out in the late sixties and seventies, most notably Intel.
And and so PayPal uh we've had probably of the there've been something like seven Companies started by ex PayPal people worth over a billion dollars.
Like which ones? Like like YouTube? What what are the companies?
Yelp, LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX. Palantir and Yammer. You YouTube was the first one to really succeed and there's been a whole series of them. I think we had a lot of strong personalities. We found a way for it to work. I think the learning at PayPal was that it was a tough business to build. We had a lot of competition, a lot of regulatory challenges, but we sort of figured out ways to overcome them. The lesson at PayPal was that you could build a great company, but it was
hard. It was not easy. It was not impossible. I think that when people come out of super successful companies like a Google or a Microsoft, they've often experienced business as too easy. And then they're set up to fail. Whereas if you come out of a company that's completely blown up and failed.
you often learn to l set your sights lower and your expectations lower. So I think failure is also somewhat overrated in our society because it actually does damage people. So I think PayPal was this intermediate case where people learned that it was hard but possible to build a great business. And then a lot of great friendships were forged and these were the bases for starting these new companies. One of the questions I always like asking people when they come in to start a business
Is what was the prehistory? How do they meet? How long have they known each other? How long have they worked together? Because I think a lot of these great companies are not. just solo efforts of of a single uh godlike person who does everything, but there are small teams that really work together well. And so the prehistory is important. Uh you know, if you if you met your co founder It's like if you get married to someone you meet at the slot machines in Las Vegas.
a reasonably long prehistory. You know, you were roommates in college, you spent years talking about how to build a company. You know each other's strengths and weaknesses. You understand the proper division of labor. when you're starting the business, you're able to speak to one another honestly about what's going on. And I think PayPal provided that sort of a prehistory for all the people who went on to start these companies.
And you point out like for employees and for co founders and so on. Everyone should know what they're doing. Like it should be clearly f defined what is your one thing that you're in charge of. And I think a lot of startups don't have that and it gets very ugly fast.
Well, it's the the way I describe this is if you're a psychopathic boss and you'd like the people working for you to fight each other for nothing at all, the formula for getting people to fight each other is to tell two people to do the exact same thing. I do think you get maximal cooperation when people's roles are defined in very differentiated ways so that people don't see their success.
as contingent on someone else's failure. You will succeed if you do your job, someone else will succeed if they do their job and their job is different from your job, so you can both succeed and it's not negatively correlated from one person to the other. In a startup the roles are very fluid and so there is a tendency for the roles to change. There's always a risk that they shift in ways where they tend to overlap more.
And so one of the critical things one needs to do as a founder or manager in an early stage startup is to continuously readjust the org chart, continuously redefine people's roles so that they remain differentiated all the way through. In large companies, the roles are normally differentiated, but it's normally just a sort of chronic bureaucracy where there's always sort of this low level unhappiness that's endemic to the organization.
Startups tend to be much more acute and manic and uh the ups are very high, the lows are very low, and you need to make sure that at the low points it doesn't blow up like it might in a primitive archaic tribe.
Well, and part of that is because you're you mentioned in the book, you're also hiring people you like and you wanna spend time with. So to some extent there's a family or friend component to recruiting that happens in a startup that doesn't happen in a large corporation.
Yes. I'm in favor of working with your friends. I know a lot of people think that's a bad idea, but I do think it's critical to find people with whom It's an intense period and so it matters a lot who you're working with and you want the people to be fundamentally aligned and on the same page and hopefully you can structure in a way where people will be even better friends at the end than that they were at the beginning.
And of course, this is where startups mirror kind of the outside world of startups. Like basically you should always spend time with people who are your friends as opposed to people you don't like. It's funny how big corporations forget this idea. And I think that's why, as you say, it's endemic to corporations that people are kind of unhappy in general at larger corporations, because they forget that people just like to spend time with people they legitimately like.
One of the rules I I was I I I was told once, uh one of the observations was that You could predict employee turnover. If someone had three really good friends at a company, they would almost never leave. If they had no good friends, much more likely to turn over. So I think one of the highest predictors of losing
talented people is whether or not they have great friends. So I don't think you need to just hire people you're friends with or anything like that, but I think hiring people that you'd like to become friends with or could become friends with is certainly a good question to ask.
So so so let me ask you this. When when Mark Zuckerberg first walked through your door with the idea of Facebook, and Facebook was obviously a small company at the time, he was a Harvard student, what did you see? What lit up your eyes?
It was already scaling pretty fast. They were already at twenty colleges. They had a hundred thousand people.
¶ Early Facebook investment logic - College-only looked "small," which was exactly the point.
All they needed was money to buy more computers to get to more users. So it's generally a rule that when all you need is computers, you need money just for computers because you have so much demand. That's a pretty good investment.
It was certainly a group of people that had been friends at Harvard for quite a while, so you did have that part of the prehistory. It was technically talented, which is not true of a lot of the social networking sites of the time. They succeeded in building it in a way that was Scalable, which had been a problem with some of the earlier companies like Friendster.
And so there was a number of different things that checked out. As an investor, I always like to ask the contrarian question. So the contrarian question for investors.
You know,
Wha why is it that this is a great company that wh and what do other people not see in this? Why do other people not see this? Certainly Facebook was a great company since it was growing like crazy, the valuation was reasonable and they only needed money to buy more computers because there was so much demand. I think people were missing it. in the two thousand four to two thousand six period, one of the biases investors have is always to just invest in things they themselves use.
And so since Facebook at the time was a college site. And there are basically no investors who are attending college. It was a systematically underestimated and how how intense the use case was was not appreciated by investors probably really until 2007 when Facebook It was opened beyond college students to the larger public.
And did did did Zuckerberg already have a plan in place? Like he he knew eventually he was gonna extend this to businesses and then to everybody?
It was you know, I I wouldn't say it was fully worked out in all detail, but but there was certainly this This extremely expansive plan from from very early on. And so, you know, people always talk about these companies like it was random, it was unpredictable, we had no idea what happened. That's the politically correct way to talk about it.
¶ Turning down $1B - The boardroom debate, optionality, and founder conviction.
But I do think there was sort of a a sense all the way through that Facebook with the potential to be this incredibly big and incredibly important medium. Most critical m uh decision, I believe, still in the history of Facebook was in July of two thousand six when Yahoo offered us a billion dollars. At the time the company had maybe Sold us college students. We had maybe thirty five million in revenues, forty million in revenues in oh seven, in oh six, and uh no profits.
We had this board meeting on a Monday morning. There were three of us on the board, myself, Jim Breyer, their investor, and Mark Zuckerberg. Both Jim and I Probably thought we should just take the billion dollars to be fair. Dr. Berg was twenty two years old at the time. He owned a quarter of the company. I started the meeting by saying, you know, this is gonna be a ten minute meeting. We're obviously just gonna turn it down.
The two of us then said, Well, we should actually talk about this a little bit more. A billion dollars is a lot of money. If you make two hundred fifty million, there's a lot you can do with the money.
At the age of twenty two.
At the age of twenty two, there's a lot you can do with the money. You can invest it, you can do other things, there's a lot that can go wrong with this company. The Zuckerberg said, Well, you know, I don't really know what I'd do with the money. I'd probably just start another social networking site, but I kinda like the one I have, so why would I sell it?
And, you know, at the end of the day he convinced us that there were a whole set of products that he wanted to build which were not being valued in the market.
And that we should at least try to build those. And so if he did not have had he not had this plan or this vision for the future, you would have just taken the money. Money is pure optionality and money is always In a world where you have no ideas, money is always more valuable than anything you can do with it and you'll always take the money.
I see, but you're saying his ideas were enough to convince you that hey, at the very least, I'm not I'm gonna be higher than a billion here at some point.
Or it's at least it's at least not a no brainer. We should you know, we we can give it another six months, see how it goes. And I think and I think so I think you know, if you if you don't have that conviction about the future, you will always sell when you get offered that billion dollars. Sometimes it's right to sell, sometimes it's wrong. But certainly the feedback at the time, you know, and this again this this part of the history gets obscured, but in two thousand six it was
When we did not sell to Yahoo, it was uniformly negative. It was, you know, this is really crazy. This is what happens when you have a twenty two year old running a company. We're looking forward to this company blowing up. It'll serve him right. I mean you had you know just Article seething with resentment.
Uh p the the articles still are seething with resentment. It's funny how like outrage porn sort of grows with the internet, you know, as great as the internet is. But you know, l let me put the numbers in perspective a little bit because You sold PayPal to eBay for$1.5 billion. You made about$55 or$60 million on that. And then if you had sold Facebook to Yahoo at that time, you would have made$100 million. So more than you would have made.
on the PayPal deal. How were you personally feeling? Were you scared that this was a risk you weren't willing to take?
I was somewhat scared but I had this bias that you know we had named our venture fund Founders Fund. We decided we were going to back founders in what they wanted to do. And I thought that maybe you know at the end of the day the right thing was to try to back the founder. The statistical way got some reassurance on it was there had been two other companies that had turned down one billion dollar offers from Yahoo in the previous decade. eBay had been offered a billion and had turned Yahoo down.
And Google had been offered a billion and had turned Yahoo down. Those were the only two that had turned it down for a billion. And so in both cases, those seemed like really dangerous decisions. They worked out. And so I concluded that probably the upside was a lot more than the downside risk, given that history.
You know, and also again, hindsight of course is great. In your book, I like how you lay out very cleanly, you know. proprietary technology, network effect, economies of scale, and branding. And it seems like Facebook had all of those at the time. And plus I'm assuming Mark Zuckerberg's ideas for the future had all of those. So it made the decision easy using kind of these metrics.
Yes. But you don't need all four of those. I think if you just have one of those, you can have a great bus business. Branding alone is always a difficult one. It's a real thing. It's something I don't claim to understand. So I don't like investing in companies that are nothing but a brand.
¶ Moats in practice - Picking the right advantage (and why brand alone is shaky).
Even though sometimes those things do work. But I think the ones I tend to focus on are network effects. proprietary technology or economies of scale. And certainly I like proprietary technology the most because that's the kind of thing you can really understand from a science or technology perspective.
L let's talk about the network effect for a second because this seems in some sense the most difficult because it's sort even if you have a great technology, m people don't really know if something's gonna go viral or not until after it's gone viral.
Yes. So so I think network effects and virality are are a little bit different. Vi virality is a growth mechanism where customers just bring in more customers. Network effects are where the value
¶ Network effects ≠ virality - How value compounds after growth.
is driven by the fact that you have a number of other people inside the network at a given time. Network effect businesses are extremely valuable. The paradox is that they're very hard to start because if you have something where you have a network, there's always a question, why is it valuable to the first person? If you know, if it's really valuable once you have a million people, how will how will you ever get The first person, the first ten, the first hundred, and get to a million.
And so a lot of great network effect businesses end up starting with a new kind of service that can emerge in a fairly small context. So Facebook the initial market was Harvard University, it was ten thousand people, and you went from zero to sixty percent market share in ten days. And then you had a network among just that that tiny community. And so you started really small and then you replicated at other colleges and then gradually
expanded from there. And because a lot of these network effects start very small, they're not the kinds of businesses people with MBAs are inclined to try because they look too small at the beginning to be any good. If you go for a super big network effect on day one, you'll never get it started because you can never get the critical mass of all the people on board.
if you go for one that's really small, that's what actually works. Although it it doesn't fit sort of the conventional business metrics. People you know, if if you'd pitched Facebook pre launch, it would have been, Well, this is it's just for Harvard students, this is way too small. It's never gonna be a real business. And and so they often get started by people who are really inspired by certain ideas rather than ones who are financially driven or Want to make a lot of money.
Well, it's interesting because you could say Facebook had as this umbrella, this bigger vision of let's connect everybody via identity. It's almost like Facebook replaced personal web pages with face the people's pit Facebook pages. And in a similar way, you created a network effect with PayPal using I think two two ideas. One is this vision that transactions can happen online through through email or or initially Pompods. But the other is you simply paid ten dollars to everybody who joined.
Well certainly the PayPal version of this was that we had to sort of accelerate the growth. And uh and you you try to you you had a viral growth driver, you had you pay ten dollars to everybody who signed up. But then it turned out there was this a network effect among power sellers and power buyers on ebay, which in late ninety nine, early two thousand was still a tiny group. There were you know, there were maybe
twenty thousand major sellers and you could get to twenty five, thirty percent market share in three or four months. And so again, you know, if you're trying to create a monopoly, you can define a monopoly as having a large market share.
¶ PayPal's wedge - eBay power-sellers and the $10 incentive as a growth accelerant.
And so how do you get a large market share as a startup? Because every startup necessarily starts very small. The answer is that you have to start with a small market. You know, Facebook started with Harvard. PayPal started with ebay. power sellers. These are themselves quite small markets. Amazon started with books, so not that big a market either. And you sort of and then ideally you can build the market out in concentric circles.
When I see a PowerPoint presentation in a pitch where it starts with this is a market that's measured in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. That's very bad because it means you will never get to a large share of the market. You will always be this tiny fish in this vast ocean.
And that's in some sense I think there was a lot that went wrong with clean technology in the last decade. But from a business strategy perspective, one thing that went wrong with almost all the companies was the markets were way too big. Every PowerPoint, every clean tech presentation was the opposite of Facebook. It started with a market that was enormously big and we were gonna get a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of this pie. And uh you ended up just having enormous
I I always call this the Chinese refrigerator rule. Somebody comes in and pitches and says, Look, we've got this we've got this brand new kind of refrigerator and if just one percent of China buys it, we're gonna be billionaires. And I've never seen anyone succeed with that kind of argument.
¶ Beware the "Chinese refrigerator" TAM slide - Start small, win big.
Because if one percent of China buys it then there will be ninety nine other Chinese companies for the other ninety nine percent of China and they will drive the marginal profits to zero.
What about something like Uber where, you know, it's a it's they start in San Francisco, so it it it i i it it's a small market where they're gonna try to get large market share, but you can look at regionally other companies could start up in different regions. Like how do you deal with a a pitch like that?
Uber's a Uber's a complicated case. It's it's uh it's certainly I I'm it's it's certainly one that we we must I
¶ Uber vs. Airbnb - Investor bias and why some models get over- or undervalued.
I would my my bias is always not to invest in companies that venture capitalists themselves are prone to use. And so I suspect that the venture capitalists are overvaluing Uber and undervaluing something like Airbnb because Uber is is sort of a town car service. Airbnb is still largely a cheap way to stay in a hotel. And so
the investor class is likely to overvalue undervalues something like Airbnb. But yet Uber's a complicated one to analyze on this. But it certainly has some elements of this monopoly business in place. And I think it's fully priced into the market at this point.
Yeah, I think the last valuation on the private transactions was about nineteen billion. सबस्पर नहाँ
I don't think that number itself tells you that it's overvalued or undervalued. And you know, people often the bigger the numbers are, sometimes the more undervalued it is because people will react and say, The number's so big, that's ridiculous. It was only just
so much more than it's it was a year earlier. And so we you have to be careful not to base it off the actual valuation. But I think I'm I I think it is the kind of business that venture capitalists and other investors understand a little bit too well for my comfort.
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Which is related to the discussion of bubbles and you talk about it a little in the book, but you know, in the in the late nineties, you know, PayPal was was starting up and you also have the sense that There's a bubble that's starting to happen. And I would argue there was never a tech bubble, but it was just a financial bubble. So we we had this like IPO bubble in late nineteen ninety nine, early two thousand, but the tech bubble itself.
Sort of came true. Amazon did become the biggest seller on the planet. Google did become the biggest search engine. You know, it seems
And the internet certainly the internet as a whole certainly grew largely in line with the predictions of the late nineties.
Right. Being a when everybody starts saying bubble, they're probably saying it like like housing bubble occurred the phrase housing bubble occurred several years before there was actual a financial bubble and all these kind of mortgage backed obligations.
¶ Bubbles and the public - What changes across tech, housing, and today's "government bubble."
So it seems like you can take advantage of when people start throwing the word bubble around.
I I do think we've had this very strange history of these different bubbles over recent decades. They were centered on different things at different times. They were centered on the new economy in the nineties. They were centered on finance and housing in the two thousands. I think we have today I think we have a government bubble that's centered on a negative real interest rate.
And it's very odd because it probably means, you know, the things were at the core of the bubbles. You had to be careful about tech in the nineties, you had to be very careful about housing in the last decade. And perhaps, you know, you should not be keeping your retirement savings and government bonds at this point. Because that's that seems like it's the center of of the current one. I do not think we have a bubble in technology today.
required the involvement of the larger public. You were quite right, they went on longer than people thought. So people were talking about a tech bubble already in ninety seven, ninety eight. It went on for much longer than that. I think there's no tech bubble today. There are not nearly enough IPOs. The public is much less involved in this than it was in the nineties. But it is certainly this phenomenon where
when people substitute other people's thinking for their own and that's when I think you get a dangerous bubble. Housing had that characteristic in the middle of the last decade. There are probably other forms of it. I I do think it's been sort of the great macroeconomic truth of our era has been these strange series of bubbles and busts that it's important to try it's been important to try to avoid.
But probably the opportunity there is that this it's these this boom and bust cycle that have has made people more and more risk averse. going against your sort of idea of let's create something different, something that's like a monopoly versus something that's just an incremental improvement that's a little safer.
Well certainly with respect to the internet and computer technology, there's a case to be made that we are still suffering a hangover from the nineties and that after the collapse of the dot com boom or bubble. Since 2002, we've had a twelve year long boom in technology, and people have not believed it all the way through. And so I do think that it's
in the aftermath of these things that probably the great internet investments have all been made in the last decade. They were not in the nineties. They've been in the two thousand two and on period.
And so uh y you know, it sort of leads to two questions. You mentioned that we're probably in a government bubble. Where would you put your retirement money at this point?
It's quite hard to say what to do. There's I I suspect that like the last bubbles, this one still has a ways to run. So it probably still has a few more years. A few more years to go. The tag word for the it's it's a more pessimistic bubble. The one in the nineties was the new economy.
The two thousands was the great moderation. The two thousands tens is secular stagnation, which as as Larry Summers has somewhat disingenuously explained to people, means that you'll have negative real rates forever and paradoxically become a reason for the stock market to go relentlessly higher. And so I think we've just started talking about the secular stagnation
theme, which is the sort of strangely pessimistic way the current bubble is getting addressed up. And I think you're right, it will go on for ways longer. Probably equity markets will outperform fixed income. And I think the strange ending of this bubble will be that it it will be the one where you should not be in fixed income. And every bear market in the US
in the last thirty five years, the correct thing has been to be long fixed income. Shorting stocks is always hard. Going long fixed income has been much easier. And I think at the end of the current bull market
¶ War on cash & credit - Why Peter favors unlevered, opaque innovation over fixed income.
you do not want to be in fixed income and so you want to be in in in other things. The way I the the macroeconomic way I frame it is that the two big the two big trends that I see in this decade are a war on cash and a war on credit. The war on cash involves these negative interest rates, zero percent nominal rates, negative real rates. quantitative easing, all the central banks printing money. The war on credit involves not allowing the banks to lend all this money out that's being printed.
tightened regulations about Basel three stuff, Dodd Frank in the US. The war on cash and the war on credit to first approximation cancel each other out. So the government's printing a lot of money and it's prohibiting the banks from lending it out. But the nuanced thing is I think you want to be far from cash and far from credit.
because that's what war has been declared on and I think the war will go on for a long time. That's why I like venture capital. It's not I don't know if it's an asset class for everybody, but personally I have probably eighty percent of my net worth in venture capital, startups, things of that sort, because it's very far from cash and it's very far from credit. It's not levered and it's not cash like.
I mean maybe you could argue some even though there hasn't been a lot of IPOs, some tech definitely is gonna ride further in the next decade, some biotech possibly. So, you know, pro perhaps that's a way to fight the war on cash.
Yeah, I like companies that are extremely opaque and not measurable at this point. Unlevered companies are ones where you have no idea what's going on and biotech is probably the most unlevered sector. We're in a world where people probably overvalue things they can measure very precisely.
And the things that are hard to measure have been undervalued and they have outperformed for some time. Google's outperformed. Amazon is a strange company, but it it certainly has outperformed in large part because People said they had no idea what its value was and therefore they systematically underestimated it for quite a while now.
So it's interesting, you know, y in the beginning of the interview you you mentioned today you were looking at comparing notes on a financial technology related to the payday loan industry and the payday loan industry, of course. fights that war against lending. Like it's a massive kind of alternative banking industry that maybe a third of America makes use of because of the difficulties in traditional banking. So do you find yourself looking at alternative banking systems?
Yeah, well no, we're looking at all I think it's an interesting area to look at with the one big caveat that it is a sector where you're fighting this regulatory headwind and that's something one should not underestimate and it's especially problematic for startups because regulations are always disproportionately tough on smaller companies. And so I think you have an industry that's static, that needs to be rethought in one way or another.
At the same time, it's also an industry that's getting regulated more and more. So it's an area we're looking at but we're still fairly cautious about.
What about with biotech? I mean, I like that in the book uh you mentioned the opposite of Moore's Law, which is E Room's Law, where drugs approved per billion dollars ha goes in half every nine years since nineteen fifty. So biotech, even though it's sort of hard to understand
¶ Biotech headwinds (and upside) - Regulation, Eroom's Law, and why sentiment can misprice breakthroughs.
There's this kind of negative government regulation aspect that is driving up the cost of drugs approved.
Yes. Yeah. So certainly biotech has been in a bad zone, I would argue, for twenty years. I think there was a boom in it in the eighties and early nineties, but it's probably been a twenty year long period of of underperformance.
The question, you know, I think the regulatory quest I'm always Interested in just from a contrarian perspective because it's even more out of fashion now than say cleantech is, which I think is also actually worth looking at since it it's crashed probably ninety to ninety five percent from the highs in oh eight. And biotech is even more out of fashion, I would argue, than cleantech in twenty fourteen. The regulatory
story that I think is worth thinking through is are we at a point where the FDA is going to have to be less tight? Because, you know, we've been in a world where the FDA has had an iron grip not just on drugs in the U.S. but really worldwide because you've had this worldwide deference to the FDA by all sorts of other countries. So you know there's always this odd thing where the U.S. is just
twenty three percent of world GDP, but yet the US FDA has somehow been the gating agency for drug approval worldwide. And there is this question whether We are going to see some real alternative markets created in China, maybe with medical devices in India. Will you start to see medical tourism? Is there going to be more regulatory arbitrage in this? And will the mere prospect of regulatory arbitrage
push the FDA to be less restrictive. And even though you're dealing with incredibly tough regulations in the biotech space, level of the regulations, but it's the first derivative. Are they getting worse? Are they getting better? We have regulatory headwinds in finance. In biotech I think it can't get any worse and I think there is a case that it may get better, although it may take a while.
Yeah, and also the aging population would suggest that ultimately the FDA has to approve more drugs. People are gonna demand it.
That that's what would happen in a rational society. Of course the the worry would be that an aging population becomes even more risk averse, even more scared, even more willing to allow regulators to do stupid things.
Now in the book, one chapter that I really liked was titled Secrets, and it's sort of like this idea that There are things that are completely unknown and that are kind of secrets to us as a society, but the individuals who uncover those secrets will be able to build monopolies around
¶ Secrets - If you assume they exist, you'll be the one to find them.
the businesses they start based on what they discover. So this kind of veers in a different direction, but you approach this again from a societal standpoint, but what individual characteristics can someone develop now to help them basically be able to uncover secrets?
Well, I think a part of it is just to have a passion for certain ideas. If there's a set of things you are really interested in thinking about, it's you keep working at it. And I think the larger point I'd like to make in this chapter is just that there are a lot of secrets that exist. So there are a lot of things we could figure out if we worked at it. There's a self fulfilling part of this where if you believe that there are secrets to find
then you will work at them and you will be someone to find them. If you do not believe there are any secrets, if you think everything's been discovered or is impossibly hard for you to figure out, then you won't figure things out. So I think there's a big self fulfilling prophecy aspect to this. The example I give in my book is of Guiles, the Princeton mathematician who proved Fermat's last theorem
And uh he spent close to a decade working on this, but he believed he could prove it. And that motivated him to work on it. And to ultimately prove it. And so it's hard to know ex ante whether it's possible or not. But if you didn't think it was possible for you to discover something new, then you would never be the person to discover that new thing.
Right. So let's say that's step one. So let's say for instance I believe I could be an Olympic level javelin thrower. I'm gonna start working
I don't like that example because that's too that's too conventional. And we can we can we can probably measure your abilities and we can figure out within thirty seconds whether it's even within the ballpark. But but sure.
Which it's not by the way, I can't be. But I I'm just giving as an example because like take the exam the Princeton example with Vermat's theorem. He clearly knew what direction he should work in to solve this secret. Or he had an idea, a rough idea. How could people cultivate within themselves?
the ability to even work beyond the step. Let's say they're optimistic and they believe they can uncover secrets or they they they buy into the idea that there's secrets to be uncovered. How can they still cultivate these personality characteristics to to work further at it?
Well I think it's I think the starting point is that one is extremely passionate about some set of ideas or some approach to doing things. And it's it's best for it to be something that's that, you know, if it's something where you have a lot of very talented people working on it already, this may be more difficult. So I I do think it's probably hard to discover
secrets in super string theory unless you're, you know, a first-rate mathematician or physicist. But I think most fields are not like physics. They're not like mathematics. They're they're actually ones where the frontier is relatively nearby and it it requires you to really approach a problem in a slightly different way. And and you know, one shortcut that I've often used is to
Look at
You know, what are things that are conventionally believed? What are things where everyone's focused on approaching a problem in a certain way? I think an incredibly important problem to work on is finding a cure for Alzheimer's. And there's a conventional approach that I suspect is way over explored, which is around beta amyloids, which are these plaques that build up
And they seem to be a marker. It's not at all clear they're causally connected. There are many other approaches that do not involve that. As a starting point. if one were working on this problem, you'd look at you try to look at something where for some reason people had not explored it and that was promising. And if it's something that's conventionally explored that everyone says is the way to go, that's probably very crowded. That's not a very promising one to look at.
It seems like in your career, you've what you've done a lot is combine areas. So for instance, like take PayPal as an example.
¶ Interdisciplinary bets - CS × biology; CS × transportation; why university silos miss the action.
Email was a kind of well covered area, but then the idea of doing transactions online was still very scary in the internet. Yep. And by combining them, you were able to develop a whole new industry.
Yeah, I I certainly think anything interdisciplinary in our society is is quite underrated. You know, I've I've talked at length about the sort of education bubble and I'm sort of a critic of a lot of what's been going on with the universities in our society, much like I believe you are. But I think one of the things that's very perverse about the current university system is that it pushes people towards arcane specialization.
And anything interdisciplinary is seen as very bad. And I think people avoid interdisciplinary fields. in college because they end up stepping on lots of people's toes and so it's always seen as politically dangerous. But I think a lot of the interesting ideas will come from
the intersection of computer science and biology. This will be the next revolution in genomics, or the intersection of computer science and transportation. This will be companies like Uber or Lyft or maybe the self driving cars. And so I think these sort of intersection fields, these interdisciplinary fields are extremely fruitful areas to explore.
It's interesting too with like Uber You have it's not just that it's a car service, but it's a logistics software where you have this labor force and then on the other side you have a demand for this labor force. So right now they use it for cars, but they could also use it for doing your laundry or whatever.
Yeah, there's a complex logistics problem and then applied, at least initially, to this very specific, you know, a building a two sided market of both drivers and passengers on a city by city basis.
So Peter, I have two final questions and I also want to kind of again tell you what I think of the book, but the one final question is Obviously in the show Silicon Valley, the Peter Gregory character is nothing like you but is clearly based on you, particularly his anti college stance and so on. What did you think of that when you first saw his character on the show?
¶ Silicon Valley on HBO - The "Peter Gregory" caricature and what the show gets right.
Well, you know, I think it's on the whole it's actually kind of flattering and
Did they ask you?
No, th they never ask. They never asked, of course not. The claim is that it it has no connection with me, and so of course they wouldn't ask. But no, I actually think the show did a I I think it it was very well written, it was funny. I don't think it was that hostile to Silicon Valley. And I think it certainly gets interpreted at this time as as quite positive. You know, the social network movie was much more negative in intense.
But even that got seen as a positive, inspiring movie. It was intended to make Mark Zuckerberg look bad, but when people in Silicon Valley watched it they saw, wow, it was impressive how hard Zuckerberg worked, how passionate he was, and that's really inspiring.
And so I think we are in this cultural moment where all these things about Silicon Valley will be given a very positive valence. And I think Silicon Valley Show is generally positive. Social network was meant to be negative, but it's like the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, which He meant as an attack on Wall Street, but it actually inspired all the investment bankers in the eighties.
Right, right. That's very true actually. A lot of people sort of looked up to Gordon Gecko despite the fact that he was a clear criminal by the end of the movie, at least in Oliver Sony.
Five minutes before the end. Uh and and Stone said he'd wanted it to make it a an anti Wall Street movie, but people thought Wall Street was a good thing in the eighties and nineties and so they interpreted it positively. And I think we're in a point in time in in history where people are looking at Silicon Valley in that sort of way. And so I think all these cultural representations tend to get interpreted in a really positive way.
The the other question I have is so you're you and I are both ranked similar in chess. You're you're a a a chess master. We're we're around the same age. How do you feel? I I I I know what it takes to get to that rating in chess. There was there's there was a lot of work involved when you were younger. How do you think that translated into your later success?
You know, it's it's it's always hard to know exactly how it translates. I mean I I think chess is always a little bit of this unique combination of art. a science and a sport, some sort of weird intersection of those those three things. I do think it there are sort of chess metaphors I like. There's the Capablanca metaphor that you must begin by studying the end game, that you ha wanna think about where you're going in business. Whoever moves
So you have a tiny edge by moving white by going first. But the last mover, the person who says checkmate, that's really decisive. And so I think in in business as in chess, you want to think about being a first mover is a tactic
being a last mover is the goal and that that's a worthwhile thing to think about. So I think there are all these ways that it it carries over. I do think it's an incredibly beautiful game. I'm worried that it's cultural valence has gone down some as a result of computers getting Better than people with Deep Blue beating Cast Bravo back in nineteen ninety seven as sort of a a key turning point, but I still really enjoy playing occasionally.
Yeah, no, I tend to play online probably at least ten games a day. It's a it's an addiction.
I'm addicted to the Internet Chefs Club. Yeah.
Uh I helped build the Internet Chess Club back in nineteen ninety two. Well. So Well I'm uh
Probably one of my biggest addictions.
Yeah, I'm a little bit I'm your drug dealer. So Peter Thiel, you wrote zero to one notes on startups or how to build the future. I like the the use of the word or here because you basically tie the future to startups. Was that intentional? Like I've never seen or in a subtitle.
Yes. Well it it's certainly a subset of how to build the future and it's because the book is meant both for the narrow audience in Silicon Valley of people who are actually working on startups And then it's also meant for everybody who's concerned about future, which I think should be everybody in our society who's who's thoughtful because the future is something of concern to all of us. We're all going to live in it and we we want to make it a better future than the present, not a worse one.
You know, uh what about your off off at this, but What about someone who's like fifty years old, he's been in a cubicle all his life or her life, and now wants to start something new? Do you think that this also applies to them? Like they can learn the skill sets needed to to move into the future?
You know, I th I think it's always possible to do something new in our society. You know, you can always you can always start over. You can always, you know move to a new city, start a new career. Often difficult at different points in time because maybe people have large mortgages, they've a large debt, sort of various obligations of one sort or another. But I do think I don't think there's any
specific time or place where's where where you're limited. It's there there's certain points where maybe it's a l you have somewhat more flexibility than other points, but there's nothing automatic about it. And certainly, you know, if you're fifty years old, uh you have a life expectancy of at least thirty years ahead of you. And so you should it would be like crazy to pretend that your life is almost over.
Yeah, it's very, very good advice. So Zero to One, Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. I I honestly think this is gonna be a best selling book. It's a really great book. Peter Thiel, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, James. It's been a lot of fun.
Yeah, same here. Bye.
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