Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:13:28 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:13:28] S0: That forced you to put on your optimistic or hopeful hat, and thinking about the future as it relates to this problem. [00:13:35] S2: Well, Victor Auburn was booted from office. He was riding high a couple of years ago. In some places, there clearly are pushes to the center, which would be, I think, very consoling for people and a return to some modicum of civility in the various societies in which people like us travel. So here in America, clearly the midterms in the next eighteen months after that are really gonna shape how we're gonna live in the next decade because there's been the imprint of one person on the last decade in America. Think in Britain, the person who's identified with the far right, Nigel Farage, may well have had his best day, and his best day may well be behind him. I think it's different in France with Marie Le Pen and the elections next year. It's different in Spain, and it's potentially different in Germany. [00:14:27] S0: Do you think that the Internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it still rewards extremes and attention?
00:14:27 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:14:27] S0: Do you think that the Internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it still rewards extremes and attention? [00:14:38] S2: I think the three letter answer is yes. I think it's been true of every form of new media from the beginning of the printing press. But obviously, the Internet and mobile telephony has made it far easier to spread false memes and innuendo. But it's a much larger, more amplified version of what occurred in Germany when radio took off during the nineteen thirties and where the radio waves were dominated by extreme propaganda and racist views and loud lies told frequently.
00:15:15 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:17:25 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I'm curious how you arrived at this method of yours, this first fourteen year interrogation method. When you first did it, how you do it, like what the method is, and why you find it just so impactful in understanding a new person.
00:17:39 · Michael Moritz
[00:17:39] S2: I suppose I first came across it oddly in Detroit when I was a correspondent for Time Magazine. With a colleague, I wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation, but more importantly, the person who turned around Chrysler at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. And a man who was for a time, the best known business figure in America, even though today most people struggle to pronounce his last name, but he was a gentleman called Nia Coker. He was the son of Italian immigrants. In writing this book, we spent a fair amount of time interviewing Ioaca. And what came through loud and clear was how much as the son of Italian immigrants who'd grown up in Pennsylvania, Lee grew up in Pennsylvania, he felt like an outsider. He worked in the automobile industry and obviously in the upper echelons of the automobile industry where I think he was always viewed with suspicion, most notably when he worked at the Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II and the other people who obviously everybody had immigrated, but who were much more members of the establishment. And Iacocan never felt like a member of the establishment, and became very clear that all of that stemmed from his childhood. As the years went by, he began to interpret many of the slights that then fell upon him, including not getting the top job at Ford, to the fact that he was seen as an Italian immigrant. If you think about the people
00:19:17 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:19:17] S0: who have harnessed that outsider energy, a lot of whom you've backed with great success, have you seen people graduate out of it? And when they do, does their driving motivation [00:19:28] S2: go away or suffer? I wanna answer the previous question a little bit as well. You asked when I've met various people and various founders over the years, spent so much time on their backgrounds. Many of these people are only 20 years old or 21 years old. [00:19:43] S0: You're covering a big percentage. [00:19:44] S2: You're not exactly gonna be able to ask them about their life in their 50s. So it's just natural to try to understand that. I don't think people grow out of it. I think what happens is that people work with a certain intensity in their late teens and their 20s and maybe their early 30s. And that intensity for a whole variety of reasons diminishes over time. I think that's what changes. The inner being doesn't change, the outward intensity changes. [00:20:14] S0: When you were asking these questions, was there any one thing or set of things that you tended to be looking for? Was it you coming away feeling as though someone had extreme drive?