The Tim Ferriss Show: #689: The Brothers Who Live One Life — The Incredible Adventures of David and Daniil Liberman

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Entrepreneurs and investors David and Daniel Lieberman discuss their background in Snap, their commitment to the founders pledge, and their innovative ideas. They also share insights into their parents' influence on their thinking and their experiences in building their own businesses, including an Internet Service Provider and an animation studio.

Show more

00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The hosts of the podcast episode talk about their experiences in the gaming industry and their transition to creating a political satire show. They also discuss their move from Russia to the United States to pursue opportunities in the animation industry, as well as their work with Jimmy Fallon and their views on entrepreneurship and embracing failure.

Show more

01:00:00 - 01:30:00

Two individuals discuss their respective roles and strengths, highlighting how they have learned to embrace their different qualities and work together effectively. They also mention the challenges of being separated and the importance of creating space for potential romantic partners. The conversation concludes with a mention of Snapchat's acquisition of the company and a question about Snapchat's decline in users.

Show more

01:30:00 - 02:00:00

The podcast explores the concept of gradual growth and the benefits of working together as a team. It also discusses the importance of interdisciplinary learning and teaching kids coding, as well as the potential applications of quantum physics in understanding biological processes. Additionally, the financial power of pensioners and its impact on the economy are mentioned.

Show more

02:00:00 - 02:30:00

The podcast delves into the generational wealth gap in the United States, highlighting how younger generations own significantly less national wealth. It discusses the potential consequences of this wealth disparity, such as protests, economic slowdown, and a decline in new business creation. The guest suggests converting individual income into securities as a potential solution to address this imbalance, emphasizing the importance of investing in people and their potential for future success.

Show more

02:30:00 - 02:44:46

The podcast emphasizes the importance of educating older generations and investors about sustainable investments and the impact of their money. It highlights the need to shift towards investing in individual income and sustainable companies to create a positive change, while also addressing the lack of awareness and communication about these options as a barrier.

Show more

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that

provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique

mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers,

that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with

memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do,

and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body

for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered.

So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix sleep

quiz at helixsleep.com slash tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes.

Personally, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Lux mattress. I also

have one of those in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.

They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages.

It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever.

Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty,

depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door, free of charge,

and there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home.

That's why they offer a 100 night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit,

you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by

both GQ and Wired magazines, and now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise

to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest collection of mattresses called

Helix Elite includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions

and firmness preferences, so you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress

comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra microcoils for

best in-class support and durability. Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year

manufacturer's warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. Helix

is now running their Labor Day sale, which you can take advantage of until September 10th,

get 25% off on all mattress orders plus two free pillows. That is very significant savings.

That's 25 off because of their Labor Day sale, so check it out. Go to helixsleep.com

slash Tim. One more time, helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

This episode is brought to you by Protects Rest Supplement, a new take on getting deeper and

more restorative sleep. I was introduced to this by former Navy SEAL Nick Norris, who has been on

this podcast. As a mutual friend of ours put it to me, it's very annoying that Nick has no physical

weaknesses. This is somebody who can climb like a spider. He has incredible abilities as a rock

climber. He is incredibly strong and can also run ultramarathons. It's quite something to behold.

And this is one of the tools that he uses. So Protects Rest Supplement helps provide consistent

restful sleep without any habit forming ingredients or groggy side effects. Simply add it to your

last glass of water before bed and it goes to work. So I tried this after I mentioned to Nick

that I was avoiding melatonin due to next day sluggishness and its possible effects on

testicular function. So I was trying to wean myself off of things like that. This rest cocktail

has worked wonders and I've made it part of my sleep toolkit. It's literally on a counter about

20 feet from where I'm recording this right now. Pro tip number one, if you have trouble opening

the packets, just use scissors. Don't make it hard. Pro tip number two, mix the packets with

water. Do not skip that step and shug it alone. I've learned from experience. Rest has no added

sugars, artificial sweeteners or artificial ingredients. Protect is veteran owned and they

make all of their products right here in the USA. Visit protect.com slash Tim to buy Protect Rest

and you will get a free bottle of Clarity with your order. Clarity is a Neutropic Mushroom Blend

of Lion's Mane, Rachea, Cordyceps and Turkey Tail designed to support brain function and

mental performance. I have not personally tested Clarity yet but I'm excited to give it a shot

and check it out. That's protect, that's P-R-O-T-E-K-T dot com slash Tim for a free bottle of Clarity

with your purchase of Protect Rest. One more time, P-R-O-T-E-K-T dot com slash Tim.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of

the Tim Ferris Show where my job is to interview and deconstruct world-class performers. I get a

two for one. In this episode, I have brothers David Lieberman and Daniel or Daniel Lieberman.

They're both entrepreneurs and investors, one of a kind entrepreneurs and investors with a

close partnership spanning 16 years. They gained valuable experience at Snap, contributing to

projects involving avatars, Bitmoji, animation and product operations. They're currently based in

LA where their primary focus is on building product science, a service dedicated to optimizing

mobile apps. I'm going to pause here and just say there's a lot more to this story and this

conversation than the bio I am reading. We get into crossbows, we get into Russian mobsters,

we get into some of the craziest stories. Honestly, I think I have ever heard. So take

everything I'm saying. It's just a preview of one dimension of 17 dimensions that we will share.

Moving on, the Lieberman brothers have established the Lieberman's company,

referred to as a people company, through their commitment to the founders pledge.

They've allocated all future earnings and economic value for the next three decades to Lieberman's

co, including founder shares of product science and potential returns from future investments.

Some of you may recognize the Lieberman brothers from a fascinating profile in the New Yorker on

selling shares in yourself. What might that look like? What can that look like?

What might it look like to invest in other people for their future earnings, etc? They have a lot

of wild ideas, a lot of great ideas, and you can find them online at Liebermans.co that's

spelled L-I-B-E-R-M-A-N-S, Liebermans.co. You can find them on Instagram at Liebermans,

so L-I-B-E-R-M-A-N-S, and there's a lot in the show notes. There's going to be a lot in the

show notes here, so be sure to check out the links after the episode at tim.blog.com slash

podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy this very wide ranging conversation with none other

than the very one-of-a-kind, unique Lieberman brothers. Gentlemen, David, Daniel, I'm getting

that right. Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. So where did you go out? And what did childhood

look like? So the two of us were born in Moscow, still Soviet Union at that time, to a family of

the very known neuroscientists, biophysicists, who like the family were sort of like upper middle

class for the Soviet measure. But as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, with the Soviet Union,

the family collapsed to the below poverty type of situation, because our dad was born in 1925.

So in 1990, he was pretty old already, and didn't have a chance to adapt to the new reality.

It was six of us, elementary school kids. So a complicated situation. Both of parents had to

continue the work as they wanted actually to finalize and finish the work of their life,

and at the same time somehow survive and feed kids and like get some clothes for us and stuff.

And it's like six of us one year apart. Our mom was, she was busy, busy, busy with making her

breakthrough works in how neurons works and the signaling system in the neurons,

at the same time having six of us in eight years, less than eight years.

How does any human do that? So let alone a mom, you know, not to get us into all these

confusing gender waters, but let's just say for the time being, mom, primary caregiver,

would that be fair to say? Yes. Yes. So how did she manage both the scientific exploration with

this groundbreaking work and six kids? I can barely manage one dog. And what qualifies as my job.

So how did she do that? I think that after the fourth one, we kind of a little bit managed

ourselves. Right. But still, it's not the answer or the question.

No, there was a grand plan from time to time. So from time to time, they would drop half of us

at the grand plan, grandma's place, and then took the half of us with them to the laboratory.

That's how we spend a lot of time surrounded by the fish and snails.

You know, we were surrounded by all this equipment.

They got first PC much earlier than anyone else. That's why we also were quite excited about that.

And I think that in general, they were super passionate about their work. That's what we

definitely picked from our parents. And about each other. So there were six of us.

It's a full team. Yeah, it's a full soccer team. So you have lots of excitement.

Maybe lots of chaos. You have goldfish, snail, grandparents, lasers sounds like a pretty awesome

setup for curious kids. Honestly. And what did you pick up on intellectually as a way of thinking

from your parents? And I asked that because I know both of you, for instance, and I'm not trying

to lead with this question, but pay a lot of attention to data, your sort of geeks for parsing

the data, whether it's to like refine how you think about or identify problems and then also

how you might solve problems. What did you observe in your parents or pick up from them

when it came to how they thought about things? Now that you said that, I realized that

our parents were doing those experiments, which required them years of repeating, repeating,

repeating the same stuff, like trying to get data, which would make sense on top of their

hypothesis of how everything works. So I guess we've been surrounded by the piles of papers with

just numbers. Literally, I remember this. How was it called? The cards. Oh, like the punch cards.

The punch cards. Yes, the punch cards, like everywhere the punch cards before the PC was

there. They were like this huge type recording machines with all this data as well. But what's

interesting, both of them was always challenging the status quo of the current understanding of

science. So if just someone claims something and you cannot really prove it for yourself with

data, probably something is missing and you need to dig deeper. And that's how they

lived. And they had their own discussions with everyone around. And we sort of picked it up.

As we were growing already, like, I don't know, 15 years old, our dad was even older. So he needed

someone to escort him to the conferences and like meetings of scientists, just basically like,

it's Moscow and winter. And the roads are icy, I don't know, five, six months a year, like something

like this. So he needed someone to basically help him get there. And being there all the time,

we saw his conversations with the rest of the scientific community in the in his institute,

as they were just like laughing out of nowhere. I mean, just like, oh, yeah, of course, like,

again, Lieberman is talking about the quantum nature of consciousness, blah, blah, blah, blah,

something like that. And we were like, looking at this, it's like, why he has some ideas and

proves. So it was sort of resistance, resistance to the rest of the world, we felt his resistance,

and we like were challenged with this as we're like, oh, we can approve everyone.

Lieberman's against the world. Lieberman's against the world. Exactly.

All right, so we're gonna leapfrog from that. As far as a next logical place, I mean, I like

hopping around because I see things on paper, I find certain things exciting to talk about,

and then we can fill in the gaps. So I'm just going to actually answer my own question. And I'm

going to take you to around, then we can fill in the gaps as we go. So you're around 18 to 19 years

old, and you're presenting to Russian parliament. What are you presenting about? And how is the

reception? Yeah, so a little bit of background. So after Soviet Union collapsed, the entire

population of the country lost their savings in the banks like twice during the decade.

So it was a quite harsh time for everyone. And for us, it was strange. Like we weren't able to

understand how with all the modern technologies with computers and how it's all like how all this

corruption in how it's even possible. Because definitely, yes, definitely some technologies

should be there should be there to solve these problems. We had internet pretty early. And we

were hackers. I mean, it was at that time of the internet era, when everything was possible.

Access to everything was possible. So at that moment, we read lots of the hackers manifest us

and some like libertarian ideas wandering around the internet. And we saw all these ideas of

decentralized type of data storage, which can be bulletproof from

various attacks or attacks and modifications like falsifications, right? It's resilient against

falsification. Yes, resilient against falsification, like a blockchain type of ideas before Satoshi

actually released his first paper on the block chain, which was never the one word it was like

block, like chain of blocks, but the torrents and other type is really storage is existed

seven days about this, we're circulating over the internet. So with this combination of those

ideas, we came up to a solution as we sought for eradicating corruption in Russia to make

all of the governmental expenses completely transparent, stored on the people and stored

in the people's machines so that none of the corrupt officials can actually even do anything

with with the data. So we're presenting this idea. And pretty soon when people realize what we

are talking about, they basically ask us to go out just like shut down the mic. It's like

the meeting is over. Thank you so much. Sorry, I'm some technical difficulties.

And then the guy who was actually invited us who invited us, he was some sort of a deputy for

the head of the party at the time at the time there was multiple parties like United Russia,

but this guy came, like, approached us in the corridor saying, boys, I can see you are very

smart. And all these ideas are just brilliant. But stop talking about this bullshit. Otherwise,

someone will kill you. No, no, no, not not us. Like we're good guys, but there are bad people

who are making lots of money. And this is against what they want.

Okay. So now at that point, do you pretty immediately pivot to something else?

Pretty immediately, we realize that what we need to pivot into is grass reading those ideas instead

of trying to make them top to bottom approach. Instead of being the missionaries of anti-corruption

Yes. Distribute the risk a bit.

It's hard to be quite clear that people in the government are not those people who really can

adopt those ideas. It was another story to that that in a week after that, they actually invited

us again to come and like we came in and they asked us to work on a project. They said, well,

like, what is the project? They said, oh, you mentioned something about this realization in

how this realization can be anonymous at the same time. Can you create an anonymous HR agency

which will sell seats in government? And we're like, wait, what? He's like, yes, yes, yes. So

imagine people who are actually making lots of money and who's capable of paying lots of money

for a seat in the government. They are people who like business better than us. They can manage

stuff better than us. So we're like just from the street. Just happened to be here just by chance

because someone was like a friend of someone. So if we actually invite people who did something

in business and have money to pay for the position in government, they can do a better job for the

country. And our first reaction was like, do you really have a price list? Yes, yes, yes. We're

like, can you give us an example? And the guy was like, Deputy Minister of Finance was half a million

dollar and Minister of Health Care at college. College was three million dollars. The question was

immediately, ecology? Don't give a shit about ecology in Russia. She's like, exactly. That's how

the person who will take the position will have a return on investment. They use all these like

fancy words. They'll get their money back pretty much in a year on bribes.

So we quite soon realized that they, they are like, well, appreciate the invitation.

Appreciate the invitation. Never call us again. Thank you. That was our reaction.

But yes, that was the moment when we decided to pivot to building our own businesses and

making our own resources and then building type of technologies ourselves.

And then you can buy the Ministry of Ecology. Or we can like do the revolution or something

like that. Now at that point, while you're observing all of this, and it's imprinting

your young minds, are you thinking, eventually, we are going to want to build businesses somewhere

else? Or did you anticipate that you would be building in Russia for the foreseeable future?

How are you thinking about things at that point? For us, somehow, at this particular moment,

it was still unreachable. The idea is that we can fly somewhere and build businesses there.

Like it's only years after that, we start to be more confident in our abilities and start to think

about that. It was miserable. Like the first time we flew to United States, just on our own, miserable

experience. Very low level, like pro level of English, no understanding whatsoever what the

country looks like and what's going on. We're trying to raise investment. We were trying to raise

investment miserable. That sounds like a hard slog of a first trip. Okay, so at the time then,

you're just focused on building businesses and what type of business were you building at that

point? We had like ideas. Even before that, our first company was an ISP, Internet Service Provider.

We wanted to have a good internet connection, and it was super unaffordable, like $5,000 to

connect your apartment. Wow, it sounds very unreachable for us people. Especially for the

family of eight people who were making like a couple hundred dollars a month, for the household,

it was unreachable. So at some point, we realized that if we want to have a such level of internet

at our own apartment, what we can do, we can go through all of the neighbors. And it was like

what, 1,600 apartments in the small district? Small district. Yeah, it's quite dense. The

neighborhood. The neighborhood, like a dense neighborhood of Norwich, Ramoshkin, Moscow.

And we literally rang all the doorbells. And we're like, the question was like,

do you have a computer? If the answer was yes, do you know what internet is? If the answer was

not like, okay, let us explain you. Let's have some tea. And we literally sneak in into people's

apartment and starting to explain them what they are losing by not having internet already connected

to our computer. So we pre-sold a couple hundred contracts. And with that, we were like, okay,

we can now go to the bank, get a house called a consumer loan, just like basically consumer loan.

And we use the money to buy all the equipment, to buy the cable, like the fiber. Yeah, fiber

optic cable, fiber optic cable, and basically connect all these households and people paid.

And we covered the loan pretty fast. It still was a quite challenging project. So I'm wondering

just what you're buying with the loans, you're buying like servers, sticking them in a bathroom,

and like, how is it being connected to the existing infrastructure?

First, we needed to basically someone to bring the cable in. It was the most expensive part of

the operation. Like dig and trench. We hired the engineering team. We were lucky because the

largest communication hub for the Moscow internet was basically two kilometers away from us.

That's great luck. It's a great luck. Because our parents from science, we were in the part of

Moscow, but most of the scientists were in the universities were there as well. And that's why

internet first emerged at this part. So we hired these people, the engineering team,

to bring the cable. And then by night, mostly, we were connecting 20 story buildings to each other

by shooting the cable using the athletic airball. Crossbow. Yes, it just local officials,

local officials, they were bribed by the bigger player, and they didn't allow us to actually

They wouldn't give us the keys to the to the roofs and to properly set the cables.

Competition was there. Even though we had the license and by law, they couldn't prohibit us to

do this. But they were like not allowing us. That's why at night, we would sneak onto the roof,

like pretty dangerous operation of getting onto the roof, even without having an access through

the door. And then from the roof to the roof, we basically were like putting these cables

using the crossbows shooting from one roof to another roof. This company was then acquired

by a bigger player. There was a significant consolidation on the market between the ninja

crossbow expansion and the acquisition. How long did that take two years, two years? Moving fast.

Then later on, we realized that what we actually need to do is super computing,

like we're like we are smart in mathematics, we can write algorithms. And this is something like

we foresee in the future of cloud computing, using machines in the internet to parallelize,

compute. This was our idea originally, then we realized that it's impossible to do in Russia

type of the business. And we decided that what we can do, we can start building games.

Now before you go on, was the computer science and whatever coding experience you had,

was that self-taught? Was it school? Was it parents? Our college degree is computer science.

But in reality, in Russia at this moment, no one will really teach you properly computer science

because your teachers would know less than you. If you're motivated.

We were lucky because of our parents were scientists, we got PCs at our home much earlier

than most of our peers. We got internet at our home much earlier than most of our peers. And we were

super excited about this technology. We were curious and, I have to say, naughty. So we would

break the computers all the time and we had to fix them all the time for the parents to continue

the work. And that's how we actually learned how to. We built our first website for our guilt.

Online game, like ultimate online. Great choice. Curious and naughty. That can be the name of your

autobiography. The life and times of the Lieberman. Okay, so you have the consolidation and then

you decide to focus on games after that. And what form did that take? We played ultimate online.

We were super excited about this type of games. We thought that this is revolution because people

just hang out there. There is no like aim or you don't need to just kill all the enemies that

are just people hang out. Sandbox. You can have a marriage there, build a house. Like second life

instead of doom. So we were very excited about this, but had to play only overnight because of

dial up connection and the phone was for everyone in the apartment for us at night.

That's why we actually wanted the better internet all the time. And that's how the ISP started.

So then when we decided to build such game, at that moment, this idea was really not popular.

You even can find some quotes from CEO of Electronic Arts, who would say like online games

is just a niche market. No one ever played online games and all this stuff.

He actually officially admitted he was wrong.

So that's very, I mean, that's very, I suppose, honest. A lot of people don't own those things.

He was super cool and I think he was like, I said that I was wrong. Like now we are in the game.

So and we tried to launch several one time failed our own savings. Spend all of our own savings

without soon. But then World of Warcraft was released. And we were the only ones who were

for years trying to raise money for such type of the project. And that's how we got all that

attention in this moment. And we raised our first. So World of Warcraft comes out, it proves,

it's a proof of concept for what you are also trying to pursue in a way.

Not only proof of concept, it was the first game ever netting $1 billion of profit a year.

I think people outside of games also today do not realize how big the numbers are,

like the opening weekend for the new Call of Duty compared to like every

Hollywood blockbuster for a six month period or something like that. The numbers are astronomical.

This market is really for years larger than the movie market. But 15 years ago, it was not as obvious.

But it was already obvious that it can make lots of money. So we were able to convince some of the

investors. Investors tend to like that. And we got a lot of attention, grew pretty fast to

150 to 100 new players in different times. But then 2008 crisis came and just it's all.

And we were not ready. I mean, World of Warcraft, it took Blizzard, the top game development

studio in the world. That's what we didn't realize when we started. It took them like

six years to build a game with an army and unlimited resources. And us, we're like,

we can do it with like a couple million dollars. Okay, we were miserable in this

in this case. But honestly, in this experience, we realize that we can be cool in developing

sort of hacking our way through the challenges, inventing new stuff, inventing how we can build

and new type of products and technologies and etc. And even though we bankrupt the company in 2009,

by March 2009, I had to fire everyone like 150 people in one day. Sounds fun.

Super fun. The most challenging experience of our life. And then three, four months later,

we already started an animation studio and used all of the ideas which came to our mind during

this period, like, we can actually do this and this and that, we wouldn't do this in the games,

but we can do this in the animation process. So you're able to take things from the failed

gaming studio and transfer them over into the terms of experience, experience,

mostly the experience of like, lesson was learned, we knew how to do stuff better.

As we were progressing from knowing nothing when we started to basically having like a pretty

sophisticated production process, we immediately reinvented the animation process. So we basically

took the guy who was experienced in producing 3D graphics and was like, okay, why don't we change

it all? Why don't we take what you know and then try to figure out how to make it much more efficient?

How did you decide on that? It was a super challenging time. The company was bankrupt.

By that time, we actually already were quite successful in different stuff, already had

venture, venture firm raised $30 million to the venture firm. But this venture form was took over

by our investors of the gaming studio. So it's like Russian style, Russian style.

Like people with the guns on the cars and like the security people from the persons arrived

to the office took us in the black cars, driving us to the underground of the office building in

the middle of Moscow. And they're threatening us that they will kill us and our family because

they know where everyone lives, unless we'll return the money. So is this type of business

experience? Hardline, strict investors. In that moment, we knew that we need to,

with a new project, we need to do something fast because we still had some obligations in place

which we just fired because we haven't paid the salary for the last months.

Okay, right. So you had outstanding debt to the employees.

The outstanding debt was like half a million dollars. And we were still living with our parents.

So we knew that we don't want to have investors anymore. And they see like all this experience

which we had, we wanted to do something which can generate cash right away, not like

development. Enough apartment building basements. That was enough.

A friend of ours who is a famous actress in Russia, she told the CEO, the president of

channel one, which is like NBCO Russia, like the largest network.

Or like one of the BBC channels in the UK. Exactly.

That we can do magic with graphics. How did you become friends with the actress?

Friends of friends introduced us and like we basically become super cool friends. We were

like writing scripts together for the future movies and stuff. In reality, I'm not sure that she

really knew that we can do that. But she was very confident in selling it.

But she knew that we fixed her internet. Many times.

Goes a long way keeping somebody on the list. So she sells the head of this primary channel

that you guys can do. You can work magic with graphics.

And we actually were doing magic with graphics, but for games.

And he wanted to create a political satire show, which would be based on the last week events,

which is impossible. Animation, usual production cycle is nine to 12 months.

South Park is actually like three, four months. But then they leave this several minutes for

something topical, which they can produce over a couple of weeks right before the episode is

released. Like they're doing this. And that's South Park. They're the fastest.

They're the fastest. Exactly. And we invented the production

process, which allowed us to produce half hour animated show 3D graphics in one week.

How did you do that? The interesting part was, we just basically disassembled the entire process

on smaller pieces and parallelized them. This idea of decentralization and parallelization was like,

we couldn't live it. It's a rather than an assembly line type of production. You're like,

how many of these can we have running in parallel? And we found out,

were you able to borrow resources from the channel to work on those parallels?

No, we actually, at the time, were able to borrow resources from IBM.

Okay, how's that work? A friend of ours was the president of IBM of Russia.

And we agreed that they would be DJ in the club.

He was a couple of weekends. That's how we knew the guy.

So during the world, you never know who's DJing at the club. Make friends.

The DJing at night during the weekends and then being in a suit.

And in a suit, like a serious president of IBM during the weekdays.

That's crazy.

That's crazy. And the guy was like, I fucking love what you're doing.

And so, I'm sorry, can I say this?

And he was like, yes, I'll give you the equipment. And they gave us like a,

I don't know, what was it?

It was around like a million dollars for servers with the idea that they will

give us this equipment, not permanently, but for some time for free.

In exchange, that IBM will use the fact that this show was created.

The most innovative show was created using IBM equipment.

But then they gave us equipment, but IBM decided that it's too political.

The head office.

And they never even used it.

Because the show was political satire in Russia.

So the headquarter in the United States was like, no, no, no.

That does not sound low risk.

They allowed us to use, they allowed us to use the equipment,

but never put the logo in there.

Okay. So they allow you to use the equipment.

And then was the president just like, look,

we're going to forget it's there for a while.

You guys can use it.

Yes. Yes.

It was exactly like that.

Very helpful, DJ.

We made the first season using that equipment.

The channel one paid us like three million dollars for the first season.

And with that money, we were able to buy all the equipment.

Because you owed like half a million to the employees.

Yes.

It was advanced payments.

So we came to channel one and said, like,

we need advanced payment.

They're like, why?

It was like the processes.

And we basically paid the debts.

Wow. Okay.

Okay. So what happens then?

You have this parallel processing that's working with your

semi-permanently borrowed IBM machines from the DJ.

You make three million, you managed to negotiate prepayments.

So you satisfy your outstanding debts to paying the ex-employees.

And then what?

This was the first time when we actually started to earn enough of our own funds.

And we returned to, first, we returned to our ideas that we need to think about

how to fight the corruption.

How to fight the corruption.

What type of technologies can be created to...

Well, you guys are not afraid.

Honestly, the part of us not being afraid probably somehow was related to our debt.

Was never afraid of whoever was challenging him.

But at the same time, back in 2000, as we finished the school,

we knew that if we have all these ideas of changing the world,

it's going to be impossible if we just stay home, play computer games and stuff.

So we decided that we would go to some business trainings,

personal development trainings, fear trainings.

We started challenging ourselves in developing ourselves.

And by 2005, we spent like four years developing our own internal

equanimity.

So let's talk about this equanimity for a second,

because this is super important.

And it's sort of the enabler or the handicapper, the lack of it being a handicapper

in so many different capacities.

And I would say a lot of the people listening to this are going to be from the U.S.

And fortunately for them, they've never had the experience of being

under a political regime where people disappear.

But I've spent a lot of time in South America or poisoned

or fill in the blank.

Yeah, disappears in quotation marks.

But what you realize is there are political regimes all around the world,

very common, where people routinely are killed, poisoned,

or otherwise made to disappear.

So the risks were very real for you.

And these are not conspiracy theories.

Like there are actual threats.

So was the lack of fear a lack of fear of death?

Or was it a belief that you could extricate yourself or avoid

any type of really significant consequence or something else?

There are three answers to that.

A. Yes, we're not afraid to die.

Somehow, don't.

I mean, this is like, you die, that's it.

Whatever.

B. Somehow, and it actually really helped with the bandits in 2009

when they came to ask for all of their money invested in the game back,

we knew that it's their way of threatening you.

And they want you to be afraid.

They want you to fear.

And that's how you're on hook.

And as soon as you show the fear, that's when they hook you and you owe them forever.

And we showed them that I can't kill us, whatever.

I mean, you will never get your money back.

And the other case, we can probably work it out somehow.

Lawrence has this experience that actually if you don't show the fear,

it's much safer than if you show.

It's a little bit like with lines.

B. Blood in the water.

Yes, blood in the water, yes.

But then the third one, the third one, is when it comes to the political systems,

let's say, particularly the Russian political system,

for the KGB people who were actually running the country at that time,

like putting this axe head of KGB,

that's the only thing which we all should understand.

That's a country run by KGB people.

Yes, they call themselves FSB, but who's going to give a shit?

It's KGB.

It's the same guys who are like who were just basically killing people

60, 50 years before that.

In Russia, after the war, before the war.

So when it comes to them, they see two types of people who are

playing against them.

It's either enemies or idiots.

Fools.

Enemies or idiots.

Enemies or fools.

Enemies like spies.

Your eyes work for CIA.

Or you're an idiot.

Or you're an idiot who was convinced by CIA to fight against them,

and you're just like fool who like.

You're a pawn.

A pawn.

So we played the pawn card.

We're like, let's show ourselves as if we're stupid.

And we were completely transparent about all of our ideas

from the very beginning.

Saying like they will just see us as fools.

Town lunatics.

Town lunatics.

This strategy worked at that time.

At that time, it was just so rare that they're like,

oh, these guys are just crazy.

Because we made it transparently.

If you are a CIA agent, you will try to hide.

But if you like transfer money to the biggest opposition you're like.

Hiding in plain sight.

Hiding in plain sight.

And they're like, oh, idiots.

They spend their money.

Okay, whatever.

We'll just steal this money from the opposition or anyway.

So fools.

That was the situation.

So for us, the shield for all this years was like,

they believe we're just idiots.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors,

and we'll be right back to the show.

This episode is brought to you by AG1,

the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.

I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement.

And the true answer is invariably AG1.

It simply covers a ton of bases.

I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.

So what is AG1?

AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients.

In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today.

You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs

with your first subscription purchase.

So learn more, check it out.

Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.

That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Check it out.

All right.

We may come back to this, but I want to make sure I don't lose the thread.

So the graphics for this political satire seems to be working pretty well.

You return to your ideas from prior, which is how we got here.

So thinking about anti-corruption and things like that.

And then we started our move to United States.

We already established our presence in Los Angeles

because of animation in 2010 and started to move all attention to United States.

Nothing good going to happen in the country.

It's ran by the KGB and they're not going to release their grasp over the country

unless it's going to be like a revolution type of situation,

which we saw that even a position they were trying to play the political game

and it was a lost game from the very beginning.

So we knew that the show political satire on largest TV network in Russia

is not going to last more than the term of puppet president Medvedev.

That's exactly what happened.

Like as soon as Putin get back to his position,

like the show was shut down immediately.

So we knew it's going to end and we knew that we need to spend all of the money

which we'll make from this in order to transit United States.

So two questions and it might seem obvious to you guys,

but I think for a lot of people listening, they might wonder,

well, why not Europe?

Why not somewhere else?

We try.

Why the US?

And then how hard was it or how easy to start to move your lives to the US?

You know, in Europe, especially animation industry is mostly subsidized by government.

So you actually need to deal with bureaucrats and you need to get any finding in like the

private sector almost doesn't exist.

So I would say it makes it very hard for immigrants.

Yes, exactly.

Yes, yes.

And it was always like, if you want to get local, you need to work with local studios

and they should get this funding and like we started developing the relationship.

But even faster, we realized that in Hollywood, we have all the chances in pretty quickly,

we were introduced to people who then introduced us to the agencies and William

Moore's endeavor signed up with us January 2010,

half a year after we started the company.

You know, it's still a challenging process.

Any immigration is a challenging process.

It took us six years.

Hope you'll really take us seriously and to get to the same type of level of professional

acceptance like then we had back in Moscow.

But we found our ways.

But at least it is possible here.

You know, like in the airport, like in the UK, you would never become.

You would never be able to spend only five, six years

and get into the major Hollywood studios to be the same.

To be the same, like the equivalent of a supermarket.

California has a lot of downsides, but it's one of the upsides is like,

this is true in a lot of the U.S.

Like no one is discriminating against green and people like opportunity.

And also California, a lot of people don't realize part of the reason Silicon Valley

worked is that California also makes it very hard to enforce non-compete contracts.

So there are opportunities everywhere of all different types.

Yeah, we agree with you.

This was our observation that it's all about like non-compete,

that they are not enforceable, that this allow you to actually work at Google,

write your own search engine at night and then launch your own search engine

and Google cannot do really anything with you.

There's a lot of free flow of talent, which makes it hard sometimes to retain talent

in Silicon Valley, but that's a whole separate story.

So you landed in LA, you have introductions to people at say William Morris Endeavour

and other places.

What happens as that momentum starts building?

We actually had a pretty good success working with different studios and different big names

like Jimmy Fallon, we worked on the show with him.

At some point we met with the guy who used to be John Stewart's head writer

and he just moved back from New York to Los Angeles and was sort of available-ish.

He wasn't for a year, but then a year later he was available

and we took our chance to become friends over the year.

And then when he'd become available like Josh, why don't you work with us?

And we managed to convince him because we showed him how fast we actually can produce animation.

Even like William Morris Endeavour or Josh, even being a friend for us for like a year,

they never actually believed that we can produce animation in one week.

And we had to prove it like literally by saying like, Josh, are you serious?

Okay, just let's write a script right now at one pager.

You will write one pager joke and in a week you will have it in animation.

And that's what we did.

And it was like, whoa, you guys were saying you guys can actually do it.

You guys can actually do it.

Before that, he worked at Simpson before John Stewart and it seems like 12 months.

Like a year, you're making a joke and it's already old, a year old joke.

And with us, there were an opportunity for him to make jokes, which are super cards.

So it was cool, but on the other hand, really wanted to focus more on the technologies which

can transform society.

And plus Hollywood wasn't really our thing.

There are some trade-offs.

Yes, no one cares about technologies, especially that time.

You're like it before Netflix and before all the stuff.

No one cared about technologies.

No one cares that you're faster and cheaper.

You don't care about who is your producers and all the divorce lawyers and all the stuff.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

How does the divorce lawyer fit in?

We don't know, but people in Hollywood say so.

Oh, wait, you want, you need to know divorce lawyers?

Yes, because they know people, they know the power dynamics.

Oh, this is good for me to know.

They're like a power dynamic of divorce lawyers who control.

I picked up a new strategy today.

Exactly.

Okay, divorce lawyers.

So with that, we knew all the lawyers and we started to know the people and we started to

meet the people.

And eventually we deconstructed what the show needed to be in order to come to a meeting

at Fox.

At that point, then you're pitching your own show.

Yes.

So we get to the point and the thing is that we cannot sell our technology.

We have to sell the entire show.

We should package voice actors.

The Trojan horse with the technology inside.

Exactly.

We took it all.

That's why we needed Josh because we needed a head writer.

That we took the voice actors.

We took the best concept artists to combine this all and produce a pilot,

like a literal final quality pilot and brought it to Fox.

And who was it?

Susanna Marcus at the time.

She was like, wow, I love it.

Because we actually knew what she likes, who she likes.

What type of artist?

What type of artist?

What type of like we engineered it all.

Data, data, data.

And then we brought it to a custom tailor to put together a pilot for her.

Yes, exactly.

But it was also some misfortune time because they're like putting it back to power.

So our show was canceled back in Russia.

In 2013, the banking crisis in Cyprus, all our money was nationalized.

So all of our money.

So wait, hold on a second.

So Cyprus, does that mean that you had moved your finances from Russia to Cyprus?

And then it was out of the out of the out of the pan and into the fire.

Yes.

And then Cyprus got nationalized and was like, oh, it's the same story all over again.

Yes.

Same story all over again.

$6 million like earned.

And all of a sudden, we couldn't pay anyone in the United States.

No voice actors, no screenwriters, like we couldn't pay anyone.

Immediately, it's all fell apart.

So did you get the green light for the pilot?

Yes.

And then Cyprus.

Yes.

And then.

Yes.

Bye-bye few.

Bye-bye few.

And we tried to think what we can do in Hollywood more for like half a year a year.

But then we realized it will take us another four or five years to recover

because there's no money.

There's like nothing in there.

So like screw it.

We're not going to stay in Hollywood.

Let's move to Silicon Valley.

So we moved to Menlo Park at the time.

Right in the middle.

Right in the middle.

And also we really already wanted to return to our real ideas.

We started with transparency again.

We decided that we can do a trick, that we can actually not target governments

to become transparent, but target non-profits.

Like why we don't see how non-profits actually spend their money.

It's kind of obvious.

It's not your personal money.

It's like we all together gather these funds to make the world a better place.

So we created a transparent banking platform

for non-profits.

For many reasons.

We were wrong about the ability and readiness of...

The appetite.

The appetite, exactly.

The appetite for the non-profits.

But you know like this was one of the...

This was also the times when we realized that some of the challenges

which like fundamental challenges which we saw in economy actually they were true

in the United States as well.

Not only in Europe, not only like Russia, not only is Israel,

but in the United States as well.

We realized that even with the non-profit transparency,

if you will look at research of what actually donors want,

you will see that the previous generations of donors,

they don't really want to see where the money spends.

It's almost the last item in the list of their preferences,

is their requirements.

But our generation and generation's younger,

they're on the first place.

We want to see what happened with...

The dynamic of thinking behind this is for the older generation,

they donate money because it's a give back for them.

They're like society gives them a lot.

It's feeling good versus doing good.

Yes.

And for the youngest, it's given forward.

We want to change what's bad right now and we want to see it's changing.

And also, actually, previous generations got a lot from society

in terms of form of free education, almost free college education,

like 30 years ago, and things like that.

New generation being hammered with student debt, etc.

They don't really feel that society gave them much,

but they really still donate the same portion of their income

than the older generation.

But it's just different reasons to say.

I feel like some of the younger generations here,

younger than me, get a bad reputation for misunderstood reasons.

Or I should say they're misunderstood in the sense that...

I know you guys have spoken about this before,

but if you look at, say, previous generations' ability to get a higher education,

put a down payment on the house and pay for a mortgage,

compared to some of the more recent generations, it's night and day.

So it's important to factor that into how you evaluate them.

Question for you guys with looking at the nonprofit and the platform.

You're very good at, it seems like, letting go of ideas,

having a light grasp on ideas if things are not working,

so you can move to something else that you think might work better.

That's not true for everyone.

Some people get very attached to one thing,

and they want to ride it until they die,

and they get attached to things that may never work.

And I'm wondering how you think about changing direction,

maybe failure and quotation marks.

Like what allows you to do that so readily?

A, we'll learn the hard way.

So the first, the game studio, we grasp and we try.

You know that if you don't stop at the right moment,

you can actually get to a deep shit.

Yeah, you can get into a hole.

Yes, but also what we saw in the data,

is that in what we realized also through the experience

of game development, failure, and then animation success,

that we realized that...

It is not always about your abilities.

So you can fail just because of different reasons,

like financial crisis, like poker, right?

Yes, you have to study the decision making, not just the outcomes.

Yes, and the statistics of venture startups

is that two-thirds will fail.

Like completely fail, losing all the money at zero.

And if you will look at all these failures,

there are rare exceptions.

But in most cases, what you should see is that

if your startup is growing, you should continue.

You should double down, put your all attention there, etc.

If it's not, think twice, and probably...

You should stop and quit and start another one.

If we look at this purely from the perspective of statistics,

if it's not doubled the growth,

if whatever numbers behind your understanding of your business

isn't doubled, it didn't double.

How to say?

Isn't double?

Yeah, it didn't double over what period of time?

Over 14 months.

14 months.

Why 14 months?

I have to ask.

It is pure statistics.

Like if you look at the statistics, it's just...

If you look at all these failures...

Oh, I see, I see.

That's the pattern.

And success is over that period of time.

Yes, it's like a pattern.

You should basically take...

Doubling over 14 months.

If you take all of them and divide, then just 14 months.

Because if you're also not growing with this space,

venture capital will not be accessible to you.

And you won't be able to actually raise money.

This is funds to grow further and things like that.

So this market is actually a pretty special in terms of these probabilities.

Like just one out of 100.

This is going to be a unicorn.

Success.

And if you don't see trajectory to get there...

Probably you're not getting that.

The right thing is just to stop and start something new.

And knowing that your chances are one in 100,

you should try as many attempts as possible.

Take more shots.

Moreover, we usually show to the young...

Wanted to be entrepreneurs.

Wanted to be entrepreneurs.

We showed this picture of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel,

who made into success from the first attempt.

Dropping out from the college and look there, billionaires.

Most of the billion dollar companies created not like that.

It's created by people who failed multiple times and then got to success.

In terms of statistics, this is what we should absorb with this thing.

Definitely something depends on your abilities to execute, etc.

But there are things which...

Totally.

...independent.

Man, I remember Angel investing starting in 2008 and seeing business models

companies that couldn't execute in a period of time,

because technology just wasn't there and the adoption wasn't there.

And then five, six years later, basically the exact same company.

But a few things have changed.

Mobile phones have become more powerful.

A handful of protocols have been developed and then boom, it works.

Uber is mobile phone with GPS.

Yeah, you're right.

Yes, with wide enough adoption.

And it was tried.

These ideas were tried before.

Ordering or text online?

Yes, for sure.

It's been there.

And because of that, especially because we really...

We balance ourselves between sometimes when we work on some forward-looking ideas.

Like buying cars, wrong kids in the marsh.

Something which is not happening yet.

And also we work on some projects which down to earth, which already something which is happening.

And we know that with these projects which are not there yet, yes.

There is the chance to win big, but this chance is small.

And there is like a lot of timing issues.

And you can lose just because timing is not right.

And we, as Daniel mentioned, we learned it hard way with game development today.

It was really hard for us to stop, even though it was obvious that probably...

We were lucky with the animation studio and then another unfortunate event

was losing all of the money just in banking crisis and Cyprus.

And we stopped pretty fast.

I mean, we were like, are we going to spend time recovering

or are we just starting something new?

Yeah, when Silicon Valley bank crisis happened, we were among like really small group of our

friends founders.

All this time, we were obsessed with diversifying the money on different banks.

And everyone would tell us that in the United States, you shouldn't think about that stuff.

Don't worry about it.

We don't worry about this.

Cannot.

Cannot just because cannot.

And we're like, right.

Surprise.

We are not immune from all the problems we've seen other places.

All right.

So I'm going to zoom out for a second because I like to think about sort of meta decisions

that span across a lot of other decisions and projects and so on.

So the two of you living one life, we have to talk about this.

I have never seen an example quite like this.

I mean, there are couples who are say power couples, but it's a different dynamic.

I mean, you guys have been seemingly sort of hive mind from a very early age.

So when did this start?

Right.

So you have one email address, one Instagram account, one LinkedIn.

I think the phone is maybe the same.

It's connected.

So that's right.

So I'm looking at some notes here.

So since you were born, this year was the first time that you guys spent 10 days apart.

Put another right, not being together in one place when you went to have a passenger retreat.

All right.

So could you explain for people who understandably will find this interesting and kind of alien?

How did this come about?

And how is it helpful versus confusing?

I mean, how do you guys do it?

It is confusing.

But A, we should understand that we, the six of us grew up in one room of a size smaller than this studio.

For those who can't see the full studio.

I mean, it's not huge, right?

It's not an airplane hanger.

It's not a basketball court.

It's like a bedroom.

Three bunk beds.

That's how the six kids could fit in the room like this.

And then even later, so we grew up like this up until like school already started.

And I think like until 13, 14 years old, it was a situation more or less.

And then parents also send us to school by pairs.

It was like a logistical innovation.

It's like buddy diving when you're scuba diving.

Exactly, buddy.

It was dangerous to walk on the streets in 90s alone in Moscow.

So together, they don't need to walk us to school so we can do it by ourselves and all the stuff.

I had a great confidence.

Exactly.

So they were sending us by pairs to school, not only the two of us, but the other kids as well.

So we were a pair.

Date was five years old.

I was six years old when we went to the school.

And the rest of the kids were seven.

So we were bitten.

But because it's so us, we learned how to like avoid to protect ourselves being two rather than one.

So had to survive.

It's like bonding experience.

Very helpful for the bonding.

Very helpful for the bonding.

Helping each other like through the education, like doing homework together, all the stuff together.

By 13, 14 years old, that's when we started forming our own ideas of what could be cool

for us to do in our life.

And that was already like a social justice type of thinking.

Like how can we make a world a better place for everyone?

And starting from there, we saw how no one literally was supporting this idea except two of us

basically continue the conversation in between the two of us and it never fade away.

Which idea is this?

This is the combining.

The idea is that like transparency in government.

It was just one branch of this idea.

So the two of you are very aligned.

Yes.

The technologies can actually lead us to a better governance.

And that's what we saw.

And through this experience of being kids, you know, like first we realize that when you go to school,

all kids, they are alone.

But we weren't.

It gave us a lot of advantage.

We're always doing that.

We don't need to struggle to company together around us because it's already two people.

It's much easier to gather a company like a group of friends around.

Also, we realized that if I know mathematics better, we can do it the way so that no one

wouldn't know that Daniel don't know mathematics as I do.

As good as he does.

So and so you can actually copy.

Yes.

We'll try and type a citation.

And we learned that that's what we can do that.

And if we weren't allowed outside the world to actually distinguish who has which qualities,

you can cover the basis.

Yes, we will be able to seem to be super human because we have both of the qualities.

Okay.

So I know you guys as an example are fans of the Collison Brothers, right?

Yes.

Amazing.

And Patrick's been on the podcast.

My understanding is they have they're very powerful together, but they have maintained

they're like, I don't want to say Batman and Robin.

That's not quite the same.

I mean, they're like, you know, two of the Avengers, right?

I mean, they're superheroes, but they have clearly delineated separate points of contact and so on.

What have been some of the other advantages or drawbacks of doing it the way that you guys have

approached it?

Even though they definitely more separate than we do, but they did a lot of really great stuff.

For example, they were like CEO and president.

They switched who is here and who is president and they switched roles.

So they actually showed to the world that they are interchangeable and the team and they are great

in this regard.

In our case, we went to just in an extreme version of that, having one line of communication.

So if you text me, you actually text both of us and you don't know who answered this text.

But we can answer faster.

We can answer faster seems to be this super human.

And that worked pretty well during negotiations of the contract.

David honestly hated speaking to people as he was young.

He was like super not into talking to people.

And I was super easy to talk to people.

So it was my role in the couple to talk all the time.

And I wouldn't still never pick up the phone if someone called.

I don't pick up the phone either.

To me, it's just too much.

I don't know what I'm signing up for.

Unless it's my brother or a family.

Okay, fine.

There are a few exceptions.

Imagine that you can answer that.

So in that work in business pretty well, even though our first business partners,

they were like, why you're on the same meeting?

Like you can be in two places at the same time and things like that.

But we even at some point give up on like trying to explain some that's not it's allow us to in

business, especially it's like win or lose.

Like you won this contract or lost the contract in all these meetings are important.

If you like playing two contracts and losing both of them,

it doesn't matter that it was two of them.

If you're playing one, but you're playing hardcore game of us being a team in this

conversation, which can win the contract, it works much better.

Yeah, we're in the hand versus two in the bush.

What are your respective roles generally then?

In terms of responsibilities or strengths?

How do you think about them?

I would put this this way.

We have two different intuitions and they're like completely different.

David's intuition is he absorb data.

He remembers everything.

And then at some point he can just like the answer is this.

Like 42, like just out of nowhere out of like, you're like, why?

He's like, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's 42.

42.

And then the next morning he can wake up.

He's like, yeah, now I know why I cleared my past as this place in my mind,

which actually made the calculation and tell me it's 42.

So here's why my intuition is completely different.

The my intuition is like, we need to fly to London tomorrow.

He's like, why?

I have a good feeling about this.

And then we fly to London and we got the investors.

It's like this.

I'm like, we need to offer this people this.

And there is like, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm like, yes, yes, yes, we need to offer them this.

I offer them this.

And they're like, yes, agree.

Hand shaking.

And they're like, how did you know?

I'm just like, I felt it.

So Daniel, much better in reading people.

Daniel, much better in reading situations in general.

I am much better in processing data, processing knowledge.

I have this strange qualities that I remember everything.

Is that hard for you?

I'm just wondering, because I have family members like this

and sometimes it's a huge advantage.

But are there things that you wish you could forget?

I learned to live with that.

I think that because we have both of it,

and I see what is the advantage of a different type of thinking, etc.

And I learned how to live with that.

And now I embrace it.

I understand the limitations.

But I cannot read the citation properly.

Like I understand the limitation of this tool.

But because it's two of us, and we have both,

I actually doubled down into these qualities

and developed these qualities further and further and further.

Do you guys get physical or psychological anxiety

when you are separate?

This was the first time when we were separate.

It was the first time when we were separate.

Like not even being able to text each other

because the phone is off during the past 10 days long.

What was that like?

Well, so you had something to do in your mind,

but you had a task.

So what was it like for you, David?

It was unexpected, but for me it was okay.

Because I knew that Daniel is working

on something which is important.

I knew that if he will extract some new experiences out of it,

I also will do that.

So it's kind of...

I would sort this...

There's the guinea pig.

There was a guinea pig.

And I actually felt like I had this intuition like,

I gotta do this.

And I just went.

And it was so quick.

So David had to wait for three months.

So everyone expected...

I was accepted four days before the course started.

Everyone expected around that I will be devastated

by this experience, but somehow I was overcome

because probably because I knew that Daniel

is working on something important for us.

There was a purpose behind it.

And then the second time was like the same

situation but reversed.

He was working on his mind and I was back home.

For me, it was a little bit more challenging,

meaning that I had this mind trick which was at least

your fault that he's there struggling there.

And like, what are you talking about?

For you, it was a great experience.

But like, yeah, but for David, maybe it's not as great.

Maybe it's challenging for him.

And like, come on, seriously, stop it.

All right.

So you had the internal voice, keeping your company.

Yes.

Part of the reason I ask, and I don't know if this is true,

this is from the New Yorker piece,

is selling shares in yourself the way of the future,

which I would love to hear.

If there's anything you wish were different in that piece,

for those people who might check it out.

But I was curious because at one point it says,

at home, the brothers share a single king-size bed.

Is that still the case?

We recently changed it.

In April, we moved to a new house

and we basically decided to have more bedrooms

and we have separate bedrooms now.

Because this behavior creates some limitations,

especially around relationships.

Yeah, I would imagine so.

So we decided that, especially now when it's published,

we've become an additional problem.

I was already.

Yeah, right, in the New Yorker works.

I imagine I'm not the first person to ask about that.

So in general, our bond is quite challenging

in terms of relationship.

That's why we decided that we need to make it easier.

Like romantic relationship humans.

Yes, we decided that we need to explicitly make it easier

for potential romantic partners.

And like splitting bedrooms is like one of the first steps.

Maybe a key aim.

Different floors.

Like Daniel has his own floor,

David has his own floor in the house.

Oh, I can imagine those in my mind, right?

As I'm painting a picture,

I just imagine the floors looking very different.

Like if the respective brother's floors must be very different.

But also, you know, like when we were in the same room,

it was for purpose.

We usually would stop talking only like before,

like a minute we will go to sleep.

And start talking as we wake up.

So what are we doing today?

Like this is like, this is a wake-up call.

So now we travel into New York.

We're in one hotel room and we constantly talk.

And we constantly talk nonstop.

What an incredible blessing and gift it is

that you guys have each other.

Yeah.

I mean, like we're absolutely enjoying this way of life.

Yes, as David said,

challenges in the romantic relationship,

like we will work it out.

So do you think when you have romantic,

like let's just say you have romantic partners,

maybe of families who knows,

do you think you guys will still live together?

Yes.

We maybe will do some, you know, like is in our vision,

we maybe can create kind of special house

when you have like sections of like private

and not private and something like that.

Because we definitely need to hear also what our partners

have to say about things.

Yes.

But we really want to still have a place for two of us

when we can spend a lot of time together.

Okay, so I have heard people need to fact check this

because I think a friend of mine told me,

just as a model that Tim Burton and his wife,

I think it's Helena Bonham Carter,

if they're still together, I don't know,

but that in their house,

they actually lived in separate wings

and then they would come together

for shared meals and things like that.

So they had a very unorthodox arrangement.

We have friends who build houses

when they have joint bedroom and separate bedrooms.

And a wing for kids.

A wing for kids.

A wing for him, wing for her,

wing for kids and wing for them together.

It's like a spaceship.

Yeah, I like it.

I like it.

I'm very interested in all that's why

maybe the divorce lawyers can give you some advice

for Hollywood.

What has worked?

What has not worked?

You mentioned Evan earlier,

not everyone's going to recognize that name.

How did you guys end up at SNAP?

Our point of view,

we always tell the story from the perspective of us

meeting Dalai Lama in 2010.

When in doubt, go with the Dalai Lama story.

So it was back in 2009,

right in between us starting the animation studio

and bankrupting the game studio.

There was a three months of us.

Took a Dalai Lama sabbatical.

Okay, there were three months of us,

clearly not knowing what to do.

And then the bandits are threatening our lives.

We don't know how to like return the money.

And then we decided to go for a five,

six days meditation retreat of Rinpoche,

Tibetan Lama, who just arrived to Moscow.

And a friend invited us.

So we came there with no expectations whatsoever.

But the gentleman was very interesting.

He was young, he was super smart,

speaking like 11 languages.

And from time to time,

he would switch from this Tibetan

stories about the enlightened kingdoms

to something more practical,

even like claiming that a single person

can actually change the world if they want.

And for us it was like, wait, what?

Are you talking to us?

And we then asked if we can have an audience

with Rinpoche.

And we were told that everything is booked already.

But five minutes later, he called us.

Now, just all clear.

So he is which teacher?

Gatril Jigme Rinpoche is like a Tibetan spiritual.

Spiritual, yes.

It's like a title which you can get only from your childhoods

if you recognize.

He recognizes the reincarnation of the people of Russia.

Reincarnation of someone else.

Yes.

So this gentleman is in Moscow.

And Rinpoche is asking us to come see him.

And we're like, wait, okay, cool.

So we shared our ideas about transparency,

about how in the future we can leave within governments

without physical borders.

And for Tibetan people, it's really important subjects,

knowing that they don't have their lives.

So he resonated with him.

And when we finished our story by saying like,

and now just two of us,

he immediately abrupted us into like the three of us.

And it was touching and like unexpected.

And he finished his phrase with, come visit me in India.

In what was it, January next year?

I'm hosting an integration of a monastery.

Dalalama gonna be there.

And I will introduce you and we will introduce your ideas

together and we'll see what we can do together.

That meeting actually happened and not happened at the same time.

So we flew to India.

We spent this week in the monastery in India, Tibetan monastery.

Dalalama actually arrived.

We had a non-private meeting with him in a group of 10 European donors

of the monastery.

But then we had to have a one-on-one meeting with him next morning,

which never happened because a storm came.

I know it.

This is like a movie story.

The storm came and Dalalama immediately to the fact and to the helicopter and just disappeared.

And then we're standing there and in half hours,

the storm just rushed and flooded the entire valley.

For the next two days, we weren't able to leave the place because it was flooded.

But then a month later, we received an email from a gentleman whose name was Jerry Murdoch.

He's the founder of Insight Partners.

One of the biggest VC firms in the year.

And the email was like...

I'm at the dinner with Dalalama and this other monk.

And they told me I have to email you and they give me your email.

So that's what I do.

That's why I'm emailing you.

That's what I'm eating.

That's why I'm telling you.

We've met with him a few months later and we've become close friends.

And eventually, through the many different stories, he invited us to a dinner.

This dinner wasn't really for us.

He said that other people will come, but it didn't work.

So he invited us instead.

And there we met.

Yes.

But since this introduction, we always were quite cautious about everything which was related to us.

I mean, Dalalama introduced us to someone.

You stick to this.

There should be a reason.

There should be a reason.

And we always tried to help him and be around and just see where it will go.

You're talking about Jerry.

Jerry, yes.

And at some point, eventually, he introduced us to Evan at his house.

And then Evan gave me his phone number just right away at the meeting.

And it was the right moment.

Which wasn't expected for everyone around, because that's not what he's doing.

And we were developing technologies around 3D avatars at that moment.

And that's what was exactly on his mind.

On his mind.

Like on his mind was he wanted to combine a bitmoji, which were the 2D avatars he acquired from the

Canadian company, and 3D engine of AR technology of Luxury, the Ukrainian company he acquired.

He wanted to merge the two technologies.

And our experience in Hollywood was merging technologies.

We literally were transferring the 2D styles of existing animated shows into 3D and back

and forth and back and forth.

In that moment, we're also focused on the 3D avatars and how the technologies can actually

not a show, not something we require.

Game type of thinking, because we decided right after the financial transparency of

a non-professor didn't work, we decided that we looked around and realized that the technology

advanced, like a computer vision and style transfers and all this stuff advanced a lot

since we left CG graphics.

And we realized that we know everything and more than probably everyone in the field.

So we can try to just start something and probably going to build a successful company.

Half a year later, Evan offered us, not offered, but already acquired us.

And so just for people who might not have the the acronym.

So AR augmented reality, right?

So people may recognize some of the current or recent iterations on Snap where you can say put

any number of different sort of overlays of characters.

I mean, they do partnerships with all sorts of companies and so on.

So you can add something to your face that sort of tracks your eye movement and

augments the kind of visual experience.

So is that what you guys were working on in some capacity?

This technology, face tracking technology, it was Ukrainian company Luxury, which they

recently acquired before us and we worked how to combine the avatars into this technology.

So right now, 3D version of BitModges is the most used avatars daily in Snapchat.

It's it's already airborne like in your profiling games in lenses in all places.

And so you guys get acquired and if I'm missing a chapter, let me know.

But can you describe what you did?

What your analysis looked like when Snapchat suddenly started losing users?

I think it was in 2017.

2018. So it was early 2018.

Are you right?

2017 Instagram released their stories.

And in the beginning of 2018, new version, new update version of Snapchat was released.

Kim Kardashian tweeted, local agenda tweeted that like no one would use Snapchat anymore,

all the stuff in audience started to decline.

And at that moment, most of the people believe.

Internal idea in the company was that it's due to the public public sentiment.

The public sentiment of the bad new version or a competition of Instagram in TikTok or altogether.

While our analysis of data showed us that it's not true.

And then the major reason for the decline of the audience

was related to the fact that Android version of Snapchat after the update

becomes so slow that people over time gave up.

Yeah, they just abandoned.

They just started abandoning.

10% of the slowest devices of Android users could have experienced like up to 40 seconds

before the feed with stories would load.

Next time when you will open some feed like

I'll barely wait for four seconds.

Exactly.

So it was so obvious that this was the reason.

But it took some time.

We realized that we didn't have any specific position related to that in the company.

And we realized that what we can do is actually to just bring all the insights

which we were able to extract engineering team and to just give him all the evidences

so that more focus can be added to the problem and to making the app faster.

Now, why do you think you guys spotted this, right?

Because it doesn't sound like it's immediately your department or responsibilities.

So was the narrative that it was, you know, the geners and the Kim Kardashian's

and then the competition was that so accepted at face value

that people weren't looking at the data or what happened?

So there were several reasons.

First of all, it's Android, where Android users and among executives,

it was a really rare thing to use Android as a day-to-day.

Evan, he pushed himself to use Android to experience this all.

What say his users usually experience when they use Android,

but we use Android as a day-to-day devices.

We hackers, we don't like limitations of Apple app stores.

And close up ecosystems.

That's why we always were there.

So when we developed our 3D avatars, it worked faster on Android than on iOS.

And it was quite unique to compare to other products.

And through this experience, we learned a lot about some limitations.

And we already at that moment looked at some data just for our products to be launched properly.

We wanted to fix Snapchat's Android app earlier just for our product to work.

So we kind of had already some predispositions and beliefs related to that.

Then when the product was launched, we decided to research everything about the user behavior

in order to understand how we can better position our product inside of the Snapchat ecosystem.

And with such problems, the challenge, you know, there are different methodologies.

For example, there is a methodology to A-B tests.

When you launch, half of the users will see one version and half of users will see a different

version, and then you will compare the results.

But with performance degradation, the result is delayed.

It's not immediate.

You cannot really, like, it's really hard to A-B test.

It's not apples to apples.

Yes.

So you need to wait for some time.

You need data for a longer period of time.

And more or less, you need to break it, give your users a bad version,

wait for them to use it for a long enough period for you to see the difference in behavior.

And, and, and, and...

Sounds like a tougher sound.

Yes. Even decision, moral decision was never do that.

So you shouldn't really make the experience of users worse intentionally.

And as hackers, for us, it was like, okay, can we find a way how to get this data anyway?

So we started to look at all the previous bugs.

Accidental.

Accidental.

Mistakes.

Decreditions.

Which led to, and then was discovered, but lasted for long enough

so that we can actually extract the change in behavior data.

Still, it's really important to note, and the article in, in the New Yorker is,

it's the words not from us.

That's why they are not as clear.

There were people who also believe in this idea, not only us.

It was basically their initiative.

There were not enough momentum and not enough people who would work on this problem.

They were really brilliant engineers who already before that started to rewrite.

You could be good ambassadors for this.

Yes. So we used our previously earned social capital.

Of building this avatar product.

We need to just spend all the social capital on this problem.

Otherwise, shares dropped to $5 per share from $20 in all our,

like the entire compensation of ours.

In the equity, of course.

In equity, of course.

And also, we saw the opportunity.

For us, we got through two major crises in our life,

not counting the childhood crisis, financial crisis.

That's why somehow for us, when it is a crisis, for us, it's a great times.

So we're like, oh, like now our...

Now we can show how we can hide.

Yes.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Yes, exactly.

And at some point, we just had to show that we're good engineers as well.

In order to challenge the status quo, David had to sit down and fix camera.

Snapchat is camera.

And David made it load twice as fast.

Not load.

Like when you press a button, how fast the picture would be ready.

I showed that it can be...

The speed can be doubled.

And it was like, oh, wow.

So yes, you are guys also great engineers as well.

So how did you do that?

And we showed some of the principles of how you can find inefficiencies in the code.

But still, it's really important.

And so it was a really team effort.

Great engineers actually was part of this process.

What we see is our contribution, this promotion of this idea and bringing this voice to the

decision makers so that they also will be empowered with data to then spread it to the

entire organization.

And that was definitely really great times.

It worked.

And even though Snapchat has some challenges right now with financial side of things,

but with audience, since then it's growing.

The audience is growing.

They recently reached like 800 million.

The audience is growing in the countries where the androids are even slower.

So the app actually is pretty significant, right?

Still, in terms of Android apps, it's still like one of the fastest apps to load compared to the

major apps.

It was interesting as well.

So launching a new updated version only happened when like in March-ish of 2019.

But it was also important.

And like we put lots of efforts into this program more than the other one to fix the

existing version before the new was released.

The old had to be fixed in order to stop bleeding.

And by December, the bleeding stopped.

And in January, the audience started to grow.

In March, the new version was released.

It never actually slowed down since then.

So I have a question about this type of data driven analysis.

Do you attempt to do this type of analysis with goals or challenges that you have in your

personal lives?

Is do you try to apply it everywhere?

Are there examples that you could give outside of the business context?

First of all, we should know that we, as Daniel mentioned about intuition, we believe in both.

We believe in intuition.

We believe in data approach.

But yes, so for example, one of our major principle is that we know what is compound

growth.

And for example, when we have some crazy goals, crazy for some people, they will set some goals.

And these goals seem to be impossible.

What we show again and again is that actually if you have goals, like for example, number of

followers or number of dollars in your pocket, quantifiable things, what you can do is that

you can evaluate what you have right now.

And then if you can multiply this number two times a year,

actually every year, if you can double yourself, it is a greatness.

You have the entire money on earth, the entire population following, etc.

So it's really important when you have these big goals, you can't have any big goal with this

approach.

Because you don't need to run faster than doubling them two times every year.

Actually, what we realize is that there is this corridor.

If physical limitation at the top, which is around 2.4, you cannot run faster than increasing

your results 2.4 times a year in a long run.

But what we realize is that it's really a tiny corridor.

If you increase this number 1.6 times, you're successful.

If you increase this number 2.4 times, you're superhuman.

You're like godlike.

So this is only a small corridor.

You don't need to think about something faster.

If it's anything slower, it's just like a normal life.

Now this is multiplying your KPI by 1.7 times every year, once per year.

And we applied it a lot in our life, in our business life, in the life of our companies,

in our personal life.

So we use this methodology.

How do you apply it?

What would be an example from the personal life?

Maybe it doesn't have to follow that doubling heuristic it could.

But what might be an example?

But for example, amount of hours you spent with a romantic partner,

you inspired by.

And so you would track the hours and then look to multiply that over time.

So you should expect that immediately you would start a relationship,

which would be perfect.

And you will spend all the time.

And all this time would be perfect and great, etc.

But if you have one hour of this experience a year,

the next year it can be two hours, the next year it can be four hours.

For some it might sound like.

In 10 years you have the entire life like that.

Slow build.

We just realized that when you try to run faster, you can actually break yourself.

I see what you're saying.

So you can make a mistake by saying,

okay, I'm going to spend half of my time this year with this person

because you're sort of biting off more than you can chew.

And maybe shooting yourself in the foot for the long term.

Okay, so basically having an eye towards growth,

but not being excessively ambitious in the beginning because you'll break things.

Yes, I know on personal experience.

Yes, this is like when you want too much right away, you break stuff.

Yeah, I can see that as someone who's like physical breakage also.

Even with the acceleration when you're in a rocket flying to space,

there is this limitation of like 3G, like 3 times G,

which then actually start breaking stuff in yourself.

So it seems that it's kind of a natural number.

This is what we can sustain like 2.4, like 2, 1.6.

This is something which we can sustain physically and mentally.

And you can honestly, you can find it anywhere.

You want to play music?

Just start from something achievable right now today.

Double your result every year.

And you will become like a beyond super star.

Super star, yeah.

Certainly true with physical activity too.

If you think about say weightlifting or whatever,

you don't need to 10x the number every year.

And if you try, if you try, like I've tried,

then you start damaging your connective tissue or needing surgery.

Yes, I remember that it was one of the Olympic teams.

Was it in the UK or something like that?

I don't remember exactly.

But they got a new trainer.

And the new trainer was a coach, was with this approach.

Like, but the approach was like,

we need to improve our KPIs 1% a week.

It's almost the same.

And they become champion from nowhere.

Like the last position on the list, they become champions.

But physical activity is the same in business activity,

running the money, finance, music.

But really important is that you can achieve anything.

You can have any type of mission or big goals.

But then you write this, you like draw this.

As long as you're consistent.

For yourself and be consistent.

What are some of the logistics challenges

and how have you addressed them in running your businesses,

how you run them or organizing your lives

the way that you guys organize them?

We have a very messed up calendar.

It's like multi-dimensional.

Does that mean that you're just traveling all over the place?

We travel a lot for sure.

We probably like this year were in the States for three months

all over the year.

But at home, like at home in LA even less time than that.

Maybe like one week a month, not more than that.

But what helped a lot that started with two of us

but quite fast, two of our sisters joined.

And they usually don't travel that much.

And they usually run operations and scaling of their projects.

Do any of your other siblings have the pair bonding that you guys have?

No, no, it didn't work.

But five of us, we are quite close.

And we work together.

We work together.

We leave together in LA.

Like our house is literally like two minutes away from each other.

Yes.

And they start to run our operations since game development.

And then they become the equal partners in animation studio.

And since then, it's much easier for us to dream more and to act.

No, now we discuss everything together.

Like philosophy, the vision for the future, the morality.

It's a constant discussion among all of us.

So I can imagine just putting myself in the place of people listening to this that

I'm sure there are people out there who work with family.

And then there are other people who don't work with family.

But I imagine working with my family.

And I love my family.

But I'm like, wow, if I hired two people from my family to run my operations,

what do you do if it's not working?

I mean, would you ever fire them?

Or do you just have complete confidence that you can resolve anything that might come up?

How do you think about?

You definitely can fire.

But for sure, we went through really harsh experience with game development studio bankruptcy.

And they were the only ones who stayed with us through the challenging period.

Yes.

And when you actually went through such experience, it's much easier to trust,

not trust just because it's family, but because you know what you can expect.

You saw how they behaved.

And especially in venture business, when, as we mentioned, most of the items would fail,

it is really important quality to have someone who you can trust that they are with you long-term.

Not just for this project.

I would say this worked pretty well.

Maybe this was the results of this experience, which we all had.

But maybe just because our parents work together, for us, we didn't have this concept

that it's not right.

Never worked with your family.

No.

And we went through challenges.

Definitely, we argue with each other, etc.

So we went through a lot of challenges, but it worth it.

I was thinking also, as you saw your sisters, I suppose, doing the challenges of the game

development company has reminded me of a quote, I don't know the attribution,

but in English is a common expression, adversity builds character.

But the alternative, which I think might be just as true or maybe true,

is adversity doesn't build character.

It reveals character.

Reveals character.

And so you got to see how they responded to a lot of challenge, which gave you the confidence then.

And there were a lot of challenges.

We are lucky in many ways.

I want to ask you about, this is a same question applied to two different groups.

So the first is going to be your parents.

And I want to just ask about what ideas of theirs you find most interesting.

Maybe that's a place to talk about climatics, maybe not.

Then the second is what ideas you guys are most excited about right now.

But I wanted to start with...

Do we have a couple more hours for each?

Yeah.

So our parents, so our dad, he was from physics.

But he was, by government, pushed out from physics because he was June.

And switched to biology?

Because biophysics was an open field.

So physics was more protected and Jews were more discriminated against in physics.

So he found this niche.

It was a new niche.

It was an emerging new science.

And he came there with knowledge of physics.

And that gave him a different perspective than most of the biologists

who would see everything through a prism of chemistry or through a prism of biology.

He looked at this prism of physics.

And he started discovering things faster in this field.

Starting with the first thing which he discovered was that the color which received by an eye

is encoded not in the frequency, which is then translated as a signal inside of the eye nerve,

but as a pattern of the signal...

Poses in between the spikes.

Poses in between the spikes.

So the spider encodes the card.

So it's almost like a morse, like de-de-de-de, and this is sort of like blue.

And that's how he realized that it should be a computer is there,

that it should be a computation because the encoding happened.

He came to this idea.

There was a really interesting, weird obsession of his

on the idea that if evolution was working properly for millions of years,

if not billions of years, then it should be optimal.

That the most optimal mechanism should have survived the evolution process.

And therefore, what's the most optimal from the physics perspective

in terms of measuring the amount of energy spent on the operation and data?

He's like, time, time in between the quantum events.

This is probably the most optimal one.

And that like from this perspective, he was like from the perspective of optimality,

he was trying to find how the eye works.

And he was the one to discover exactly how it works.

And he's like, wow, so I was right about the optimality and then used optimality

all the way down, exploring into the nerve, into the neuron,

and into the core of the cell, into the DNA, and then like cross the entire cell.

So Chaimatic was the abbreviation of chemistry, optics in mathematics.

So he always believed that the real discoveries are in combination of different fields.

That's actually the fact that we learn this subject separately.

Limiting us in terms of us being able to discover

some things which requires you to look at some interdisciplinary synthesis.

In their success, both like that and now, the success was because of that.

They would combine things which others wouldn't combine.

For example, he brought the quantum physics into describing cells' processes.

So even till like maybe 2008, 2010, it was really a marginalized idea in science.

They were trying to avoid as much as possible some complicated processes in biology

because they would challenge the idea that it happened randomly.

And they were trying to avoid that.

In only recently, more and more discoveries around photosynthesis,

which probably requires quantum tunneling and then the smell and the fact that the birds can see

the direction of polarization of light and like where is North Pole.

This all can be described only through the quantum properties of some processes

which happen inside of life.

So the biggest discovery which we personally, like it's the last discovery,

you know, like it's always like that.

It's not just discoveries, like the entire concept that our consciousness

work through the quantum compute inside every single neuron,

every single neuron is sort of a qubit.

It's like a quantum state machine itself, which then combined in the network

produce all the results, but every neuron is quantum state machine.

This can actually explain a lot about our psychology, how we think, how our consciousness work,

but also it can give humanity a lot of clues how to build proper quantum computers.

So currently the quantum computers which we build, like Google builds or Microsoft builds,

they are all require some really complicated environments.

So you need to froze the computers to like minus 270 degrees.

Fully isolated from any chaotic fields and stuff.

So it's really complicated while if our parents write in every cell in our body.

And all this process happening at room temperature so we can actually look at

how biology made it and then build a new class of quantum computers,

which can actually be in your watch.

And then this can accelerate personal AI development, not the corporation's big AI,

but the one which would be with you always and things like that.

Plus there is a chance also as well that if these processes are happening inside of the cell,

the answer to a room temperature superconductors can also be there somewhere.

I know that recently there was this entire hype with supposedly discovery of the room

temperature superconductors.

It seems that it didn't work this time fully, but we all like why it was so excited because

it can change everything.

Understanding the quantum levitation, all roads can be done from superconductors

if all roads can be done.

Then we have flying cars.

If the same roads can then become the electric network which distributes electricity

around the globe from sustainable sources of energy like solar panels,

we have days somewhere each hour all the time.

And if the superconductors can surround the planet,

then we have electricity everywhere without the losing of power.

Lots of stuff can come from the superconductors.

The answer can be inside of ourselves.

Yes, so in the biggest discovery was that the answer can be inside of the cells.

If we can actually look at the properties of these nanotubes and they are really special.

Is this really like right now there are a lot of discoveries showing that

these nanotubes have properties which no one would expect that they would have,

even though we all know about physics and chemistry, but we cannot predict these properties.

Because this is probably not even published or maybe some discussions in the conferences

is happening that the nanotubes of that sort, the cytoskeleton nanotubes, microtubulars,

they can capture photons.

They can capture light and direct it within its structure.

As the light actually hits the microtubular, the photon goes inside the tube.

And then as if it's a cord which captures the light and then.

So a lot of really unexpected and great properties which can be used in industries

and which can be used by humanity to just accelerate our developments.

What is important is that they just realize that to achieve that we need to be interdisciplinary

and we need to combine through the last years.

He was a promoter that he believes that in schools we should teach kids like that.

Like not to teach like physics and chemistry and like ballet, but teaching all together

and show how all this interconnected in that we need to kind of grow a new generation of

scientists who wouldn't be so silent in disciplines.

All right, so I want to segue to the ideas that you guys are currently most excited about.

Thank you for explaining all that.

I could spend hours just digging into what you just said maybe another time.

But since you mentioned teaching, which relates to learning, how would you teach

kids to code or people to code versus how it's maybe currently taught?

So first of all, we saw that computer science historically emerged from mathematics.

And they keep minds like ours.

And so it's really great for us.

But for most people, it's really alienating.

Because if you're not good in math, you mathematics, you will just avoid even learning

because you will think that you are not really great at that.

In reality, coding is much closer to learning French or Japanese.

It's actually easier.

A friend of mine published a small book which was basically Code is Poetry.

That's interesting.

Can you share it?

Because we actually also wrote a tiny book like Code is Language.

Sure, sure.

I'll find it for you.

I'll find it for you.

And I'm not sure if he published it, but he gave it away as a gift.

Matt Mullenwick, who's the founder and CEO of Automatic and was one of the lead developers,

arguably the lead developer of WordPress.

I'll be needing to combine our sites in one book and then publish it.

So I'll find it for you.

I created, during the pandemic, had some additional time.

So I created an interactive book where you learn that you can actually

first type something in a normal language, description of the world,

and then it can be easily translated by you into coding language like Python or C++ or Swift.

It's literally like a translation.

First, you wrote it in your own language and then you translated it into the code.

So the only thing which you need to learn is a little bit different way to describe the world.

That's what mostly you should learn.

You should learn the words and implications and the infographics of this language.

If you use this method to learn, then you can actually code in any language.

Because it appears that Swift or C++, they're all the same.

They're all interchangeable.

Every time when I interview an engineer and this engineer would say that I know only this language,

this would be a red flag for me because it means that you don't really understand

all these languages.

They're almost the same.

Yes, there are nuances, but you almost don't have tasks which actually require you to use these nuances.

But if you understand the meta language and this meta language is really close to real human

natural language, then you can actually code in any language.

And that's what we really promote.

And we happen to actually teach some people coding who would never think that they can code.

Who would think that mathematics is not there.

Like moms of two.

Housewives, they are great.

Because they're great in language.

And if you're great in language, you can actually learn this language as well.

Especially right now, even though, yes, chat GPTs of the world, they can code for yourself.

But if you know how to code, you will be well off in the next 20 years, like 10, 20 years.

So for people who are listening, if they are resonating with what you're saying.

So for instance, I'm a casualty of mathematics.

I was actually very good at math.

My brother also very good at math.

And we had very different experiences with teachers.

So he had a few great teachers.

And I had one very, very angry, kind of abusive teacher.

And so I said no more math for me, even though I was innately quite good at it.

He kept going and got PhD into statistics.

And he's very math capable.

But I developed like an adolescent onset allergy.

But I recognize the beauty and elegance and value of code.

I don't think I would ever use it as a profession.

But I like the idea of testing myself.

But I've always struggled with trying to identify how to start.

And I've looked at AI as maybe a way to use an intermediary.

So I can use natural language to do some type of coding.

But how would you suggest to someone who is interested, maybe a little nervous,

but would like to explore coding?

There is a free book on our Instagram.

Like there is a link which you can try.

It's definitely only the first step.

Then you will need to learn more.

But at least through the step, our expectations that you will stop being

nervous and afraid of coding.

And it would be more natural for you.

That's why we wrote this book just to make it easy.

Because I don't like any other courses.

Because they all start with syntaxes, etc.

It's not the way you start.

They are great courses.

It's just not the way you start.

Because you alienate people who are like, oh, function.

What is function?

I don't know anything about coding.

But it's the same with foreign languages.

And I mean, it's like you see the way that they're taught.

And it's like, oh, here's a huge table of conjugations.

Memorize this.

And people are like, no, thanks.

I'm out.

I'm out.

Exactly.

No, no, no.

Here's a comic book.

Let's look at some things you can use immediately.

Make it fun.

And then later we can do the harder stuff.

And also what we found, and that's how we learn how to code,

is that usually when you learn language, you first read.

Not write.

You read.

And you need to read some easy but good written book to learn the language.

Same for engineering.

It's the same.

Like, we actually...

We mocked an Instagram application.

We wrote a clean code of a simple Instagram application.

Because everyone knows what it is.

And everyone understands how it works.

So if you read this code, you understand what's...

And then in the middle of the course, you're just, okay, now change.

Now change some stuff.

And the code, then you will see the changes in the app.

And as you change the parts of the code, you see the changes in the app.

And you're like, oh, that's how it works.

Also positive feedback.

Yes. And also, even if you decide not to be an engineer,

if even, for example, if you're a product person, product manager, or marketing person.

Or QA.

It's really important for you to understand.

Otherwise, you won't be able to give properly the tasks to engineers.

You won't be able to manage engineers.

And you're losing a lot of opportunities.

You will always be triggered by engineers.

Because you will ask them to do something, but they will do something really different.

If you don't really understand their language.

But as soon as you do, it's actually...

I wish we had more time and more eager to actually finish the full course.

But it's absolutely not the primary goal in our hectic life as well.

But I'll link to that in the show notes.

So that people are interested can at least find it and give it a shot.

I might do the same thing.

So ideas.

Exciting ideas.

Exciting ideas.

Could be projects, could be missions, could be ideas.

Just things that have you both feeling excited and motivated.

First, observations which we have about the world.

And this observation give us a different perspective.

And this perspective is almost obviously led us to some ideas.

And then usually when we have ideas, these ideas exist in us for some years.

And then we're trying to crystallize them in the project.

One of the major observations which actually started from bankruptcy of Game Development

Studio, we really wanted to understand what was that?

What the hell happened?

It was a financial crisis.

Like what?

How we missed that?

Not that we missed it.

Like we saw that there was like a problem in the real estate market.

But everything collapsed around real estate market.

We thought that just real estate market will collapse, but everything collapsed.

Little did we know about how the financial market works.

Yes.

So then we dig deeper and get first.

We got to the same conclusions that everyone, like economists.

Derivatives, credit default swaps, this all led to this bubble.

Subprimes, like all this stuff.

Yes.

People usually like when it's about derivative and credit default swaps,

blame the bankers.

Like bankers, they made this deregulation.

They are the problem and that's how it all happens.

But we usually, every time when we have a statement, we check it with data.

And we decided to understand who was the actual beneficiary of the credit default swaps.

Not of their fall, but of them being created and popularized that way.

And then we realized that most of the credit default swaps through some vehicles,

they were owned by pension funds.

And we're like, what?

Because we're from a region where pension funds really,

all pensioners are really poor people.

And you would never think that they own some multi trillion dollars.

Huge.

Yes.

Huge.

Pensions in the United States are like, what is it?

Forty trillion dollars.

It's more than the entire publicly traded market combined.

You will combine all Apple, Google, Exxon, Walmart.

You will combine all these companies.

It's smaller than the assets of pension funds.

All together, less than the assets of pension funds.

So through this prism, we started to learn more and more like how the hell it happened.

And it was a great invention.

I mean, the fact that United States is the greatest economy in the world is because of this.

So we realized it's not because of the army,

we were saving some big chunk of their money.

And the money was not just saved, but was invested into the market.

And that's how market got all the capital to grow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But then we realized that, unfortunately, as soon as this population

not only grew to the amounts that are the majority of voters,

but also they have this enormous financial power.

The financial power which never existed at the banks,

the bigger than any other organization.

So that's financial power and this voting power.

Together, combined, led to lots of popular political decisions and regulations,

which was completely false.

What types of things?

So we can give you some taste of it.

Yeah.

For example, when we first came to the United States, we learned about student debt.

And for you, it's obvious, it's United States, everything is commercial.

That's why college is not free.

That's how we got to the student debt.

But the student debt, if you will look at the size, in before 2000s,

it was a really small problem.

It was now like $2 trillion.

But before that, it was a much, much, much smaller problems.

And what we realized that previously, in the 80s,

your tuition, when you go to state college, would be mostly subsidized by government.

Like 90% of your tuition would be subsidized by government.

That's how your parents were able to actually pay for their tuition during the summer job.

Like through the summer job.

And that's how the debt never accumulated as much.

But in late 80s, beginning of 90s, because of almost bankruptcy state of public pension funds,

the governments in different states, and in federal level as well,

made a decision to not only bail out, but also for the future, protect these pension funds.

For example, in California, the growth of public pension funds, including teachers fund,

guaranteed on a level of 7.8% a year.

Imagine that your deficit would be guaranteed as well.

A state budget.

And it's not even average.

A state budget.

So the subsidies to education went down as a result.

Yes, exactly.

So you can see tons of information become publicly available online.

You can trace it.

You can trace it.

It's all there.

Tons of data.

But if you like to dig in this data, you can find it.

It's just there.

You can see it.

You can like, all right.

The money goes into the education.

And then to the pension fund.

Cull spurs in California.

Yes, it's public pension funds, pension fund, public workings,

and pension funds of teachers of California.

No one really realized the size of these funds.

And no one really realized the gap in between assets and liabilities of this fund.

So when everyone discussed that the pension funds are underfunded,

it's only public pension funds which are underfunded.

$5 trillion of a gap.

$5 trillion.

This is accounting the money which is constantly transferred

from subsidies to the pension funds.

Someone might think that this is just public workers.

Like they're probably what 15% of workforce in the United States.

And yet the size of their pension funds is half of all pension funds.

Of all pension funds.

Even though it's only 15% of workforce.

Why?

Because of a guaranteed 7.8% annual growth.

Because when the rest of the market goes down, up, down, up.

So in this problem, it's not only education.

If you look at the police, there was this big movement of unfunding police

and we looked at the budgets.

And per person in LA, for example, per officer,

in LA it's almost like $250,000 a year.

And people was very angry about that.

Like what the hell?

Like we pay you a lot and like you're not doing your job.

The real work is right now.

The real officers right now are not paid as much.

And not paid as much.

And they get only a tiny portion of it.

And most of it goes as a transfer for pension funds for officers who worked 30 years ago.

So where does this lead?

You guys are looking at the data.

And I suppose like a good set of data ideally allows you to have some predictive ability

or at least speculation ability.

So what do you do with this?

Zoom in out to a larger picture.

What it led to is that through the generations, starting saying from boomers,

I mean, I know, I know this is like a full science about dividing people into these generations.

But we can buy a batch.

People who was born around 50s, yes, so let's say.

The boomers, as they were getting into 30 years old on average as a generation,

owned something around 21, 23 percent of national wealth in the United States.

That following generation gen Xs at the same average age owned around seven.

Us, the millennials by the same age owned only less than 3 percent, like 2.8 ish.

And then the trajectory shows us that together with the crisis which happened during the COVID,

we can expect that the next generation after the Gen Z going to be in that by the same average age.

On average, as a generation, they still going to be in that.

So trajectory really bad.

And also what this creates that if these young people, not if when they realize

that the social agreement is not working, social structures will start to fall apart.

What do you think are some likely ways that that will show up?

We will see like the new wave of unions, protests, people not working,

economies slowing down, this stuff.

New business is not created.

We can see from the statistics that over the last 10 years,

the share of the new business is created in the United States.

And in the United States, lots of new business is created every year.

Lots of them never survive the year.

But like that's the case.

You create many, many, many businesses and lots of them die and some of them survive.

And that's the economy.

So the share of the new businesses created annually in the United States,

by the people under 30 years old, used to be 40 percent or 45, let's say 40.

And now 10 years later, now it's a 30.

It down 10 percent.

Now is the same number of companies being built just by younger and older?

Or is the total number more companies?

The total number is sort of the same.

It's just like not young people creating them.

It's people 55 plus creating them.

That's surprising.

That's surprising.

And know what I would expect?

I never checked the data, but my intuition tells me all those businesses are just real estate.

People buying houses and renting them out.

So nothing new is created.

Just the spike in the price in real estate is just because they're buying and renting out.

And those are the new businesses.

There are a lot of problems.

And but still, like when you talk about the problems, it's really important.

At least I proposed some solutions.

And what we saw, because we realized that this shift is based on regulations.

It's not natural that this shift is happening.

It's a regulation that's the rules which were set by the previous generations, which

making this constant transfer.

We realized that if you would decipher these regulations, what they did, that they made a

preference to equity, to like shares of the companies, etc.

Compared to the income.

So capital gain is tax less.

Like there are a lot of things which actually made the huge difference between equity,

how equity treated by the regulation and by the market, and how personally.

Got it, right.

The taxation, everything.

The incentives, everything.

The pension funds can invest in that, but they cannot invest in that and things like that.

There are limitations set, not naturally.

If you have all the capital, like the majority of the capital is pension capital,

then where it can be invested matters a lot.

Sure.

So in this term, we realized that the solution which we can test and propose.

At least try.

Is to try to convert income.

Individual income.

To into securities.

Okay.

So this is where the Lieberman's company comes in?

Yes.

First of all, we did this ourselves.

We, as a scientist, you need to make the experiments and the experiments first.

Wish more scientists did this.

You gotta be the first monkey shot in the space.

Yes.

At less than 3 Gs.

So even though our income is not stable, but if you will build a model around all the founders,

all tech founders, and the probabilities of success during the period of time,

we can build an income model like you would do with a company, projections.

Risk-weighted, risk-adjusted cash flow projection of an entrepreneur.

And then based on these projections, yes, and then by based on these projections,

you can actually set a price for a company which would have the same type of income.

In this case, if you can form the company, then you can attract investment.

The same way companies do.

And in this case, you will eliminate this bias and vice versa will be supercharged

by improving your future.

So supercharged, just to try to ensure I'm hearing you correctly.

So supercharged meaning, if you're showing a decent rate of growth,

even though you're capital constrained, if you can bring in equity investors who invest in you

as if you were a company, you can accelerate your growth and potential.

And then we can average this as an index.

As an index cross some cohorts of specific professions or specific cohorts like students,

for example, you have higher education or you don't have higher education.

How does it change your average income in the United States?

Should we invest in good education?

Every kid to have the good higher education for them to increase their individual income.

And that's where investors get their money back.

Or should we just leave it the way it is right now with the loan which then suppresses

the wheel to go and risk.

And that's how young people don't create new businesses and just go find a sheet of job.

So how do you think you incentivize this type of wider adoption and data sharing?

Because I can imagine, if let's just say we flash forward and this has been widely adopted,

now I can choose, do I want to invest in people who are going getting accounting degrees?

Or maybe I have a more reliable return on my investment year on year?

Or do I want to invest in the growth stocks that have much higher volatility,

like the entrepreneurs of a certain class or maybe age bracket,

where it's going to be a much riskier by volatility measurements investment.

But who knows, the gains could be higher.

How do you go from a single proof of concept?

I have also questions about taxation.

Just if you're being taxed at an ordinary income level,

how do you translate that effectively to equity holders who might be your investors?

Let's just say, but we could tackle any one of those.

So it could be like, how do you contend with maybe the handicap of having ordinary income

taxed even though that's presumably what people are investing in on some level,

like the discounted cash flow or whatever.

And then how do you take this and encourage other people to experiment with it?

We start with ourselves as tech entrepreneurs because most of our income comes from

building companies and selling companies or making companies.

It's different today.

There is no difference whether you registered this company under your name

or you registered this company under a holding company name.

That's a great point.

You guys are actually operating in a very in an easier case,

straightforward case, because most of your gains would be from companies.

From companies, therefore likely long term capital gains.

Maybe you have like that's USBS exclusions, etc.

Versus if you guys were like very high paid lawyers or something.

We want to hear.

Yes, we want to use that example.

Thousands of entrepreneurs can actually show under an example that it works for the investors.

And then if it works for the investors, then we can introduce new regulations

which will make it work for the professionals.

Let's say software engineers, doctors, lawyers, and from there go to even wider groups like students.

There need to be even more regulations because kids need to be protected and stuff like this.

It's all possible to be done.

So we're pretty sure that at least some politicians will see that their voters can benefit out of it

and that they can actually live better life.

And the problems like student debts can be solved in just really short term by the tools like that.

We hope that some rules will change.

Right now, most of the pension funds are invested in really bubbled, overpriced assets

just because it's too much money and not that much of instruments like financial instruments

to actually generate the growth.

That's why they needed these accredited swaths, etc.

Because they need these derivatives because it was just too much money to invest.

And if we're talking about investing in people, everyone will win.

Like pension funds will win, people will win.

It's just the growth of the economy would be much faster than it is today.

It's likely going to be 10 times larger market to invest in when we start investing in individual income as equity.

What do you say to people who think about this now?

Okay, I'm sure there are cases where this would be very attractive, at least initially, right?

So you might have somebody like a very promising YouTuber.

They want to build out a studio and hire.

I guess they could go out and raise like an equity round.

That's what we did.

But with individual income, like in the YouTubers.

Okay, so how now do you think if somebody is really successful,

that they would try to renegotiate or that they would not try to renegotiate?

There is an example.

It's not us.

It was before us.

There is a fund which invested in college athletes.

And they proposed to every college athlete.

They took the statistics because it's quite statistical.

It's like a moneyball type of a game.

Like they calculated their way to understanding how to predict how many students they should invest in

in order to basically have a couple of LeBronje.

Exactly.

Yes, and they offered every student the same price.

5-10% investment.

We're buying 5-10% of your future income and we pay you the same price.

It's $10 million.

So half a million million.

Relation.

5-10%.

70 students agreed.

That's lit.

One of them already netted a 15-year contract for $350 million.

So they did great with the fund.

Yeah, they did pretty well.

There is one athlete who's tried to challenge this agreement in court.

This one athlete challenge?

One athlete.

Was it the same athlete?

No.

This one, there is a great interview of him where he explains that this money actually helped him a lot.

Best decision in his life.

And he would never do another decision.

I'm just imagining he might be cool with it, but I'm thinking about the managers and the agents

who are like, what the fuck is this?

But it worked out.

Yes, it worked out for everyone.

But there is another athlete who netted like $3-4 million a year type of contract.

He tried to challenge this in the court.

And everything in this case is more complicated than with our case.

He was 16 when he signed.

English wasn't his main language and things like that.

So he signed and still court was on the side of investors.

Upheld the agreement.

So how can people find more about this particular example if they wanted to Google something?

I will send you a link.

You can send it to me and we'll put it in the show notes.

Yes, I think it was in Wall Street Journal, the description of all this case.

But also I can send you the links to the court case because all the court cases,

they open so you can see all the arguments.

And arguments of the court, they were about the fact that he did well.

So it's not about investors taking the class to help you.

I think like that.

So he did well and also investors described all the scenarios.

There is an agreement that there is a scenario that you will do well.

And in this case, we'll get this amount of money.

So they described all the scenarios.

But precisely described.

Moreover, I don't remember what was in their contract, but in our contract,

with our investors and when we invest in other people ourselves,

we also invested already in like around a dozen people, we have this

minimal sum which we don't actually hear.

Minimal sum, which we don't like.

Minimal income of yours, before which we are not getting anything.

Okay, yeah, there's a hurdle, right?

There's a hurdle.

We actually aim to have the outliers.

It's a power law distribution.

In most of the industries, there is this power law.

It's not only in tech, it's just in art, in podcasts,

in our opinion about this.

We will all win.

The market will win.

Society will win.

Humanity will win from the fact that we will use this power law for wider groups of people

to invest in them, provide them capital and provide them chance to get a higher education,

to try to start a business.

So question about your investments, to the extent that and we can look at it

at least two different ways.

So one could be your investors and why they chose to invest in you guys.

But since you guys made the decisions about your investments,

I'm curious about those people.

To what extent did you choose them based on their earning potential and so on

versus their potential to be a good ambassador or story for this model?

Because they both seem to matter, right?

Yes, now we care about the books.

So a good investment may have the financial ROI,

but there's also showcasing.

Obviously, because we have not that much money to invest in every people we want,

we needed to pick those who will be a good story.

So definitely we look at both.

So in terms of investors in us, the first investor who supported us,

he did not allow us to back off.

Like how to say back up.

Yeah, yeah.

And we were almost ready to give up and say,

okay, we're not doing this and you're like, no, no, no guys, you have to do this.

Like, please.

Some lesson.

He actually had the similar idea when he was out of high school in 2001.

He is one of the general partners of Slow Ventures.

Too early.

So he invested in us.

But then other prominent names like Marc Andreessen or Chris Dixon or Josh Kushner,

they also now all invested in departments.

But we earned it.

It did work right away, but we made the first round,

then we proved some results, then we made the second round.

So like with the startups.

So when we invest for us, definitely it means a lot that we want to find really great examples

because all these examples will affect the future of the idea.

And this will help others to get access to the same type of resources.

But what's more important for us, the major thing is whether we believe in this assumption,

if the person will continue building after failing.

Yeah, that's a big one.

That's a big one, right?

Because you're not just investing in one company or one idea.

Moreover, we would come and already did this through the last year and a half as we invested

in people.

We came to people and said like, quit it.

Drop it.

And that's not worth your time.

It's not working.

Like switch to something new.

You will never hear about this.

You will never ever hear something like that from the investor who invested in this particular company.

If I invested in you personally, I am mostly interested in your success.

And if you are locked yourself into something which you're like, no, no, no, I got to do this.

Like this is failure.

It's not failure.

It's an attempt.

70% of those attempts are going to end up with zero.

So just move on.

Start next one.

You'll be successful later.

With Sam, it's probably our best relationship with the investors ever.

So because it can be really open and not just showing the good results,

but also showing the things which are not working, struggles.

Because now we're in a different type of relationship and we really like it.

And we actually, we had challenging experiences with investors.

I don't think Sam is going to take you to any basements.

Yes.

It seems unlikely.

Exactly.

But not even that.

I mean, like he's fully supporting us.

It's the same when we invest.

So we understand that some of the founders we invested in really failed with their current projects

and they started the new one and we were the ones who support them through this process.

Some of them are coming through like hard times and we would say, go for a sabbatical.

Take care of yourself.

Like you need to be super efficient and you need to be happy with your own life.

Long term, this will score us much more than if you're like, we'll destroy yourself right now.

Yes.

And we already have a really beautiful examples when founders were able,

through this freedom, were able to act the way they wouldn't act.

And it's already gave them results.

Like we completely enjoin with the passes of all the people who we invested in

and they're all very different.

Different stories, different individuals, different spheres.

Like it's everywhere from YouTuber to reinventing quantum physics.

Yes.

And with YouTuber Marina, she is actually really also an awesome example.

She is a founder.

She had the startup.

But to create a marketing vehicle for the startup, she created a YouTube channel.

And send you to this YouTube channel.

Media empire.

Become like a much larger thing than the startup.

Making like a million plus a year.

But a mortgage, family, kids.

It's all risk, which you like, you wouldn't bat all of your income to the growth.

Yes, she was growing fast.

But as soon as she got like the understanding that she can use a capital from her future,

like literally, this is what we are doing.

This is capital from your future.

If you are doing as you are doing right now,

then clearly you're going to have that amount of money in the future.

You can take part of this money, which already almost exists.

And there's a current and there's a present time.

And use it in order to make your future even more successful.

So this brings up something that I wasn't sure we would get to,

but I figure I can bring it up.

Time machine.

Is it possible?

Well, there's the time machine, but there's also maybe the,

and I go back and forth on how I feel about this,

but the, I guess we could, you could look to the data if you have such data.

And there is some it would seem, but the, maybe the over fetishizing of suffering

and how that contributes to success or the belief that the more one struggles,

the more likely you are to have outside success.

Because those make for good stories, right?

Yeah.

Somebody suffers for their whole life and then they show how much they can persevere and then

they succeed.

But if you look at, you know, some of the examples that you mentioned earlier,

of like the dropout and then the big company, these are not stories of abject suffering from

the earliest stages of childhood generally.

So would you say, and this is tying it to what you just said,

that by relieving some of those pressures with the mortgage and the kids,

you're improving the likelihood of a bigger success later,

or somebody could certainly look at it and say, well, she's not going to be as hungry.

So we have lots to say about this subject.

That's why I'm asking.

If we will look at the most successful experiment of all times for the humanity,

providing free school education, free school education for everyone,

doesn't matter whether they're a smartest kid on the street or not,

like every kid gave us more than any other investment,

which we as a humanity, like infrastructures and stuff.

No, providing free education is this, like a capital early on.

It was a controversial idea like 100 years ago.

It's an expensive investment to provide education for every kid,

expensive investment.

And we scored a beautiful world, gave a lot to us.

So providing a little bit more of the same can give us unexpected results.

The different perspective is if we'll look at the majority of the unique warrants created in

the United States and look at who were the founders of those companies.

These are companies worth a billion or more.

Those companies worth a billion or more, or more.

A big share of them, like most of them are from upper middle class families.

They never struggled as us, you know, like they never went through real like

poverty type of situation.

Losing all the money on the bank account and stuff like this.

All the stories about dropouts from college,

they never had a student that's parents paid for their college.

And that's how they afford it.

The other thing that gets left out of those stories is when you drop out of a fancy school,

they always let you come back, generally.

It's not like you burn the ships behind you.

Exactly.

And then the last one, probably not the last one,

but the one also the last one for me, then David will tell something.

The struggle will come.

It doesn't matter if you have millions of dollars,

you will always be struggling because you strive to achieve more and it's challenging.

And it's not necessary that the struggle is needed, but it will be there.

Yeah.

Doesn't matter if you're like rich or not.

Like what was this rich people also cry?

So not going to wear that t-shirt around, but yeah, I mean, that's true.

And the challenge comes, especially when you started the startup.

You wanted to succeed, but then also human nature is human nature.

Life is suffering.

You're going to it's going to it's going to find you.

Don't worry.

Sonsara is still here.

Exactly.

But in general, you know, like with this argument, we hear a lot that founders should struggle.

So we struggle a lot through our founder's path.

We were like having no resources in the country where investments are always considered as a

debt you need to put as a collateral your house and things like that compared to San Francisco,

where there is no collateral, you can have a salary.

You're like, in our case, we are prohibited to have a salary as the founders.

You should have the skin in the game, they said.

No salary.

That's hardcore.

So hardcore, and if you compare this experience with Silicon Valley experience,

this is a struggle, not struggle at all.

So most of the successful companies, you know, would never exist without venture capital.

Venture capital is money in advance is actually not struggling.

Struggling is like having the cash flow and in building your like bootstrap business.

Most of the companies are not like that.

Because some levels of achievements, at least in some areas, they require this freedom for you

to actually risk and to try things.

That's why we believe that some struggle is needed, but we believe that not on the level

we have right now.

You don't have to manufacture it.

Yes.

And there will always be competition.

But student loan, which just stops most of young people in United States from actually

taking the risks early and to achieve more.

And later too.

I mean, I know people in their thirties who still haven't paid off their,

you know, and I'm not talking early thirties, like mid, later thirties,

especially if they go to like an extended graduate school or professional school,

they're still paying off student debt.

This is a needed struggle.

This is really an optimal, not needed, artificial struggle because we know that the subsidized

money is paid through taxes by people, but it's just spent on the different styles.

So we don't believe in this idea that the struggle is needed.

In vice versa, we believe that the different local maximum, which would be much higher in

terms of the size of the economy is in the place where we removed some of the struggles,

especially those which are artificial and just like trying to imagine what it is 10 times higher,

more electricity, more power, more roads, more cars, more education, more whatever,

more everything, 10 times more everything.

This is when the abundance is probably likely to be close.

To reality.

And that's what we can do in this new local maximum.

If we just change the perspective on what's worse to invest in, the individual income,

or the undying companies, the companies are dying.

On average, they live actually less than human beings.

All the statistics is for people in their potential, but all the regulations are

actually supporting for companies and shareholders.

Yes, it's obvious why it's this way, because in the past, we needed this invention of

limited liability companies in order to remove the personal obligations, individual obligations

over the business. When your ship is sunk in the sea, now you own not only all of your money,

your house, but your family can be taken and enslaved. We are far away from this world,

like hundreds of years away from this world, through the innovation of limited liability

and then the public market. And this is all innovation in the way how we see the market,

and the way we look at the market. But we are ready for the new innovation.

And this new innovation can uplift the economy.

So, question for you guys, I'll answer it first too. So, what would you,

what request would you like to make of my audience? So, very diverse audience,

across many countries, many places, most of them are interested on some level in technology,

not all of them. Well, let's be honest, all humans are interested in technology,

they just might not recognize it as technology.

Is it technology, right? If we all use tools,

that's the reason that homo sapiens have done what they've done, good and bad.

But my request for my audience would be to send me links to some of the biological and

biophysics topics that you both discussed earlier. Very interested in all of that,

including quantum effects and potentially be a bird vision or olfaction. All of this is of

great interest to me. So, people can shoot those to me on Twitter at T Ferris or elsewhere.

But what requests would you like to make of my audience or places you'd like to point them,

anything at all? Two things. First, there is a conference about quantum biology

in near San Diego in 20s, like 18th of August. All right, here we go, look at that.

Like best scientists right now are gathering. It's still quite a small group of people,

that's why they're really supportive to each other. They should compete with each other,

but they actually are quite supportive to each other. We will be in the conference as well.

But what we would ask is actually, first, to think who would be those individuals

you would invest in. Likely, all of us have someone who will be like,

this guy is going to be very successful. Second, is send this information out to us.

So, if you know that person, you would invest, you would invest, you would invest your money in,

like, probably we all should invest. And the third one is think that maybe you

should invest in this person as well. You're like, maybe it's your kid and your parents,

and maybe you should make an agreement and actually invest in the person.

Our agreement is publicly available online. You can all read it and check what's the closest

in there. Like, you can use this. And that's Liebermans.co?

Yes, let me say Liebermans.co. So, I would say that this is a request. So,

first, think about these people you would invest in, send out the information about them to us.

So, what is just being cognizant of the fact that this is a large audience? So,

sometimes not good to give out like your private email. I've had people do that.

I warned them about it. How should people notify you of these? You have a form.

It's a form. That's it. Humanism.is.

Humanism is. Humanism.is.

And also, we communicate quite extensively through Instagram. Usually, we use Instagram,

million people will come. Usually, we use Instagram, not for pictures,

but for larger texts in some of the ideas. That's instagram.com slash Liebermans.

Liebermans. L-I-B-E-R-M-A-N-S also. Same spelling, Liebermans.co.

Just telling people. All right. So, Instagram, the form at humanism.is,

and people can find the agreement. On that, Liebermans.

Liebermans.co. What the other ask can be,

if we truly want to see this world happening, we need to educate the older population

and the investors and the grandmas and grandpas who actually are

shareholders, stakeholders in the pension funds. We need to educate those people who actually own

most of the money in the country to gradually start investing in this type of agreements,

to at least check, to see what's going to happen in five to ten years from now,

if they're going to make more money by investing in individual income rather than

private companies, public companies. And in this case, we will be able to have an experiment.

And if it's a successful experiment, we will educate country and market to shift towards this.

Yes, you can ask your red man to look where the pension money of her are invested,

and to see that probably some companies we all blame for some problems in the world,

they can be the investors. But actually, companies which affect our ecosystem in a bad way,

they are not owned by bankers, bankers or whatever, they actually, most of them,

like 90% owned by pension funds. So if we can educate our previous generations that they

can be shareholders in the problem. Or the shareholders in the future and they have to

choose how their money is influencing them. And they can be the shareholders of the future.

This is the heritage they can leave, destroying the planet or actually switching.

And I would imagine 99.9% of them have no idea that they can control it.

That they have a choice. Yes. And they have. That's the funniest part.

They can log in and they can actually change. They can log in and change.

They'll sit down with your grandma, maybe look at their like...

Write an email saying like, I do want some share of my pension funds to be invested,

on my savings to be invested in the individual's corporations.

Or in sustainable companies at least. This education should happen

otherwise there is this belief that the previous generation did everything right.

And just the new generation is fail. But it's really important to educate that some decisions

which were made 30 years ago affect us a lot today. And some of this effect can be changed

if we change where the money is invested. And where is the knowledge about?

Yeah, I think a lot of it is a communications problem and an education problem. And that

net and net humans of different generations have more in common than they have

different amongst them. But as you pointed out, sometimes the problems aren't obvious.

And sometimes problems aren't discussed and the options aren't discussed.

The fact that I didn't know this until I mean shockingly recently for me like 10 years ago

that I could with retirement accounts you can invest in privately held companies and

all sorts of other things. It is an option. It's just not readily exploited by most people

because they don't realize that it's on the menu. So I'm excited to see what people come up with.

Maybe someone need to make a startup which actually offers a solution for the for the

pensioners to do it easier. Yeah, to just do the sustainable companies. That's it.

Some type of interface that makes it less manual, less one on one.

Because right now it is hard. You need to spend some time to actually set up your account properly.

But the greatest opportunity we just need all to talk about this. If you have some

challenges believing in this, you can make your own research on trying to understand whether

we're right with our data and our points of view. You can like you can ask a question in the form

you can like find a way to reach us out and ask a question. So we will explain how we see this.

And why so many? Because actually the really really really good way of investing your money.

Well also I mean this conversation has raised so many good questions. I mean one of which is like

how do you take capital which is a you know it's a currency. Like it's something that you can

exchange for other things that is currently locked in a somewhat static form that may not be

generating much positive value in the world. And how do you liberate that for other faster growing

more dynamic sources of value. Not just for the individual but for the community for society.

And I mean I think about that a lot. I mean it's asset allocation but on sort of a

karmically considered level at least at the collective. And you don't need to spend the

money which you need right now. It is money which you'll only get access like in 30 years from now.

So we made an experiment when we joined SNAP. It was first time in our life when we got 401k.

First time in our life employed. Yes. Yes. So SNAP acquired us. We are employed. We now have

401k. And the experiment was we're getting exactly the same salary. Exactly the same

savings in the 401k account for all of both of us. David changed everything in his account.

Where the money is allocated to towards more sustainable companies like companies caring

about it. Yeah. Exactly. And the Monsanto's of the world removing them from there and just like

shifting the investment towards the companies which are more sustainable. Me I just left everything

as it was by default provided by the Fidelity. So far I earned 20,000 more than Daniel.

The gross is 30 percent higher than mine. So in essence it's just this is the finest part.

If you believe that other people believe in the same is that actually the world is moving in a

more sustainable clean society you will win financially as well. If the shift is happening

if you believe in the shifts then it should happen otherwise we're all going to die.

But because it's and because it's happening like naturally logically it's happening then you should

that should be no brainer that we should invest in the companies which actually does this because

others will lose in the market game. Yeah. It doesn't doing right morally doesn't need to mean

doing something that is self-destructive. You can align the incentives. Absolutely.

And investing in your kids in your grandkids is the best thing ever.

All right. So I think everybody listening has a good amount to think about and they have options

for communicating with you. They can go to Liebermans.co to see examples of the agreements.

Right. The types of contracts that have this participation in future earnings potential

and outcomes of individuals. They can go to humanism.is to fill out a form

after they think about which of their friends which of their peer group which of their circle

they would most invest their own savings into. And they can also consider doing that themselves

with the templates that you provided. We've got the Instagram book and course for those

interested in exploring coding. And the Instagram is instagram.com slash Liebermans.

David. Daniel. Thank you so much for taking the time today. It's awesome. Absolute pleasure.

Yeah. So much fun to traverse so much ground with you and for everybody listening

as per usual we'll have extensive show notes linked to all the resources everything that was

mentioned and we'll track down a few things here and there including links to might have been in

Wall Street Journal but the sports example. And you can prove those at your leisure at TimDubbLog

slash podcast and until next time be a little bit kinder than is necessary to others but also to

yourself. And as always thanks for tuning in. Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing

before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email

from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and

two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday

easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share

the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind

of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading books I'm reading albums

perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including

a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and

then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness

before you head off for the weekend something to think about. If you'd like to try it out just go

to tim.blog.friday type that into your browser tim.blog.friday drop in your email and you'll get

the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Protect's Rest

Supplement a new take on getting deeper and more restorative sleep. I was introduced to this by

former Navy SEAL of Nick Norris who has been on this podcast and as a mutual friend of ours put

it to me it's very annoying that Nick has no physical weaknesses this is somebody who can climb

like a spider he has incredible abilities as a rock climber he is incredibly strong and can also

run ultra marathons it's quite something to behold and this is one of the tools that he uses so

Protect's Rest Supplement helps provide consistent restful sleep without any habit forming ingredients

or groggy side effects simply add it to your last glass of water before bed and it goes to work.

So I tried this after I mentioned to Nick that I was avoiding melatonin due to next day sluggishness

and its possible effects on testicular function so it's trying to weed myself off of things like

that. This rest cocktail has worked wonders and I've made it part of my sleep toolkit. It's

literally on a counter about 20 feet from where I'm recording this right now. Pro tip number one

if you have trouble opening the packets just use scissors don't make it hard. Pro tip number two

mix the packets with water do not skip that step and chug it alone. I've learned from experience

rest has no added sugars artificial sweeteners or artificial ingredients. Protect is veteran-owned

and they make all of their products right here in the USA. Visit protect.com slash tim to buy

Protect Rest and you will get a free bottle of clarity with your order. Clarity is a

neutropic mushroom blend of lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps and turkey tail designed to support

brain function and mental performance. I have not personally tested clarity yet but I'm excited to

give it a shot and check it out. Let's protect that's p-r-o-t-e-k-t.com slash tim for a free

bottle of clarity with your purchase of Protect Rest. One more time p-r-o-t-e-k-t.com slash tim.

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that

provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses

including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers that's not me,

and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide

optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side as I often do and did last night on one of their

beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support and stomach and

back sleeping positions and on and on they have you covered. So how will you know which Helix

mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix sleep quiz at helixsleep.com slash tim

and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally for the last few years I have

been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest bedroom

and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best

night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me

whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty depending

on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge and there's

no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why

they offer a 100 night risk free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit you're welcome to

return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both gq and wired magazines

and now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring you a truly elevated

sleep experience. Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different

mattress models each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences so you can get

exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for

pressure relief and thousands of extra microcoils for best in class support and durability. Every

Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturers warranty and the same 100 night

trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. Helix is now running their Labor Day sale which you can

take advantage of until September 10th get 25% off on all mattress orders plus two free pillows.

That is very significant savings. That's 25 off because of their Labor Day sale so check it out.

Good Helix Sleep dot com slash Tim. One more time Helix Helix sleep dot com slash Tim with Helix

Better Sleep starts now.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Snap, Silicon Valley, Corruption, Quantum biology, Snapchat's decline, Dalai Lama, Animation production, Coding, Financial challenges, Founders pledge, Sustainable progress, Generational wealth gap

People

David Liberman, Daniil Liberman, Dalai Lama, Jerry Murdock, Tim Ferriss

Companies

Snap, Product Science

Organizations and Institutions

Founders Pledge

References

Warning: Undefined variable $clean_references in /srv/www/podtranscript.com/app/podcast_episode.php on line 376

Brought to you by AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement, Helix Sleep premium mattresses, and Protekt’s REST sleep supplement.

David Liberman and Daniil Liberman (@DaLiberman) are visionary entrepreneurs and investors with a close partnership spanning 16 years. They gained valuable experience at Snap, contributing to projects involving avatars, bitmoji, animation, and product operations. They are currently based in Los Angeles, where their primary focus is on building Product Science, a service dedicated to optimizing mobile apps.

Moreover, the Liberman brothers have established The Libermans Company, referred to as a People Company. Through their commitment to the Founders Pledge, they have allocated all future earnings and economic value for the next three decades to LibermansCo, including founder shares of Product Science and potential returns from future investments.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. 

Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.

*

This episode is also brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2022 by GQ magazine, Wired, and Apartment Therapy. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim. The 25% off offer is valid until September 10th.

*

This episode is also brought to you by Protekt’s REST supplement! Protekt’s REST is a new take on getting deeper, more restorative sleep. Protekt’s REST supplement helps provide consistent, restful sleep without any habit-forming ingredients or groggy side effects. Simply add it to your last glass of water before bed, and it goes to work.

REST has no added sugars, artificial sweeteners, or artificial ingredients. Protekt is veteran-owned, and they make all of their products right here in the USA. Visit Protekt.com/Tim to buy Protekt REST and you’ll get a FREE bottle of Clarity with your order. Clarity is a neurotropic mushroom blend of lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, and turkey tail, designed to support brain function and mental performance. I haven’t personally tested Clarity yet.

*

[06:59] Childhood.

[09:46] The influence of scientist parents on curious kids.

[12:42] The perils of pursuing anti-corruption innovation in post-Soviet Russia.

[18:09] Building a business with cables and crossbows.

[23:21] Lessons learned by bankrupting a gaming studio.

[29:42] Moscow-style investment recovery.

[31:07] A lucky break in the darkness of debt.

[32:07] Streamlining production through decentralization, parallelization, and a DJ connection.

[35:00] When playing the fools is the smart move.

[41:04] Coming to America.

[44:46] Building momentum with animation in Los Angeles.

[46:19] Divorce lawyer power dynamics.

[47:10] Another unforeseen financial hurdle.

[49:02] To Silicon Valley and nonprofit transparency.

[52:21] How are David and Daniil able to pivot between different ideas so quickly?

[58:12] The formation, advantages, and drawbacks of the Liberman hive mind.

[1:07:18] Separation pros and cons.

[1:08:56] How does external romance fit into this arrangement?

[1:12:12] The Dalai Lama, Jerry Murdock, and Snap.

[1:19:28] Reversing Snapchat's 2018 decline by adapting to data and fixing real problems.

[1:27:40] Applying principles of compound growth to life.

[1:33:23] How working with family has helped with logistics.

[1:37:11] The value of interdisciplinary synthesis.

[1:45:46] How the Libermans might teach people to code.

[1:52:55] A data-driven look at our current financial crisis.

[2:04:21] What's the Liberman solution?

[2:06:46] Incentivizing adoption of such a solution.

[2:10:33] A real-world test.

[2:14:08] Who/what makes for a good investment in this model?

[2:19:35] Do we reduce or elevate the potential for success by minimizing suffering?

[2:27:33] How to invest in people (and why you should).

[2:37:52] Parting thoughts.

*

For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.

For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors

Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.

For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.

Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.

Follow Tim:

Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss 

Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss

YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss

Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.