Yeah, so I don't think it's a philosophy. I think it's a state of being. So for example, let's back up a little bit and talk about industrialization. So what I described earlier was the agricultural age. But then at the beginning of the 19th century, industrialization took place. Labor went from farm, to factory, from countryside to city. But as technology drove enormous wealth creation and change, it was the industrialization of the Charles Dickens novels. Eleven years old losing their hands in the factory. And the social contract was rewritten. There was the introduction of things like child labor laws. They said, "Yeah, you can work in a factory, but not until you're 16." The introduction of a minimum wage. The introduction of the concept of a weekend, a pension. Yeah, work in the factory for 30 years, and at the end of it, there'll be something on the other side.

So that social contract was actually the successor to the agricultural age social contract. And the problem we're having right now, in the context of today's America, in today's world, is our social contract, which is largely a byproduct of things that were true a hundred years ago. Think about a pension for example, my kids, your kids, are not likely to have one employer for 30 years, and at the end of those 30 years, they're going to get a pension. Think about education. The concept that existed a hundred years ago, that free up public education could take you to age 18, and then you would have all the knowledge you needed to go work in a port, factory, miner, mill. Or if you were an elite, to a university. Now we all have to be lifelong learners. So what my point in part, in writing this book, The Raging 2020s-

Right. So I'm not pretending to be a guru. Right? This is not a book, this is not 250 pages telling people, "This is what we should do. We should be Denmark. We should be Singapore." Or anything like that. Rather, what the book tries to do is tell stories, and give a view into how other states and societies are addressing these challenges. So for example, let's talk about things like benefits. Whether it's healthcare, whether it's unemployment or whatever it is. We have a model in the United States right now that's employer based. I think that that model is largely failing at this point. That in fact, our employers shouldn't necessarily be responsible for providing a series of benefits that in most other places are byproducts of the state. So I think we need to begin to think about how we can evolve past that. Thinking for example about... I'll go back to pensions, just as a very concrete example. In a world where there aren't pensions, but where we are all going to grow much older... just in my lifetime, the average life expectancy has gone from 58 to 71.

It's a big jump in 49 years. We're going to go from 71 to 80, I would argue, over the next seven to 10 years, as an average global life expectancy. What are those things that we can do to ensure that as we grow older, we don't grow poor. So these are a lot of the kinds of dynamics that we need to sort through, if as we produce wealth, as we increase well-being, that wealth and wellbeing is more broadly distributed, and therefore we don't have rage, from all ends of the political spectrum.

Sure, well, thanks. So look, I grew up in the coal filled hills of West Virginia, as you referenced. A public school kid from West Virginia who worked hard, went to a good school. And then, in my twenties, like the caricature of it, started a company. Started a company in a basement that became successful, focused on technology and telecommunications. Recognizing... this was in the mid-90s, or around 2000 that the nature of the economy was changing and, with digitization, there were going to be huge opportunities. So, I started a company which became successful and pivoted from that into government. So, I ran technology policy for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. That went well and, from there, I worked at the State Department. So, for four years, I ran the innovation agenda sort of within America's diplomatic arm, within the State Department.

From there, after doing that, I became a venture capitalist. So, I'm a board partner in a venture capital fund with a little over a billion dollars of assets under management. I have written a couple books now. The first, The Industries of the Future, was a best seller on five continents and translated into, I think, 24 languages. So, really living and working at the intersection of government entrepreneurship and ideas where those three things come together.

So, I've been an entrepreneur. I'm now an investor, deploying my LPs capital. Going back to working on a beer truck in the coal-filled hills of West Virginia, constantly thinking about the ideas at the base of our economy and sort of seeing these issues with two eyes.

One eye, again, as the public school kid from West Virginia who worked on a beer truck and the other who now lives and works in the world of capital and is in the 1%. So, it's helped me understand these two very different worlds, and I try to bring them together a little bit in what I write.

I'm curious about what you were thinking when you were working on the beer truck, like how you became interested in innovation because I think that we are in danger. This is my own statement. So, I'm not reading into your work or anything, but I do think that we're in danger of stifling that kind of can-do spirit.

So, I'm wondering what you were thinking at the time. I delivered appliances for a living for a while, for over, I think, 13 months is how long I did it. I remember thinking there's got to be more than this, but at the same time, I mean, it's a job and you're working and you can do what you can do. So, what was going through your mind at that time?

Well, first of all, I was working my ass off. I mean, look, the door of the beer warehouse would literally go up at 6:00 AM and, because I was a junior employee, we had to be there at 5:15 to put the beer on the truck so that the wheels would be rolling at six and the wheels would roll back in at about 7:30 at night. So, the first thing, I was just trying to survive, but what was I thinking?

There wasn't a government policy or a subsidy or a class that I took that made me interested in innovation and entrepreneurship. I don't know if it's genetic or what, but it's something that I was born with and I guess living in the United States amidst the conditions that enabled that, I was able to become an entrepreneur, What I would simply say is, I do think there is something within the American character that lends itself to entrepreneurship.

For those who came to the United States voluntarily, that was an act of entrepreneurship, you know, go West, young man, settling the frontier was an act of entrepreneurship. So, I do think that there's something hardwired in the character and culture of America that lends itself. It's this frontier mentality that does seem to be baked into our culture, at least juxtaposed with others.

I don't know. First of all, I wish we had some bipartisanship right now. We don't. Unfortunately, we have tribal politics that are more like the Hutu versus the Tutsi. I think that we are as divided now as we've been since the 1860s. Is politics stifling innovation? I think that if you... Look, there are 196 countries on planet earth. I've traveled to more than a hundred of them.

The policies of our government are much more favorable to investment in entrepreneurship than just about any other country on planet earth. Few other places make the distinction, for example, between capital gains and traditional income that we do. Few countries in the world create the incentives to help the investor class as we do in the United States. So, I think that there are strong conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship here.

I mean, look, I'm deploying capital almost every day, and it's never been a better time to be investing. I mean, the field of entrepreneurs, the startups that are out there, and not just in tech, but very broadly are incredible right now. I do think that what we need to make sure is that there's more access to innovation and entrepreneurship. When I think about immigration, for example, 40% of the Fortune 500 was started by immigrants and the children of immigrants.

So, if we don't continue to make the United States attractive to people who want to come and imagine and invent the future, then we'll be stifling innovation and entrepreneurship. So, there are things that we can do to get in our own way, and I think that we have, but there's still, I would argue, no better country in the world to start a company than the United States.

Well, I think that we made a pretty significant mistake with some of the tax decreases under the Trump administration. I think that what we did with those tax policies is, we actually created incentives for companies to locate more of their activities abroad than in the United States. We intended, I think, to try to onshore a lot of that capital and we did onshore capital but, what we did is, we ended up offshoring a lot of activity.

In terms of spending, let's think about what got us out of the ditch of the 1920s. What got us out was the New Deal. There is not one example in the past 400 years of history that anyone can point to. I'm happy to be educated, but investing in infrastructure has not been a financial win, whether it's ports, whether it's rail, whether it's highways, whether it's broadband networks, investments in infrastructure, or investments in the future.

So, if we're going to worry about spending, the first place we need to start, I think, is with our military spending. We're spending over $800 billion a year on our military budget right now, and we're not in Afghanistan. We're not in Iraq. The slope on the graph in our military spending continues to go up.

So, what I see right now is a lack of discipline, where we can make changes in public policy, for example, but we don't then create the corresponding changes in terms of how we actually allocate capital. So, if we're spending too much money, there are plenty of places that we can look first, and I would start with our military spending.

Because it's more than $800 billion a year and we aren't at war right now. So, if you go back to 2002, 2003, 2004 as a percentage of GDP, we are spending as much as a percentage of GDP on our military right now, as we were when we were in kinetic operations with tens and hundreds of thousands of people deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It just doesn't make sense economically. This isn't calculus.

This is like middle school math, so I think it's fairly insane that we are spending what we are right now without having the boots on the ground in these countries but, because our Congress is so wedded to military spending and because any attempt to bring any sort financial discipline to that world is viewed as something less than patriotic, we don't do it. Also, let's look at it in juxtaposition to our global competition, China, for example.

China is investing in next generation technologies. They're investing in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. They're investing in 5G broadband networks. They're investing in genomics, And yet they're investing about one fifth of what we are in the military. We should be spending less money on the military and more in strategic investments oriented to the future of our economy.

Sure. Well, fortunately, my investments have thrived and continue to thrive in large part because where I tend to focus is in that segment of the economy where America is best, and that is early stage companies that are imagining and inventing the future, that are rewiring markets, and that are oftentimes entering public markets. We've gone from $200 million of assets under management to over a billion in four or five years, particularly because times are so good in that segment.

Frankly, government policies don't really enable or inhibit us too much. If you think about the creation of a lot of America's biggest companies, it's not like Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon was enabled or disabled by the government. When Sam Walton started Walmart, he wasn't enabled or disabled by the government.

If you were to go to Google, if anything, they were enabled by the government because of the Google search engine. The first funding for it was a government IMLS grant for a couple of grad students at Stanford.

So, I do you think that when I think about spending in Washington right now as a human being, as a citizen, as somebody who pays taxes, I want us to bring a more logical approach to what we are investing in, where we are spending in capital. As an investor, I would say it's not really impacting our behavior. It's not something I'm overly concerned with.

So, we invest very, very broadly and, if you go to Amplo.com, you can see a list of those companies. Technology is at the core of most of the companies, but we're also investing in agriculture. We made an investment in a company called Bowery Farming, which is using AI and robotics basically to produce organic crops at levels that previously didn't exist and bring those products in at lower price points into a Whole Foods near you.

We invest in human capital. We invest in education. We've invested in a variety of different areas. For us, if I were to say there's a sort of a common aspect to them, it's digitization linked to artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics.

Yeah, so one of them is mania. So a focus on mission. I'll give one example. There was a company that I got involved in called Mark 43, and it was started by a kid from a family of cops. And he, like my son, was a student at Harvard. And when he was a junior at Harvard, he started doing ride arounds with the local police officers and noticed that in their cars, the technology they used was like something out of CHiPs. It was like technology from the 1980s.

And if you arrest somebody, it's like a six hour process. You're taking a police officer off the beat for six hours to do paperwork, right? So he, being a really smart engineering student, a junior at Harvard, thought about how to create technology to make law enforcement more efficient and effective.

Fast forward seven years, it went from an idea of a kid in a police car who's in college undergraduate to we just financed it at 1.5 billion pre-money. Suffice to say we got involved a long time ago. And the slope on the graph goes really up. But what the characteristic there was, somebody young and hungry with a very clear idea about how to take the world as it existed previously, like the police car that looks like the police car from CHIPs, and take it into the future. That's something that I just got.

I'll give another example. I believe that talent is universally distributed, but opportunity is not. So you in New England and me in West Virginia, I don't know about you, but I think that there are kids who went to my high school in West Virginia who had just as much God given talent as everybody else. They just didn't have the opportunity.

So one of the company is we invested in is called Andela, and its thesis was, "Hey, if we go into Africa, go into a place like a place like Lagos, Nigeria, where there are 20 million people and we come up with a methodology to find people who have the greatest level of sort of natural talent for coding, if we give them sort of Google class technology training, we can create great engineers, we can create a marketplace for their talent. And in doing so, we can bring assets to Africa."

Well, that went from sort of a crazy idea to SoftBank just invested, again, 1.5 billion pre-money. But the characteristic of that entrepreneur, clear idea. Talent is universally distributed, opportunity is not. We have a specific way of identifying really highly talented people, developing that talent, and then commercializing it.

The first thing I would say is invest in funds, invest in venture capital funds. An individual with some capital is most likely not going to be able to source the deals the way I in others are. But if you look, let's come back to Harvard. Harvard just threw up some insane numbers. Their endowment, which is huge already, increased 34% last year. How did it go up when you strip out that 34%? Outsized returns in private equity and venture capital.

So what I would say is public markets investing is something entirely different and we can talk about that. But for people who want to be able to invest as effectively as say Harvard, and for whom public markets, you might look at public markets and have some difficulty because sure, there are things that are great, but there's more liquidity than there are great companies with room for growth. I would say invest in good venture capital funds.

Well, first I was passive. I mean, I'll be honest, when I was an entrepreneur, I was not looking over my shoulder at my own investments. So I invested, and it was mutual fund guys and that's fine. It's fine. But I didn't get surgical. Where I went from passive to active and where I really sort of became the CEO of my own personal capital, investible capital, was actually not that long ago. It was shortly before the pandemic where I saw the professional money managers, with plenty of fees associated with them, underperforming relative to what I thought I could do myself. Then I sort of took control. And if you read my first book, I wrote a book called the industries of the future that was referenced earlier. I set out a number of theses about the world related to digitization, related to the development of fields like genomics, and related to crypto.

So what I did is I began to allocate capital in line with my thoughts, but then into specific equities. So I'm like, "All right, well, if everything's going to be digitized, who is in the best position to sort of digitize music? Spotify. Who's in the best position to digitize video? Netflix. Who's in the best position to digitize consumer goods?" And I was kind of like, "Well, Amazon, but Amazon's already really expensive." I thought Amazon was really expensive. I invested anyway and then it doubled during the pandemic. So what I just said is, "All right, if I believe that there's going to be digitization broadly, what is the sort of best of class in all of those?"

It ended with financial collapse and with Germany tilting toward Nazis, Italy tilting towards fascism, and the United States tilting in a different direction toward the New Deal to restore the health of the economy. So, that was the roaring 20s, and it was a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production. The raging 20s, I would argue, has started very badly, in much the way that the roaring 20s began after World War I, after the Spanish Flu. This decade is beginning through the destruction of the pandemic. And as Picasso said, "Every act of creation began ends with an act of destruction."

But we're in a position right now, where I think that we are going to make decisions, whether this decade concludes with us tilting more with the world looking either more like Star Trek or more like Mad Max. And whether the future looks more like Star Trek or more like Mad Max at the end of this decade, comes down to the question of, will we rewrite our social contract?

I mean, just a little math for you. I think I'm young. I'm only 49 years old. But if you go back to when I was three years old and nine years old, rather, third grade... If the level of inequality had stayed constant over 40 years, over 40 years from when I was in third grade to today, it would mean that 50 trillion dollar, 50 with a T, would have gone to workers earning below 90%. That's $1,100 per worker, per month.

So why are people in West Virginia raging? Well, they're raging in part because they've become completely emasculated and they've suffered for decades, economically. And that $1,000... And if it were 40 years ago, they would be earning, on average, $1,100 per worker, per month more. That's remarkable. Thinking about the 1%, over the last 30 years. And again, I'm part of the 1%. But over the last 30 years, here's the math. This is just data. In the last 30 years, the top 1% has grown $21 trillion wealthier while the lower 50 half has grown $900 billion dollars poorer. And the middle class, 50 to 90%, has stagnated. That's fairly remarkable math. And if that trajectory continues, then what I think we're going to see is, we're going to see more radicalization, we're going to see more and more rage, and we're going to see the social contract tear.

In part, with things like tax legislation. They're very... That sounds really... This stuff sounds high minded, but it then becomes very practical. I mean, the fact that we have a tax system where, about every other year, a single FedEx driver, like one FedEx driver pays more in federal taxes than Federal Express Corporation, that's pretty screwed up. Where the 17 year old barista who makes your cappuccino for you at Starbucks, pays more in federal taxes than Starbucks. That's pretty screwed up. And it's because as capital has globalized, we've created a global capital system where you might think you're at a Starbucks, but you're really in the Grand Caymans from a tax perspective.

I write about this a fair bit in the Raging 2020s. Paying taxes is not something that the world's richest corporations and individuals do. So if you want to talk about how we can rewrite our social contract, I think that billionaires, and I think that the world's wealthiest corporations should pay taxes. I think FedEx should pay more in federal taxes than the FedEx driver. I think Starbucks should pay more in taxes than the 17 year old barista. So, here is a very practical example.

No. I mean, look, I think that the idea that we should say, "Our richest people in our richest companies shouldn't pay taxes because it creates jobs.", if I could... I think it's a pretty dangerous idea. And also, if you actually look at... Let's look at the math. I'm a big believer in math. Let's talk about the airlines, for example. Okay? America's five biggest airlines produced 49 billion dollars in free cash flow in the decade preceding the pandemic, 49 billion dollars. Did they invest in new planes? Did they invest in higher wages for their employers? Did they invest in new roots?

No. 47 billion of that 49 billion dollars went to stock buybacks. And so what... So 47 billion dollars disappears into stock buybacks. So what then happens when the pandemic hits? What happens when the pandemic hits and they need cash, guess who comes to save them? The government. This isn't capitalism, it's corporate socialism, where you privatize the gains to shareholders and you socialize the gains to taxpayers.

Think about Boeing. Boeing, over that same 10 year period, had 58 billion dollars in free cash flow. It spent 43 billion of that 58 billion on share buybacks. This, despite the fact that so many of its planes were crashing. So it didn't put that 43 billion dollars into building safer planes, to doing research and development so that maybe they wouldn't crash. No, they fluffed up the stock price. And so, these things, no, I think it doesn't work in reality. And I also don't believe that companies like Google and others that incorporate in Ireland during tax holidays and others, should get benefits that most of us, who live and work in the United States and work and play by the rules here, don't.