What's the turnaround plan, man? They want these shares going up. You don't get shot for that. Like, this is America. This is shot for that. They're not abducting 5-year-old children. I mean, like that. Someone should sue you for that.
Keith Rabois has been ranked among the top 10 venture capitalists in the world. His husband is in the Trump administration. He's buddies with Peter Thiel. His boss is the guy that kicked you off the beach in California. I've been talking to Keith since I started reporting on Silicon Valley. I simultaneously respect the hell out of him as an investor while being infuriated by his insufferable tweeting.
In this episode, which was hot off Keith hanging out with the vice president, JD Vance, we battled it out and didn't leave anything on the table. This is the Newcomer podcast.
Keith, welcome to the show.
All right. Do you want to talk about tech or politics more? That's the first question.
Well, do you want to write about tech or politics more?
But you were saying just before we got on that politics is a little bit your junk food and tech...
It's like tastes good, but it's not nutritious. My job is to find the next best founders, the next generation of iconic companies. It's not to be engaged in politics. Yes, as companies grow up, they have political interests, as we've all learned, and they have to engage in the political sphere, but that's not what I do for a living.
We'll get into both. I'm excited. We obviously have a long history. I've profiled you. You let me needle you sometimes, which I always enjoy. I feel like I'm conflicted in that I'm liberal while you're right-wing, but I like the contrarian, fighter, non-boring personality. So, I'm endlessly conflicted on you at once, celebrating your willingness to say whatever you think while sort of disagreeing with a ton of it. At least the non-tech pieces of it.
Well, as you know, I work with colleagues who have disagreements as well.
Disagree. Yeah. All right. So, let's start with some big tech news. Brex sold to Capital One. I joked, you know, Eric Lyman's already been acquired by Capital One before obviously with his old company. Paribus. You were a series A investor in Ramp, a great investor when you were seed. Okay. And then you led the series A at Founders Fund. Okay. So, very biased. You also have exposure to Rippling which I want to talk about in this whole thing through Founders Fund as well. But starting with the Brex sale and what it means for Ramp. What is your take?
Well, I'm excited because there's going to be one modern technology company. It's not going to be Capital One, right? The history of technology and financial services has never been led since the 1960s through large banks. That's not going to change because they acquired Brex. So if you want to build a finance organization for the 21st century or the 22nd century, are you going to rely upon a technology startup like Ramp or are you going to go to any bank in the world? You're not going to go to any bank in the world. So it's clear the future is Ramp or nothing.
I'm not as familiar with them honestly, so I shouldn't really comment. We don't really interact with them or they don't seem to be competitive, but I don't have a lot of visibility for them.
I just bank with them. So I'm like, I agree with you that as a small growing company, I don't really want to go to a bank. I'm always having to call JP Morgan when I have some problem with that bank account, whereas Mercury ever since...
Yeah, I don't know Mercury. I haven't used them. I haven't studied them and I don't know if they really conflict with my investments. So I unusually don't have an opinion.
Do you feel like you guys, Delian maybe a little bit more than you, but I think you danced on Brex's grave a little bit too much, aren't you? You're not in the celebrate founders?
Well, no. I mean, look, they quit. That's a good outcome for them and probably for most of their employees. That's fine. We're in the business of building a trillion dollar company at Ramp. I will be very disappointed if they're not worth hundreds of billions. Like literally personally disappointed. And this is what we talk about as a board. When Eric Glyman and Zach Perret and I get together, it's like, look, we can skate to 100 billion, but our ambitions about changing society and changing the way organizations are built and the way finance works should propel us to a much broader, much bigger ambition and the compensation that's associated with that. So, I'm focused on the future of Ramp. I don't really care about Brex. People think about it as a corporate credit card that helps you cut spending. What gets them to the next level?
Yeah. So, the next level is pretty straightforward. The CFO does care about cutting expenses, right? CFOs, controllers on down. And we started there. We're going to save you time and money. But the CFO doesn't have the ability to stitch together all of their policies, which Ramp does do. Now you can take corporate policies and implement them on the cards programmatically but they don't recognize and reconcile like revenue against this data against costs against payroll. If you were the CFO's eyes and ears of the entire company and a CFO could literally run a large organization and have complete transparency, complete visibility, all the data integrations. That's the future. Someone's going to build a company where the CFO sits around and maybe has almost no colleagues for a public company because they have all the data plumbing together. That's why the bank can't build this. You know how many integrations you need to do on different data, structured data, unstructured data, how to synthesize it. You need a UI layer like...
Eric and the founders of Ramp have clearly leaned into AI very strategically and both in marketing and in the actual product, which has been savvy.
That sort of leads us into now that Ramp and Brex, I mean there could be some collision obviously Capital One wants to compete with Ramp, but for the Silicon Valley story is it going to be Ramp and Rippling these days or do you see a head-to-head competition?
Well, yeah. Again, you know, I'm not directly involved in Rippling, you're right. I was a GP at Founders Fund. We invested and the biggest regret of my career is and I've talked about in other podcasts is I gave Parker a term sheet for the seed round. It was just a little too cheap on the valuation.
Gary Tan. Yeah. And Parker just wanted me to raise it a little bit and I didn't. And I still have nightmares like almost every day about this. Like, you know, Parker actually responded to one of my tweets about the nightmares.
So I love Rippling. I love Parker. I helped actually him close Matt to join the company. Matt McInnis. So, you know, I'm a big fan. I don't think there's as much overlap as people think. Yes, at the margin both companies have massive ambitions and anytime you have two companies with massive ambitions that have some directional overlap, there's probably some, you know, conflict at the margins, but it's not something I think of as like an existential fight.
Right? You mean they both want to be the software of record for a business, right? I mean, Parker definitely wants to be the software of record, system of record. He's always been interested in that space forever.
Ramp, I don't think we think of it that way. We think we want to be the eyes, ears, and actions for the CFO. It's a little bit different. It's like imagine Workday but for a CFO is probably a better metaphor.
So, Rippling, do you think Rippling's strategy of, you know, sort of cobbling one startup on top of another gets a little unfocused?
I don't see evidence of that let's say in metrics or performance. I think it can be dangerous as a strategy independent of Rippling if you try to do too many things. I think that is pretty precarious. And so you have to be very judicious and it's a function of, I use this metaphor barrels and ammunition. It's a function of talent. You can only do the number of things you can do in parallel is dictated by the number of barrels you have in a company. And if you have 10 barrels, you can do 10 things in parallel successfully and safely. If you have three and you try to do 10 things, you may break everything. And so I don't know how many barrels Parker has sitting around.
And what is your read, do you think Deel broke the law?
You know, like I'll say I used to be a litigator. I have not read the pleadings. Like I've not personally read the docs.
From the Twitter exchange like meeting the superficial feed I see, it does look that way. But again, I have not double clicked. I haven't had the time to double click and read all the stuff. If I really wanted to have an opinion, I would read the documents myself and I would have a strong opinion. I'm just too busy doing other things. I'm not an investor in Deel and I'm not really a direct, you know, participant in Rippling. So, I've just kind of, I track it, but I don't really have an opinion.
Do you think Andreessen Horowitz is really bear hugging Deel? Like, do you think, you know, they were the board member on Synapse? Like, how much do you think investors need to hold a hard line against fraud or...
You know, the lesson from Andreessen in some way and, you know, I'm a defender of Parker, was always support the founder. I don't know what are the limits of enabling. I think there's, you know, everybody has their definition of integrity. I think that's critical and, you know, I did a joint podcast recently. We talked about Jack Altman asked us like directly is there, you know, one thing that's like non-negotiable and we both have the same response immediately. It's like ethics, integrity. So, I don't think you compromise that. For example, like when Parker was pitching us for the seed round of Rippling, he only got two term sheets, by the way. Gary Tan and me were the only two term sheets. The key thing I wanted to hear and my partners wanted to hear is what lessons did he take away from his benefits. That was all we knew he'd be successful and he'd be able to get traction and he knows what he's doing. He knows how to build product and company. But the question for us was has he learned based upon that experience his benefits or is he going to do the same things and we obviously extended term sheet. So we believe that he had internalized some core lessons, it was a different person.
Let's move to AI. You know you've done some meaningful marketplace investments. What is the future of marketplaces in an AI era? Like do you see these sort of agents existing in marketplaces? Have we, it feels like Silicon Valley has moved on from marketplaces?
Well, I don't think in terms of labels like marketplaces. You're right. I invested in Affair and I like marketplaces but it's more that I found the founder fascinating and I felt like that there's a business opportunity and marketplace was a tactic to me. It's not like the Bill Gurley like writing about blog posts about marketplaces and looking for all these marketplaces. Like DoorDash is a marketplace in some ways but that wasn't what resonated with me. It was like Tony, you know, interned with me at Square. I thought Tony's phenomenal. I immediately grokked when he and Evan actually pitched me. Evan Moore pitched me on what DoorDash was, was this is the I'm hungry button on your phone. Kind of an Andrew Mason concept. It's like yeah I'm hungry. I can imagine people pressing this all the time. Now the hard part was could you deliver that food reliably across vast selection on time. But the demand was obvious and the marketplace just is a component. So I don't really think in terms of people's labels even AI which is, you know, the conventional label of the day, the du jour topic.
You've sort of pushed back a little bit on the AI everything or you have...
About 70% of my investments over the last since I came back to Founders Fund, which is a little over two years, 70% of my investments are AI but I don't look and say I want to meet AI companies. The way they deliver value to some end customer is through the introduction of AI and that to me is the critical part. And then there's a set of questions around can they deliver this value sustainably, durably given all the progress in technology, you know, through labs and new labs and all that stuff, is there a durability there? But it's more to me the value proposition of what value you're creating for the world or for an industry and then what's the secret sauce that you're using that no one else, what's the why now and what's the sustainability, the accumulating advantages of why you can do this forever.
So let's make this tangible. You know one company I'm excited about and you're very invested in is Rogo. We had them on stage early at Cerebral Valley. That's true. Explain the theory behind Rogo and what...
So in the short term I think you can think of Rogo as co-pilot for investment bankers. Like investment bankers do a lot of grunt work. Like we're in New York City, like a lot of people here are investment bankers. It's one of the worst jobs on the planet as far as I can tell but it's prestigious and lots of, you know, fancy college grads want to be I-bankers. What they do, you know, all day is create presentations. That's all they do. Stitch together these presentations 24/7, turn it around and, you know, pitch clients on like here's targets for you and all that stuff. It's a lot of grunt work but glorified grunt work and these people are compensated heavily but they work 24/7. Could you use AI to automagically generate these presentations with the proper data with the right target list? Absolutely. And so that's what we do is we make the life of investment bankers better, more accurate, faster and probably less expensive over time to customers.
How capable is it right now?
It's really good. I mean like so there's really roughly 30 top tier investment banks in the world. I suspect we'll have almost all of them as customers.
They all want to know, they all want to make sure they're not missing something. That's not...
Yeah, but we, so one thing we do differently at Rogo, we have always cared about from the beginning since I got involved. I led the series A. So, I got involved. We care about the usage metrics like literally MAU, DAU kind of consumer metrics. Like if you're building the right product, you want the entire banking team to be using you frequently, constantly and that's the right metric, not revenue. Revenue is a byproduct of succeeding. We don't just try to sell and then because there is a lot of budget, you know, allocated to AI and check this out. We don't care about that. We care about DAUs, MAUs.
What's the moat to protect them from OpenAI, a coastal investment or Anthropic?
Great question. You know Gabe and I chat about this all the time like all the time. I think there's workflow moats. Like the construction of what an investment banker has to do is not just leveraging ChatGPT. Yes, that can be a useful ingredient. Secondly, there's data moats. There's a lot of proprietary data in this business. Like I was shocked actually after I met Gabe of how many successful startups or companies that have like hundreds of millions of dollars and are worth billions of dollars that are just proprietary financial services data. There's like, you know, something like five to 10 of these and...
I wasn't familiar with maybe all but maybe one of them.
So, you need access to that data. Many or most of these companies are not giving it to OpenAI or Anthropic because they actually don't want to protect their own business. We actually do have the rights to use many of them through Rogo. So I think that's...
Bloomberg I don't think we use.
I'm sure they would resist.
Well, it's less important in different parts of banks. Use Bloomberg differently. The I-bankers are not as addicted to Bloomberg and Bloomberg chat as some other parts of the bank.
At least that's what I've been told.
Right. Right. Right. I haven't been an I-banker.
But I had friends who, a lot of my friends growing up from college became I-bankers.
Now lawyers are making big bucks. I mean obviously you've done very well but for a while it seemed like a foolish career if you're optimizing.
So literally this is the case. I started as a like high-end corporate Wall Street law firm in New York City at Sullivan & Cromwell.
And what happened was all the smartest corporate attorneys, transactional attorneys became I-bankers. They all went to be like wanted to go work at Goldman because they make so much more money. But I was a litigator so I didn't have that option. So I had to go to tech. It was like I was a desperate, desperate, like height of the internet bubble January 2000.
And was PayPal the entry point?
Well no I started at a company that no one remembers called Voter.com. It is actually a good idea. It was involving politics actually. Politics meets tech. You can see why it was interesting to me. And we were trying to personalize content back in 2000. The basic concept is a lot of people you say are you interested in politics? More than a majority of Americans say no, but most Americans have an issue or two that they care a lot about. Like it could be taxes or it could be abortion or it could be some foreign policy, Israel, Iran, whatever the case is. So the question was in the beginning of the internet sort of was could you narrowcast content that people would read and consume even if they rejected politics. So that was what we did and we're doing a pretty good job of it actually. Then the internet bubble occurred and we kind of built the startup assuming capital was cheap and oxygen and fuel would be forever available and that changed very quickly in March 2000 and then definitely changed forever in June of 2000 and we had a very young, sharp but young 19-year-old CEO dropout Duke. He wasn't willing to make dramatic changes which would have been required to save the company. I still think the idea generally is conceptually pretty sound.
But that was my first startup and as that company started struggling and I got frustrated the CEO for not being decisive. I called up my friend Peter Thiel and I said hey what do you think I should do? It was just pure advice and he said well I could introduce you to a lot, the company was more on the east coast. I was living in Boston in DC and Peter's like I could introduce you to a lot of people in Silicon Valley but why don't you just come work for us? I was like you know what do you want me to do? And six weeks later, I had already moved to California and started in the office of PayPal.
This is a fraud question, but the PayPal mafia is all over the Epstein files with Reid and Elon fighting with each other. What do you make of the whole, what is your view on like how much we should be focused on this or not?
You know, I don't know. Oh, it's one of these again a topic that I have not like, yes I see in my feed Elon, it's hard to miss Elon. If a core question is like how does the world work you're a little closer to it than I am.
I know some of the people not Epstein obviously never met him but I read, you know, these threads and I don't have the time to dive into like who said what about who and how true or false is it like that. Like I do need to concentrate on like what I do for a living.
This is just I feel like the answer is this is a loser to talk about or like how can you not be curious about it like America...
Like pure amateur and I think some of the stuff with Elon Reid going back and forth as an amateur I can't tell the difference. Like I have opinions on some things I've read in the news about Epstein but it's more just I have opinions about like, you know, anything else in the news. How it gets to like how sincere is some of the fighting on Twitter, right? That's a fair question.
It feels like one of the main topics that they're just like weaponizing against each other when because it's like mutually assured destruction or they instead of mutually assured destruction where they would stay away from it. Now it's like everybody has put their foot on the gas and is just throwing accusations around fairly.
I think that has changed. The dynamic seems to be very common. On, you know, that dynamic.
Are you out on Reid? Like I feel like it used to be there was sort of a friendly relationship between the right-wing members of the PayPal mafia.
Yeah. I mean I haven't, I don't have any problems with Reid. He has in my opinion the wrong views on many topics, but I also think he's very good at what he does. He's funded some things that I think are a mistake and, you know, as he looks back on his life he'll realize he probably shouldn't have funded. But like lots of people have wrong views and sometimes they have epiphanies.
Like sometimes people wake up and realize like I used to think X and now I think Y. Like this happens to people. So I'm somewhat optimistic.
This is I grew up in Macon, Georgia and, you know, I had all these Christian friends when I was an atheist and I'd be like, 'How can you think I'm going to go to hell?' And they'd say, 'Well, we think you're going to convert. You're going to be saved.' That's sort of what you're saying.
Yeah. I'm holding out for a soul to be redeemed someday.
Yeah. So there's, I mean so I grew up actually the opposite way. I don't know if you know this. My parents were pretty liberal. They were like the impeach Nixon people running around. I was like if you watch the old...
My parents were liberal to be clear. Have you ever seen Alex P. Keaton and Family Ties growing up? This is a great TV show about this like conservative preppy kid with like hippie parents. That was like my family growing up. So, you know...
I do think people do change though. I have seen important people in my life evolve their views and one of the reasons why I prioritize, you know, about topics, politics, whatever is occasionally you say something that resonates and that's a big deal. Like so for example I'll tell you how I became a conservative it's kind of interesting. I remember listening to my parents about all these views and then Ronald Reagan got elected and they were convinced that he was going to blow up the world. They're convinced that he hated Jewish people and then he got elected.
Are you Jewish? I don't actually...
Extremely Jewish. Um meaning like...
My daughter is now Jewish. So yeah. Anyway, one of those people say...
But so they had all these views about Reagan and literally he was going to have a nuclear, you know, again like anyway he got elected and like on day one everything started getting better. The hostages got returned from Iran, the economy started growing blah blah blah. America was back, you know, we won the hockey game, you know, all this stuff. So, so I was like, is that a story? That's a story. Like, so this is funny. What happened to me just got returned when he came back? So, well, it was because they were afraid of Reagan like were like, 'He's gonna bomb us. He's a bad guy.'
No, they were like, 'He's going to bomb us. He's not fucking around.' It's a little bit like what they're going to see about Trump. Like, Trump's not screwing around like with Iran.
Yeah, that regime is going to end. It's just a question of how painful is it? And like period, like...
It's going on for a long time. Like there's just to bite on Iran specifically. There's a funny dynamic on Twitter which is like people like Josh Wolf being why isn't the left talking about this more which I don't understand what we're supposed to be calling for like...
Well that's a good question of what you should do but it is absolutely the case that the current government is slaughtering innocent people it's terrible and right so like but the same people who are whining about other topics seem to be very...
Normally you whine in America when you're trying to move the American regime. What are we supposed to whine about on Iran?
Well, I do think people should be protesting. Like there's official organizations that are supposed to protect civilians.
Very, they were very critical of other parts of the Middle East and suddenly they're all dead silent. Like there's no protest at campuses. There's no celebrities wearing pins, none of this. It is a little interesting. I'd argue it's because of anti-semitism and a bunch of other reasons, but like fundamentally Josh isn't wrong at all. I still think though that doesn't give you the answer which is what are you going to do and I actually think this is a challenge for the administration. Like I know many of the people in the administration and...
Your husband is in the administration.
Yeah. He doesn't work directly on this specific...
You are close to it but I know most, you know, Vance pretty well.
Yeah, I know JD. We just, I just had JD over for dinner. And so I and I know Marco and I think he's phenomenal, too. And I know Scott and I think these are all great people. They're working on this, but if they ask me sometimes when friends of mine ask me, I have an idea. Like, here's what you should do. Ask me exactly what to do here. I'm not so sure I have the right answer.
You're like, I'm a dumb tech guy. I don't know what to do.
No, no, no, no, no. You're like, no, I would never say that. No, I do have ideas. Like if you said, 'What would you do about healthcare?' I have some ideas. Or if you said like for example in Iran, I do have one specific idea that I think Trump should have done like a month ago is he should have absolutely, he said you know stop murdering protesters. He should have said you also must turn on the internet now.
Like he should have coupled the two and like...
I think it would have been effective and then it would have been like transparent of like what's going on and it would have been harder for them to mask all the atrocities.
But they have still been killing protesters.
Yeah. No, I know forced the red line. They're going to take action. Like I just think that a, it was a question of what action to take like that would be effective as opposed to taking action for action's sake. Like I think one thing the administration has done that's very impressive actually is many of us studied poli sci and things like that growing up and you had, we learned all, you take all these classes on the lessons of Vietnam and, you know, the more modern lessons from like other interventions and lots of did not go well. This administration before they took action in Venezuela literally consciously sat down and said all the mistakes that were made the last 30 or 40 years what were the root causes and then how do we avoid them and they have a checklist of like here's the things that...
Well like at least try like at least what can we learn from mistakes that the country has made so at least we don't repeat the same mistakes and then try to apply that to what are we going to do in Venezuela.
I think they're trying to, we'll see whether they do successfully figure out what went wrong with other interventions and wars and then how could you apply that to Iran to have a more successful outcome. And again, we'll see. But it's not easy. It's not like, oh, just put this troop there, just put that thing there. So, we'll see what they eventually do.
But I like the psychological journey we were going on. You had liberal parents. They told you the sky was going to fall. It didn't fall.
It didn't fall. And I was like, well, maybe they're wrong about everything.
And I started more, they were wrong about foreign policy first, actually.
As war interventionists at the time.
Like you supported the War in Iraq.
You must have, I don't know that specifically about you, but just given...
Directionally probably at the time like I don't think I ever explicitly commented on it, but like probably like I think it's a fair, like the people, let's put it this way, the people in power were people I supported.
Right? I mean Trump came in obviously sort of being anti-interventionist and now is interventionist.
No, I think that's somewhat, let's say superficial and not in a dismissive way to you, but just like a lot of people focus on a couple of his statements. He's old. He's an old school. My view is he's an old school Teddy Roosevelt meets McKinley.
I've heard you say this. Yeah. And he's very interventionist. Teddy Roosevelt was very interventionist. But defined to a smaller set of things like I'm going to care about this and if I care about this, you're screwed. Like you do not, like but I'm not going to try to do everything and fix the world in every possible place simultaneously. But if I tell you don't do that, you don't want to do that. That's like Trump. More like Trump, but more like the big stick. You know the famous thing about Teddy that speaks softly. He doesn't, Trump doesn't follow the speak softly part but the big stick definitely part and so in the territorial expansion from the, you know, from McKinley, like, you know, like Seward's Folly on down and Louisiana Purchase like this country was built on territorial expansion actually people also forgot that. So I don't think Trump is like...
You want us to take Greenland.
Oh definitely. I mean not take, well no like so let's be careful. We definitely need to have strategic assets and leverage.
We already had that. We could, let me give you an example. Trump is talking about like making us territory.
Yeah. Well, let me give you a very specific illustration of sometimes why the media doesn't communicate things well. So they say, 'Okay, we already have the bases or we have the right to the bases or whatever.' The truth is when you have a base somewhere, and we learn this in the Middle East all the time. If you want to read about it, read about Qatar, Turkey bases. We have bases there. If you just have a base, you need the host country's permission to use that for an active operation. So Turkey can say no, even though we have a base there, you can't use our airspace to fly your planes. Well, Qatar can say no. And for a lot of regional reasons, they often do. If you have actual sovereignty on the base, Denmark or Greenland cannot say no to the US launching a military operation. And that is indispensable and it's very different. And so I think that is fundamental.
We've never had an issue with NATO reject, like NATO is not like some of the countries are a little soft like Turkey's technically a NATO country so actually yes false of the drama NATO as an institution...
I didn't say, I didn't say there hasn't been a NATO country that's caused us like difficulty. I did not say that. I did not say that about an individual NATO country.
Illustration but NATO as an organization is like controlled by the United States it's a vehicle.
Technically controlling it but so okay so that's one thing is we definitely need military control of some bases there, especially because the as the Arctic has melted like the, the, the Russ, you see those plots people have on the internet of like where the missiles go, where the subs go. So, we definitely need to stop that. Second, the other big initiative for this administration is supply chain for minerals. Like China's been using that as a very aggressive like sort of piece of leverage against the United States. And so the from JD on down to Jacob are working on mineral supply chain. Greenland has some minerals and we definitely need access to that. There could lots of other ways to get access to it. You don't have to like take over the country or anything. He was never going to invade the country. That was like silly like that was not going to happen. But and it is in my view it is perfectly fine to use economic leverage to achieve goals. Like if we have the biggest economy in the world and it's growing the fastest, we can definitely tell other countries.
A loser to alienate Europe. Like it's useful.
Yeah, JD is more right than wrong about this. Meaning like Europe is harassing Jews. So if you're a Jewish person in the UK, in France, you need to get out like now. Like this is really bad. Like I hope we do things to encourage those people to move to the United States so they're safe. Second, they are cracking down on US companies like X and harassing them or, you know, and that's going to have to stop like we are going to use economic, this administration is going to use what Jacob likes to call economic statecraft which is we're going to use our economy.
European treatment of Jewish people but we're getting closer and closer to the Middle East which has been extremely hostile. Well, I think the whole point is like we're gonna have more Abraham Accords, but it's like a different set of standards for one country from the other, which is supposed to be what?
Well, you'd be safer in Israel than in Europe by far.
Um you'd be safer in the UAE actually as a Jewish person than in any European country.
What's safe is, you know, very loose.
I would travel to the UAE without security. I would not travel to Paris without security.
Really? You wouldn't go to Paris?
Like you're worried you're gonna get kidnapped or what's...
Yeah, I would if people identified me as a, you could not wear a yarmulke like in Paris at all. You will definitely be assaulted. Like everybody is terrified. Jewish star. Like I would not walk down the streets of London or Paris with a Jewish star. I would definitely wear one in the UAE and maybe even Saudi Arabia. I don't know that for...
My wife is I mean pretty clearly Jewish. We spent two weeks in Paris. Didn't she wear...
It doesn't, I don't want to, it's an awkward subject because I don't want to speak for how other people feel afraid. You know, the liberal in me comes out not to tell you Jacob's mom left Paris. They were born and raised lived in Paris forever and they had to escape. They literally had to move just because the anti-semitism.
So we're, you're going to see that so we give up the European alliance now. You're, we're just let, they're breaking it. We're breaking. You're moving on.
They need to rethink their first principles of like what values do they support? Like do they believe in free speech or not? That's a fundamental tenet of the United States.
All right. That I want to get to free speech. I honestly was surprised free speech wasn't sort of a core driver that foreign policy was sort of the first starter.
Well, there wasn't this libertarian authoritarian like suppression of free speech back when I was growing up. Like if you're like a liberal, it's classic liberal. Like the ACLU and all these people were like very pro speech. Like they were the ones, you know, suing like Illinois to let the Nazis protest, right? It was a leftwing...
Yeah. The left wing was more free speech. So there wasn't like this authoritarian like we're going to stop and suppress ideas we don't like. It didn't really exist. Certainly not from the left. So like, you know...
And therefore you didn't need to but you therefore, well it wasn't...
I'm not trying to drag this up but you obviously had a very famous example where you used a word and you said it was about testing the borders of free speech.
Well Stanford was very different. So I grew up in high school in college before there was no like constraints on speech. No one even thought this a good idea. Then all you show up Stanford and like everybody's on this like crusade to crack down on ideas that were not what we used to call back then the term was multicultural.
Right. It's changed various vocabulary.
But like that was like a rude awakening. Like I'd never even seen people like the thought that way that were but there was, you know, Stanford in the 80s was at the cutting edge of like the woke movement. We didn't call it that back then but it was and, you know, I was pretty resistant to that but and so were, you know, several of my friends who, you know, went on to do interesting things. But...
But they called for a lot of, I mean what David Sacks and Peter Thiel wrote out against date rape. There are a lot of things that they have sort of disavowed.
So David wrote an article. Honestly, I personally have not read that in 30 years. So I don't, I don't read.
For someone who gets very schooled on the issues you want to talk about, not...
Sure. Well, exactly. I talk about things I know something about. You want to talk about Iran, I know a decent amount about it. You want to talk about the Middle East, I know a decent amount about it. You want to talk about persecution of Jewish people, I know a lot about it. There's lots, there's a billion topics like so yes when I was young I used to read the encyclopedia like literally cover to cover like that's what we do for read every volume. I don't have an early language...
I don't have time. I serve on 16 boards. I don't have time to read every issue.
Let's drill in on free speech. I won't make you. Litigation said many years ago...
No but we did at the Stanford Review we wrote like anti-multicultural things without a doubt and I think with the benefit of history, look lots of 16, 17, 18, 19, 20-year-olds will write things that don't look perfect with the benefit of history. But I think there's going to be a lot of things the Stanford Review published that look great. Like I wrote a piece like for the Stanford Review on the brilliance of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. That was my first piece. That's the title. The brilliance of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. That now looks profound. Like this was when the Cold War was at its height and I was like Ronald Reagan's going to fix this.
Do you want the United States have a policy of basically letting white immigrants into the United States and not other races? My views on this are it has nothing to do with race. It is a pure talent question. I think the most talented people on the planet we should admit to the United States wherever they're from like whether it's an O-1 visa or whatever you want to call it. Like we need to be a magnet for...
But we're letting, you know, white South Africans come. It does feel...
There is a political asylum question there which also might be relevant to the Jewish people. Like if you're persecuted and fear death like we may grant asylum.
But I think at some point look at what the Trump administration is doing. It feels like they are preferencing white people.
I don't think that and I think they also, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that they let in 37 people, right?
I mean, but a lot of these 16 million illegal immigrants against 37 people. Which one should we be focused on?
The Trump administration does not want to, they're not like really supporting H-1B visas particularly.
There's controversy within the administration. I think there's people...
who are more enthusiastic about a magnet for talent.
JD Vance is moving away from that.
I think so. I think there's a lot of pressure on reducing. There's definitely been abuses of H-1B visas where there has been a clear substitution.
To the extent tech was misled about what Trump was going to do. I mean, he goes on the All-In podcast. He's like, 'We're going to give everyone...' and then it isn't happening. Like, we're a year in.
Well, yeah, we're a year in a four. He has accomplished almost everything else in year one, which is very impressive. Minnesota, the economy is not. He said he was going to bring down inflation. Not like it is. There's no inflation. Look at inflation. It's like we're much... go to the economy. I use true inflation.
Yes. Trump visas, O-1 visas.
I personally think we should expand O-1 visas like probably 3x them, right? That's my opinion.
That is something we are aligned on. We want immigration, certainly elite immigration. People tweet at me like, 'Oh, you just repeat whatever the administration says.' No, like I actually think we should triple O-1 visas.
It doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
We'll see. I mean, I think the administration does definitely want to fix lots. Everybody on all sides of the spectrum thinks our immigration process is a mess. I don't know anybody who's like, 'Oh, this is the system we should have.' So the question is, can you create an alliance of people who want to fix this to get enough votes to change that? But I think Trump, as he said on All-In, is more progressive about bringing talented people to the United States. Now, there is a tricky issue with the CCP. China has been sending people here and there clearly have been examples of imported material espionage. And so I think that poses another layer to this of what are we going to do about the CCP sending people here designed to conduct industrial or otherwise espionage. So that's also a very complicated...
That's a very complicated... and then like, so let's talk about immigration. You want to talk about crazy immigration. We currently have allowed, and maybe in the last month this has changed, but as of a month ago this was not true. You could as an Iranian citizen go study nuclear physics at MIT. I know this is a fact.
That's insane. Why are we educating the nuclear physicists of Iran? We should want them to stay here, right?
Well, maybe the problem is we didn't figure out a way to keep... I don't know that citizens of an enemy state, like Iran is technically an enemy state, foreign adversary defined in law by Congress.
I feel like you're bringing up a lot of edge cases.
But no, but this is failing to deliver on the core.
They aren't delivering on the core thing. The core thing they ran on is we're going to shut down the southern border. Day one, fixed.
Like literally fixed. Obama. There were fewer illegal immigrations during Obama. No, no, no, no. Zero. What Obama claims credit for, and I can walk you through the stats here, is he said we had more deportations. The reason he can claim that, the stat is very misleading, but here's the definition he's using. If you tried to be an illegal immigrant and come from Mexico during the Obama administration, if they caught you and they turned you around, they called that a deportation. The current definition is if you're in the interior of the United States. So Obama had many more stop you, but they counted that statistically. It's true that they did actually turn you around. So it's not a bad thing, but the statistics are apples and oranges and everybody who studied this would agree with me like this is...
So it's... but they're both good. I mean, Obama, like look, if you read Clinton's speeches on immigration or Obama's speeches on immigration, they sound like Trump. Like this is a very modern change in the Liberal Democratic Party, their views on immigration.
I think people could accept certainly freezing the border.
I think the interior work, I mean, you were a lawyer.
So you understand that there are lots of laws that people aren't following. Speeding, whatever. And then there also there are people with green cards that we have the right to revoke, but then there's no reason to like scare the shit out of them when they were allowed to be here. They had a green card or they had some other...
To be here as long as they didn't break any sort of agreement with...
Well, we do have different rules on green cards. Like Rubio talks about this a lot. If you're a guest, you don't have the same rights as the person who owns the home. And I think we stopped enforcing that and Rubio and the State Department is enforcing that. So if you're on a green card, your ability to criticize the United States is different than an American citizen. And I think that's very reasonable.
It creates a terrible free speech culture in the United States.
Not necessarily. The woman, by the way, I think you had sort of pushed back on the idea that the woman who was pushed out of the United States over an op-ed, that it was just the op-ed, and then evidence did come out that it was just the op-ed. Do you concede that one?
No, actually, send me the evidence and I'll look at it. But I do think Marco was right.
We have scarce number of green cards and we should choose. It's perfectly proper to choose people who support the United States to allocate the green cards to. I don't think you can do that for American citizens. You shouldn't. The government shouldn't choose. But the government does have discretionary rights for people who are visitors just like at your dinner guest. But we're creating a right to a green card.
You have to sort of have fidelity to the Republican Trump administration right now. Do you align with their views? They want to be able to scrub the social media of people coming into the United States.
You're cheering out. That is insane.
It's insane in the context of an administration that very much cares about fidelity to a specific...
Well, that's your interpretation.
You don't think that's what all your business friends are doing.
Tim Cook is literally bringing him like golden gifts. Okay. You cannot pretend that kissing up people...
Like Hunter Biden like...
Hunter Biden that had like a small random contract with the CCP.
Are you... you deny that like business leaders today obviously see, and we're starting to see this break because we literally just saw...
I don't think it's going to break but like keep going, keep going.
Business leaders feel like they need to cozy up to Trump in a way that is unprecedented in modern American history.
I think business leaders in tech feel the need to cozy up to Trump. But let me explain why. They all spent infinite amount of money in 2016 and 2020, depending on which year and sometimes both, funding democratic opposition. And I don't think a successful CEO should be that binary with their money like across an organization. Google, 98% of all contributions went to Democrats. That is not acceptable. And so they do need to do some correction to that. Facebook, Mark spent 600k personally trying to elect Joe Biden. You can't do that without creating enemies. So I think some of it is a recalibration.
Some, I think... well, show me how many tech executives or how many companies, how many tech companies can you find that had 70% or more greater Republican contributions?
But some of these were just employees. Like employees are allowed to be left-wing.
Well, you are allowed to be left-wing, but I think if you're going to get... if you're...
You are, I guess this is...
Well, you got to be careful then. Like I don't think like see...
The government is going to come after you.
