Well, hello everybody. Back to school. Here we are. And what a wonderful thing to have this conversation going on. Seated next to me, of course, is a man who spent 40 years proving that the best investors and the best storytellers use the same muscle, knowing which details actually matter. We all know, of course, that Michael Moritz has the Midas touch as an investor, but few, I think, realized that this former journalist, which as Lucas said, is so unusual. He's also a writer of such lucid, fluent, evocative prose. I mean, I was completely blown away by this memoir, Outlander, and I feel very delighted, Michael, to be talking to you about it.
So it begins, Outlander, which means outsider in Austria, with a dramatic discovery. At the age of 51, you learned that you have an inherited propensity for a bloodborne cancer that is common among Ashkenazi Jews, and that you wouldn't live past 70. But here you are, turning 72 this Saturday. So, talk to us about the impact, you know, of this sort of medical information that you got, and how it took you on a voyage to discover your origins.
Well, first of all, thank you, Tina, for doing this. Fresh Hell being the first thing I open in my inbox when I see a fresh version. I was a bit nonplussed because I'd been feeling healthy. So when I got the diagnosis, I was a little nonplussed and actually, predictably, somewhat downcast by the prospect that I'd be dead by 70.
I have a very kindly hematologist in San Francisco. And then Harriet, my wife, and I decided to go and get a second prediction, and we went to the Mayo Clinic and we met the world's leading expert in this ridiculous form of cancer. And I went out of the meeting with him with a real spring in my step. And it was very simple. He drew a little bar chart and he asked me to predict, on a bell curve, where I would die. Would it be on the left-hand side of the bell curve, in the middle of the bell curve, or on the right-hand side of the bell curve? And again, I was nonplussed. I said, 'I have no idea, Doctor.' He said, 'Precisely.' And as you can tell, I've never forgotten that conversation. And I left the Mayo Clinic with a completely different outlook on life.
Right, but it took you then, made you obviously, it was co- was happening, and you went into this sort of more introspective period of your life where you suddenly felt a great desire to learn more about your roots. Boxes of letters and mementos arrived at your house after your mother Doris died, and you started delving into them. So what did you find in that box that set you off on this quest?
Well, it was all accidental. I didn't set off to write a book. This was a collision of coincidences. My mother, who was approaching her 96th birthday and was the forecaster of doom every day of her life, died maybe three weeks before COVID broke out. And so she was cheated of the one great disaster she had been waiting for all of her life and, savagely and cruelly, disappointed by missing it.
And then COVID broke out, and these boxes of papers — this was not the Rothschild archives, this was the Moritz family collection that was in three sort of U-Haul cardboard boxes — arrived. And I had more time on my hands because it was COVID and I wasn't traveling and I wasn't commuting, and I just began going through the papers. I obviously knew the general arc of my family story, but I didn't know the details.
And for me, it's always when you're reading about history, it's always the details, the personal familial details, that bring the broad political tapestry to life. And that's what I began to get very interested in. And I just started, you know, poking around on the internet and following every little trace and clue that I could find on the internet. And then I employed some researchers to fill out the details that nobody in my family had ever told me, and maybe they didn't know many of the details either.
So you were born in Cardiff in Wales, but your parents, Alfred and Doris, who you were just speaking about, they were German Jews who got out of Germany just in time. So how did they end up in Cardiff?
They wound up in Cardiff quite simply because that was where my father got a job. He was a classicist and he was offered a job at the university there. And he spent all of his working life at the University of Wales. But my mother — both of them, incidentally — had got out of Germany. My father was a 14-year-old in 1937.
And my mother, in 1939, she was one of the Kindertransport children. And there were about 10,000 Jews that were brought out of Germany and Europe on trains by an extraordinary fellow called Nicholas Winton. And both of them, before arriving in Cardiff those years, they had both coincidentally arrived in Britain — my mother in 1939, my father in 1937 — on April the 20th. April the 20th, it turns out, is Hitler's birthday. So, in Cardiff, where they wound up, every April 20th, my mother would always ask me with a big smile on her face, 'Do you know what day it is?' 'No.' 'It's Hitler's birthday,' she would say. And I almost expected her to serve a cake.
But of course the rest of their relatives weren't so lucky. Talk about what happened to the rest of the relatives in the Moritz family.
I began — they perished, and they perished in different ways. Some took their own lives, others were shipped off and never seen again. And they went to all the horror places, all the awful, appalling names that everybody knows that are etched in history. And there was probably a family member at every one of them.
Well, two of the most heartbreaking characters, I thought, in the book are your grandparents, your father's parents, Max and Minnie, whose story sort of goes silent after they're put on a train to Poland, right? And never to be seen again. So we assume, I think, that they ended up in Auschwitz, and they previously got their own sons to safety, their two sons to safety. So why didn't they flee as well?
My paternal grandfather was a judge — not a high-ranking judge. That was impossible if you were Jewish in Germany, but he was a lower court member of the judiciary in Bavaria. He had served at Verdun. He'd got his Iron Cross. He was a loyal servant of the state. He had got a job that had a pension. I think, best as I could tell, that he was very risk-averse.
He spirited first my father and then my uncle on two separate journeys out of Germany to get them into school, where they both survived on scholarships. And he then went back to Germany and never left again. And the answer, Tina, to the question, I think, has several layers to it. One of which was, I think, he was fairly risk-averse. He didn't speak a word of English. He was just over 60 years old. He was afraid of being a burden on his sons. He had no way of surviving in Britain.
I mean, there were a couple — just to show you how dire it was — there were a couple of friends of my grandfather's who had got to England, and they made their way by sewing the buttons onto teddy bears. These were in the days when teddy bears had buttons for eyes. And that was how desperate things were. And then my grandmother needed an operation. And so by the time they figured out they had to get out — and I think they were also in denial for several years while they wanted to spirit my uncle and my father out of Germany. I think they also felt it can't possibly get worse. And then, of course, it did. So it was all those combinations of things.
That is one of the things that I find so haunting about that period is this sense of denial. You know, that it can't get any worse. It can't. And then, of course, it gets worse and worse and worse.
Well, and then there were also all these obstacles to getting out of Germany. All the papers that you had to get, all the authorizations that you had to get, all the exit taxes that you had to pay. It was not easy to get everything organized even to get out of Germany, let alone gain acceptance in another country.
Yeah. The book, which I think is very sort of interesting the way you've structured it, it isn't structured chronologically. It's a series of memories and discoveries that sort of trigger reflections. One that I found particularly striking was your mother's funeral in 2019. You describe being packed into a room at the crematorium in Cardiff. The mourners, all ghosts from your childhood. And as you were pushed against the wall, you felt a growing sense of claustrophobia. And then you realize the source of your anxiety — that you were packed into a small chamber with a couple of hundred Jews being funneled towards a corridor leading to a crematorium.
And yet this, of course, is not a memory for you. It's the sort of the wound of your family's memories. And then you talk about actually, you know, this inherited despair, as you put it, that is always present in the descendants of Holocaust survivors. That is a very interesting concept. I mean, have you ever felt that since? And I mean, have you talked to other Holocaust survivors about that sort of — memories that you don't have, in fact, because it didn't happen to you?
Well, since the book came out in Britain, I've heard from a whole bunch of people who've written to me with similar sorts of anecdotes. But I haven't really spent — I haven't spent much time seeking out, in a self-pitying sort of way, other, you know, descendants of Holocaust survivors. Although I have a whole bunch of friends, and we all went through the same with our parents, and all of whom were very reticent to share the details. So I find it much easier to be with people who have that shared heritage, because immediately you're speaking this — even if you're not speaking it, you're communicating in this inherited language.
Yeah. And yet, of course, your own parents weren't at all sort of voluble on the subject, were they? I mean, they did not talk to you about these disastrous and hideous things that had happened. It was not a household where this was conversation. Correct?
Very little. My father opened up a little bit towards the end. I tried to — when my mother was dying, I tried to talk to her about it. But I think, you know, there's a phenomenon of suppressed memories where when people have gone through really difficult times — my guess is my parents both suffered from it. And they just didn't — and they weren't people who were in touch with their feelings. Or, you know, you remember the Britain that we both grew up in. This wasn't a Britain that was made for psychiatrist couches. So deep rumination and reflection wasn't in their playbook.
So part of discovering myself, or discovering my parents and thereby discovering a bit about myself, was excavating the past that they themselves had refused to dig up.
Yeah. It's a very different way, isn't it, that the American Jewish community and the British Jewish community actually process their heritages, as you say. I mean, it just wasn't talked about very much in the UK.
And I don't know — well, when I moved, and I grew up, as you said, in Cardiff, if there were 250 Jewish families in Wales, population three million or so. I then — my first stop in America was Philadelphia. I'd never seen so many Jews in my life. I mean, I was surrounded by them. Or people with funny names, or what would have been funny-sounding names in Wales.
Well, there weren't many Jews, as you say, in Cardiff. And did you experience any anti-Semitism as a boy?
Well, it was of the mildest sort, but when it expressed itself — whether it was a swastika that was scrawled, I remember one time, inside the drawer of my desk in high school, or there was a time when the English teacher, when we were reading Merchant of Venice, thought it would be hilarious if he picked on me to play Shylock. There were barbs like that, or people saying, 'And Moritz, what sort of a name is that?' It was always this inference that there was something about me that was different.
And one of the memories I have of that period was — we all probably in this room remember the era of telephone directories. And once a year we got a new telephone directory at home, and this being Wales, the telephone directory was full of, you know, pages and pages of people with the last name of Jones, or of Williams, or of Edwards, or of Hughes, or of Lloyds, or whatever other Welsh names there were. And I would always go to the M's and fervently hope that this would be the year that we weren't the only Moritz in the telephone directory. And I know it sounds ridiculous and preposterous, but that to me was always another mark of not anti-Semitism, but of being different from everybody else. And I think every child yearns to be — most children yearns to be like every other child.
So now here you are living in America, and there were more than 1,500 anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US last year, nearly two-thirds of all hate crimes. You know, how are you processing that? Because you spent all this time, you know, excavating, as you say, these dark, dark events of your family's past, and now we're talking a lot now about anti-Semitism here of all places.
Well, I don't want to whine about anti-Semitism or, again, sound self-pitying, because I think in being Jewish and being aware of the need to survive, it actually has made me pretty resilient, knowing that there are people who don't like people like me. So I'm not complaining at all, because I think actually it's helped make me stronger. Nor am I complaining about anti-Semitism, even though I don't like it. It's a fact of life. It's in the air. It's been in the air for 2,500 years. It isn't going to change. It flares up now and then, particularly in bad economic times when people are stirred up by authoritarian leaders, and it doesn't matter where you are.
Harriet and I were in Greece recently, and we were going around the islands, and there were all sorts of anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls. I have cousins who live half a mile from a synagogue that was attacked and where a couple of people were killed a few months ago. The kids in North London going to the Jewish schools get pelted by tomatoes. I've got a buddy in San Francisco who's a fairly well-known Jew, runs a bar. All of his windows were smashed and, again, graffiti scrawled all over the place. But this is no different than it has been for thousands of years, and it's just a condition of life for us.
Well, there's a strong undertow, though, in your book about America today. I mean, you write, 'For me, the spread of conspiracy theories and the silences of the masses seem like the harbingers of mob rule and the collapse of democracy, the darkest fear of any Jew.' Okay, that's a fairly — you know, that's a very strong expression of anxiety. I mean, how dangerous do you think the threat of rising authoritarianism is in America today?
Well, we could fill the next few hours talking about that, but I'm reasonably — despite, you know, the chants of, whenever it was, 2016, 2017, 'Jews will not replace us,' all these protesters brandishing their torches still ring very loudly. And the prospect of the daily diet of Trump stirring up hatred for people who aren't gun-toting white Christians is obviously intensely disquieting. And the notion that 77 million people in the last election voted for this fellow.
But I think they were also expressing — and I have enough confidence, I think, in America's institutions, may be misplaced, that we will get through this awful period and we will revert to something that seems more comfortable. And, you know, we're going to see in the next several months whether or not the midterms produce the result that all of us want. But there's not a lot that, as an individual, I can do about it to change the flow of things.
Well, I think one of the biggest shocks in Trump's second term is the speed with which prominent business people in Silicon Valley have flipped, as it were, to embrace him. You know, has that been a shock to you? I mean, you know, all these repellent — sorry. But I mean, have you —
Well, I think they — I have sympathy for some of them because I know exactly what they think about Trump. They think he's a complete buffoon, but they also think he's Tony Soprano and he's a mobster and a racketeer and vengeful, and he will wreak havoc on their businesses if they don't toe the party line. So they go and pretend to pay homage to him while hating the fact that they have to go through the ritual of presenting him with a shiny object in the Oval Office, and they're protecting their businesses and paying the ransom money that this man demands.
Yes, that is certainly true. But it's no more admirable than, you know, those who did that in Nazi Germany, is it? I mean, you know, these people are wildly rich, you know, they have a huge amount of their own power and their own sort of influence. And yet, you know, they feel that kissing the ring is more important than standing up for things that we hope America —
I think some of them do it. I don't want to give them a free pass, but I don't think they're the people running Krupp and Siemens, and I don't think they'd employ slave labor. I don't think they go to any of those kinds of extremes. I think what they do, particularly one or two that I know, is they try to influence him quietly while giving him the public image that he needs. But they will have off-the-record conversations with him where they voice their disgust. Now, that is not as reassuring to everybody who's watching this charade as it is to hear them say it in public, but they're saying it in private.
Yeah. But they're also not just collaborating, but they are actually, you know, stimulating a lot of these sort of awful events. I mean, we saw what happened with DOGE and Elon Musk and the fallout from that. And I mean, that's far more than just being sort of —
That's right. That's right. And I won't quarrel with that. But I think Elon beat a retreat as well. I'm not trying to be an apologist for Elon. But, you know, part of the trouble with Trump is that there's usually — and part of his wicked talent is that there's usually a grain of truth in what he says.
And it can be about China ripping off the US. It can be about immigrants in an uncontrolled fashion coming over the border with no means of support in the US. It can be about the Europeans not paying their share for armaments. And it can also be about bloated government. And I think he's dead right about many of those issues.
And I think what Elon was reacting to was the chance to trim bloated government. And I think he has said publicly he regrets some of the things that he's done and that he waded in not knowing what he was really getting into, and he created a lot of havoc and disruption and cruel outcomes for individuals as a result of it. So I think if you asked him, would he do it again — and you can say there's no excuse for this because the damage is done — I don't think he'd do it again knowing what he knows.
But he is giving like a hundred million to Trump's PAC, which is something he could have forgotten as some kind of penance.
I agree. No, you're right. I'm not — as I said, I'm not an apologist.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the sight of Jeff Bezos, you know, I mean, after having kind of half-demolished the Washington Post, you know, sort of toadying to Trump is something I think people find hard to take.
Yes, I agree. I understand.
But I think there is this other element where they're defending their business interests and trying to do so in a fashion where they don't sell out entirely. But I can see why people feel that they've sold out.
Well, as AI takes hold of every aspect of our world, given what we've just been talking about, I mean, do you have qualms about the lack of sort of moral boundaries and how we can trust the people who flipped so quickly, really, for Trump to now essentially design the future of humanity? It gives me a lot of angst, I have to say.
I can tell. Come on, Michael. I think it varies depending on the individuals, and without naming names here, I think there are some of the leaders of these companies that have a very sort of well-tuned ethical backbone.
I think there are others where they don't have much of a backbone. But I think the more important companies, the leaders there are reflective, thoughtful, careful characters, not wanting to damage the world. But I understand, again, why people are far more cynical about it than I am.
Well, I mean, as such a kind of incredibly successful investor, I mean, you're obviously sort of surveying this landscape. I mean, what is your sort of view as an investor in this massive sort of explosion of wealth coming from this AI sector, and who do you think will win that AI race?
I think the two winners are going to be Google and Anthropic. Those are going to be the two big winners. And the other big-cap tech companies, they're all, I think, on the whole, going to prosper as a result of it. I think OpenAI is in a more challenged position today. I think it's relinquished its leadership in the sector.
And this is the latest wave, obviously, of massive technology shifts. But if you look back over the last 50 or 60 years, every technology shift — whether it was mini-computers or personal computers or the internet or mobile computing or now AI — the scale and rapidity and advance of each wave has dwarfed the previous waves.
Well, I mean, you know, you were brilliant for 20 years as an investor. I mean, you very, very early on spotted Google and PayPal and Yahoo and so on. What sort of made you such a bullseye investor? I mean, what were the sort of things that made you spot the thing and say yes to that?
I think it was a lot easier at the time that I was really active than it is today. Today the venture business is a lot different from the venture business that I was lucky enough to be in, because today it's effectively a very efficient auction business. And I won't bother to go into the reasons why, but when we were investing — when Sequoia was investing in companies like Cisco or Yahoo, we had time to get to know these people and to try to understand them, and we didn't have all the competition of investors coming in from the outside making life far more complicated and difficult.
So it was — and I think any moderately intelligent 12-year-old — and this isn't false modesty. I mean, I was lucky enough to be in the epicenter with a small firm that had a good name, where we had entree to the most interesting people, and then really just had to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot. It wasn't a question of being particularly brilliant. We just knew everybody. We had all the sources of information at our disposal.
Remember, we were dealing in an era of imperfect information, which is a hell of a competitive advantage. Today you're in the era of perfect information. But a lot of these investments were made pre-internet, before information spread everywhere immediately, and that's a massive competitive advantage. You don't want to be in a very efficient market where information is available to all.
And so what was the way to get your attention for an investment? I mean, presumably deal after deal was put in front of you, and you have to decide, you know, whether you're going to go for it or not. Is it the idea itself? Is it the —
It's a combination of things. First of all, it's the size of the potential market. And then the belief of — or trying to develop the conviction of whether or not the founders have the capability of building a product or service that really is differentiated in that. And then the third thing is the grit, the persistence, the tenacity, the toughness, the intelligence of the individuals.
And that is something that you must feel very confident about judging, right? I mean —
