Chris Sacca

The highlight of tonight, a fireside chat with Chris Sacker. Who of you doesn't know Chris Sacker? Raise your hands. Or who knows him? Raise your hands. That's pretty good. So Chris is one of the most amazing agents in the world. He was a first investor in Twitter. He's an early investor in Uber, etc. I won't bore you with that stuff. It's a great pleasure that he's here in Copenhagen tonight. He will tell us, hopefully, also about what attracts him so much about Copenhagen. So please give a warm welcome to Hampus Jakobsen and Chris Sacker for Conversation on Stage. So hi Chris. Nice to have you here. Thanks. I hadn't heard of fuck-up nights before. Yeah? But the coincidence of that is pretty much the biggest fuck-up of my career is Airbnb. Was it? Interesting. I actually... We were just talking about it. I really enjoyed Lisa's talk. But yeah, Joe and Brian and the team, I was one of the first people to see the Airbnb pitch. And they said, what do you think? You know, we're getting ready for the Obama inauguration and they've run out of hotel rooms in Washington, D.C. What do you think of this thing? I said, you guys, come here. Come here. I don't want to say this in front of anybody else because I don't want to ruin your chances. But I got to be honest. I think what you're building is really, really dangerous. And they're like, really? I'm like, just as a favor, I'm just telling you guys. I think somebody's going to stay in somebody else's house and they're going to get raped or murdered. And the blood is going to be on your hands. Yeah. I think didn't we all? I mean, everybody looked at it in the beginning. Yeah. I know a lot of people looked at it that way. But that particular sentence cost me like $4 billion. So... Yeah. You should participate on fuck-up nights. That's a good start. Actually, now I'm going to follow my gut. After hearing myself tell that story again, my gut is telling me I need a beer. So if anyone has one, that'd be great. So actually, my first question is how lucky are you on a scale 0 to 200? Thank you about that. 0 to 200? 0 to 200. That's pretty lucky. No, you got the Airbnb scale. In the Zappos culture, they ask a question about how weird are you? Oh, yeah. I actually find the weird question even more powerful because what it reveals is self-deprecation and self-awareness. Yeah. We often hire for humor. Meaning we don't try and hire people who are... Yeah. Necessarily crack-up clownish funny. But what actually makes something funny is that it's true. That's why there is no Fox News Daily show. There is no... Yeah. No, seriously. For something to be funny, it has to be true. Yeah. And when you're building a startup, when you're in the weeds, when things aren't going particularly well, the humor comes in identifying and recognizing the shittiness. And then going past it together, right? And honestly, one of the things I think we don't understand is how smart stand-up comedians have to be. Like being a stand-up comedian is an extraordinarily intelligent craft. And a lot of times we view them as clowns. Yeah. No, no. Actually, most stand-up comedians I know... I don't know how we got talking about this. But most stand-up comedians I know are actually really awkward and lame to hang out with in person. Yeah. Yeah. So how would you introduce yourself if this was an elderly character? I hope none of them are watching right now. I love you guys. If we were an elderly character right now and sitting in the audience here and the average age was like 70-something, how would you introduce yourself? Who's Chris Saka? This is a 70-year-old audience. 78 years old? 70 average. So some here are 95. There's a young 68-year-old over there. Because this audience, I would just say, go type my name in and see what the results are. But... Whoa. They're sitting and waiting here. Yeah. I am a... I'm a... I'm an unemployed rodeo clown. That's... That's who you are. Yeah. No. Look. I'm a guy who helps people build their businesses. Yeah. And I do a lot less of that now. I actually... It's not really well known, but I stepped away from my firm two years ago. And we have a younger partner who runs it day to day, Matt Mazzeo. So I focus on my existing companies. And then I have three startups that are five years old, three years old, and one year old. My three daughters. Yep. And so I focus a lot on that. And then I'm doing some other... I'm going to announce some things, some climate stuff soon and stuff like that. Oh, interesting. But generally, I just... I'm a very loud, opinionated person who swears a lot and can't avoid getting involved in something if I think I can be helpful or have some impact. And so that usually works out for the best. But it also gets me in a lot of trouble. So on your kids, I mean, what do you feel that your kids have to learn? Like now they're startups. Like what are the... I have three kids too. It's like one of the things... I have a 10-year plan before the first one is 18. So I'm thinking a lot about this. So the first thing with kids, it's funny. This applies to startup entrepreneurs, is that when you build a company, you build it in your image. You get to change anything about it you don't like. Something's not going right, you get to move it around. And you can even rename your company, change the color of the logo, whatever you want. And so as a startup guy... Before my first daughter was born, I was going and asking for advice of all these other dads that I really respected. So how do I make sure I have good kids? And I was asking all these questions and finally one of the guys was just like, you don't get it, do you? They're just roommates who show up. They come as themselves. They already have all this personality. And your job is just to polish the edges and hopefully nurture some empathy and some exposure and some appreciation for these kids. And I know that there's some of you guys out there that just got married. be. And that's kind of like the adviser to that piece when you're like last wing for somebody What is it you want? people, yeah, you can give the investors back their money. You can't really say, look, I'm done with this kid. Exactly. No traction. Sorry. But I think, you know, there is a, but when it comes to my kids specifically, I think it is imperative that we really culture a deep and intrinsic sense of empathy in them. I think it's something that increasingly has been draining out of our industry. You know, so I'm 41, and if you were my age or older and you studied computer science in school, you still had regular crappy summer jobs. You still mowed lawns or waited tables or worked manual labor somehow. And you were exposed to people who actually work for a living. You were exposed to the poor, to the working poor. And you develop not just an appreciation for their life condition, but also it kind of fueled a hunger of like, man, these are really, really hard jobs. I don't want this kind of job. So I'm going to keep, you know, hopefully taking advantage of the opportunities I have to go to school, etc. Well, if you're younger than I am and you studied computer science in the United States, those programs and those universities became so well endowed with donor money that the kids who went through those programs have never worked. They've never had a job. They've never worked for tips. They've never dug ditches. They've never had any interaction with the working poor at all. Well, they have when they come with, like, the laundry. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Exactly. People who work for them. And in parallel, there's another thing that's happening is that the curriculum in those computer science programs got so intense that there's no time left for those kids to study abroad. And so you take out this thing where they no longer have diverse exposure within their own communities and they no longer get to travel overseas. And then you wonder why we have a tech bro culture. You wonder why we've become so monoculture, why companies make incredibly bad miscues. based on JJ the platonic MLP for how to handle just that. academically and whose coding performance is amazing, but who have no actual sense for humanity. They've never come out of a subway station in a country where they don't know the language and had to ask somebody for directions. They've never had to put themselves entirely in the trust of another person. And these are the people we're sending to Mars. The people that can't even sort their own garbage. Yeah. Well, these are the people, though, that will tell you that, you know, we just had an example of this, that I've seen Mark say publicly and privately that he deeply believes that Facebook actually exposes its users to more diverse news sources than they would have gotten traditionally. And he says it with a straight face, that there's not a filter bubble there, that it's not totally constantly self-reinforcing and shoving fake news down your throat. He really actually believes that. And so I worry that I think this problem is going to get worse. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Figure out ways to, you know, and part of this is going to be solved with actual diversity in hiring. You know, I think the work that Jana and people are doing is really, really important. And I absolutely believe it. I mean, I could sit up here and make the progressive case for why I like working with female entrepreneurs and companies that are diverse in color and race and sexual orientation. But I also, I just fucking like money. And it turns out that's a really good way to get rich. entrepreneurs that have often ignored. So I can go either way on it. Has your view on money changed? I mean, it used to be extremely, you took like immense bets when you were at Google starting investing. And like, are you still the same? Are you starting to get risk averse? Are you like, would you bet it all? Yeah. I mean, I bet everything every time. I've been closer to zero than I think people in this room would understand more times than not. But it's just how, it's who I am. You know, we... I found myself in Christiania at 6 a.m. Like, not, I didn't get out of bed early and like go for a jog. I mean, like last night took me into... And one of my buddies who's with me here is like, you have like two speeds, like zero or holy shit. And so, you know, that's how I do everything. That's how I do business. That's how I do startups. That's one of the reasons why I ended up stepping back from lowercase for a bit is, you know, it's an incredible pace. Like, you can't do a startup half. You can't kind of be in it. You can't kind of tiptoe around this industry at all. Like, it requires everything. Yeah, absolutely. You used to have it being underrated. Like you've said that publicly, that was your superpower. I mean, you can't have that anymore. Well, look, one of the greatest things about working for yourself is that these big ass VC firms think they can kind of walk all over me because I don't have a posse. Yeah. And they fuck it up every time. Yeah. And so, I love, I love, love, love... I love being underestimated. It keeps happening. Like, as long as I dress like this... I dressed up actually for you. I never have this many colors. And talk like I do. And, you know, has anyone ever been to lowercase capital headquarters? Good. Because if you raise your hand, you're going to be lying because there isn't one. We've never had an office. So, we, you know, it's really funny. I'm on the show Shark Tank, which I know you guys have one here. I met Tommy. Is he here tonight? I met Tommy from Shark Tank last night. Ah, the Danish one. But Shark Tank... Wanted to shoot a reel of me looking rich. They're like, we need to make you look rich for America. So, what we're going to do is we're going to start outside your mansion. I'm like, oh, sorry. Detail there. We have a three-bedroom house with no air conditioning. And they're like, okay, well, what about your jet? And I'm like, I enjoy flying in other people's jets, but I don't own one. They're like, what the hell? So, how about all your sports cars? I'm like, we do have a Tesla. But not a whole garage full of them. And they're like, your boat? I'm like, fuck no. Boats. Oh, my God, no. And so, they're going down the whole list. And they're like, literally, how is America going to know that you're rich and important? And we had to fake it. I had to borrow one of my startup's offices and make it look like our boardroom. We tended to be... Oh, that's great. We went out... Whether it's they're misreading their gut or their other senses, as long as people keep scoring by the old scorecard, I will keep fucking them up. Do you have imposter syndrome? Imposter syndrome? Yeah. Do you wake up feeling... Like other people wearing this shit? Sure. No. No, no, no. I have it massively. I constantly think that I'm fucking up. I'm really good at fucking up, though. Well, no. I mean, I have to confront myself sometimes. Every now and then, someone refers to me as a venture capitalist. No, how do I put this? I sometimes... I'm going to say this with no humility at all, because I mean it with no humility. I'm really fucking good at doing my job. I'm one of the best ever. And I have to say it out loud, because... For so long, I refused to allow myself to believe that I was even a venture capitalist. Because I didn't have an office. Because I didn't have an assistant. Because I didn't have a waiting room and a whole... And the logo spelled out in big Lucite letters across the wall. I would forget that sometimes. And I would actually... I found myself in situations with these other VCs where I would feel a little bit junior to them. Where I'm like, actually, you know what? I'm just smarter than you are, and I'm better at this than you are. But I found myself like, I don't have the khaki pants and the blue blazers. And the office on Sand Hill Road. And so I actually would psych myself out a little bit. And so I say it... It's not a humble brag. It's a straight up brag. I'm really good at this shit. But it took me a long time to realize, like, I do it differently. And that's probably why I'm good at it. Absolutely. No, no. One thing about... You don't have to agree with everything I say. No, no, but I do agree with you. I think that it's like... I think that a lot of VCs right now are trying to figure out themselves. And it's like one of the least innovative industries. So I think that it's like being different. And wearing a cowboy shirt, that's a good branding step at least. But my second question here is like... Being a great investor, is it about what you know? Or is it about who you know? It's definitely not about who you know. I mean, I came... I came to Silicon Valley without any network. I went to the school of foreign service at Georgetown. My life ambition was to be an ambassador someday. Or to be a spy. But like a spy... You know, in the United States, you have to borrow a lot of money to go to school. And the salary for spies doesn't actually afford you to pay back your student loans. So I went to spy school and I was like, fuck it. I'd have to either be on the take with the Russians. Or I'd have to go find another gig. You actually thought of being a spy? Did I actually think of being a spy? Yeah. Yeah, I literally went to school for it. Does anyone here go to school of foreign service? Don't raise your hand. You'll give away your cover. Exactly. They're trained. They know what they're doing. But yeah, no, that's... That's literally... You're like CIA training school at Georgetown. Have you ever thought about starting your own startup? Starting my own startup? Yeah. I mean, lowercase was that. I walked away... I worked at Google for four years. And amazing, like just absolutely rewarding, amazing time. I loved it there. I still am really proud of the culture they built there. And end of 2007, I just knew I had to go. It was getting really big. And I'm a startup guy, not a big company guy. And so... I loved it. I loved it. I just told them, hey, I'm going. And I stuck around for a couple of weeks and they threw a party for me. And I went home for the holidays. It was right around Christmas time. And I was sitting at my parents' kitchen table. And the New York Times had written about me. And I was pretty excited. I'm like, holy shit, I'm in the New York Times. And I go to read the article. And a couple sentences in it says something along the lines of, but why would he ever leave the greatest job in the world? I was like, oh my God. What have I done? And I just sat there weeping openly at my parents' table. Just wondering, holy shit. I really did just walk away from the greatest job at the greatest company. But I just knew. I didn't have a ton of money. I certainly didn't have enough money to be an angel investor or anything. I just knew that I could have had a comfortable ride for as long as I wanted at that joint. I needed to get out of there and start something. And so while I've been there for the founding days of a lot of great companies, and lots of Uber kind of came together in my living room or my hot tub, I, yeah, Travis Klanek can spend eight to ten hours in a hot tub uninterrupted. It's very impressive. It's inhuman. The guy is obsessive. We put a whiteboard next to our hot tub for Travis. But lowercase is my startup. You know, I... I know you're stepping down. Like if your parents would ask, would you say, I'm unemployed? A couple years ago, I already did that. Yeah? It doesn't... I made like an announcement through a party, and so nobody really gets that. But, and when we wrap up, a bunch of people are going to line up here to tell me about their companies. Yeah. And I really appreciate it, but I'm not investing in any of them, because I just don't do that anymore. You can still tell me. But... Would you forward them to Matt? I actually, yeah, you know what? I encourage you. I'll just tell you now while everyone has their stuff out. Jackson, J-A-C-K-S-O-N, spell out the word lowercase, LLC.com. Jackson is the guy. He's the pitch doctor. So he will hear everything you guys are up to. And they can just say that to talk to you, and you're super positive about it. Yeah. I got... Just, yeah, drop, like, throw in the selfie of the two of us, you know, and... No, I got to this point in our business where... I didn't get risk averse. I just started with no by default. So I say no for a living. Right? So I get 100 to 300 pitches a day in my inbox. Still. Right? And so even when I was actively investing, it was a little more than that. You know, most of my encounters with people in this world are some kind of pitch. Whether they're pitching a company, whether they're pitching they want to get into our fund, they want to work with us, whatever it is. And so I have to say no all day long. I say it professionally. But what I found was after a long time, I was just starting with no. And it was really hard to even be open-minded to a yes. Interesting. And that, for me, felt like a little bit of burnout. Yeah. You know, when I just was so... There was so much pattern and habit oriented around just saying no to every startup idea that I didn't have that vibrancy and excitement about, wait, that one might be interesting. That might be... And so I had to purge that out of my system. The same thing with employees. You know, I... When you work in a big company, and you're not... somebody brings you something to work on. You don't get to be like, no, you got anything else? You know, you just... You grab the work you're assigned. You're like, all right, I'm going to make the best of it. Right? And so... But when you're an investor, you have to learn to fold your cards sometimes. You know? You know, if you play poker, you know you're just mucking your hand. You're folding over and over again. And so what ended up happening was in the early days of my investing, I got into it, and everyone who would come and pitch, I would say like, okay, that's a good idea. And I know I can make it better. And so if you go to my website, you can probably pick out my first three deals because they're my first... They're the shittiest deals. Like, I didn't have a real quality filter. I just felt, okay, your thing is okay, and I can be helpful to it, so why don't we work together? I had to teach myself that as an investor, I have to encounter something that's already awesome, and that I think I can make a little bit better, tip it into a greater likelihood of success. But it has to be already awesome before it gets to me. And so that helped me build a filter, and that was what I used to curate all those names. We've got 12 unicorns now. But... Are you an investor in my fund? Correct. So one comment. But what I was going to say is I found myself overcorrecting all the way to the other way, which is just like, I completely close-minded on people, on pitches, etc. And that's like a really expensive and dangerous place to be in this business. But it's really nice to be... I think that when you work with VCs, I think that... Inside the VC room, when they talk to the startup, when the startup leaves, it feels like every single person is telling why they shouldn't invest in the company. And that's like a game. Everybody's like, oh, I didn't really like the founder, way too tall. Or it's like, his accent was kind of weird, I'm not sure they're going to handle other countries. And it just feels like, hey, come on, guys, be slightly positive. It feels like the VC world is like a very, very negative world. And you feel like, hey, I can make this great. No, it is a negative world because of the orientation. Like, there's just... There's a lot of demand and very little supply. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Increasingly, there's more supply. I'm the part of the business where I don't actually use spreadsheets. So I've never made a determination on investing or not investing in a company on the basis of any Excel. I don't want to use it. So I need to find... Traditionally, I found a product that I get. I need to wrap my head around it. I do think that's important, by the way. It can get way too provincial, and that's why there's always like 85 Uber for yachts. Because VCs tend to invest in shit that they deeply understand. But I do think in order to be impactful, I need to get that business. But then I need to see a team, ideally, that's already been working together for a little bit as a two or a three in shipping something, like getting something out to users. And then I... Before we ever talk about a deal, we just work together on something. I say create value before you ask for value, but I try and lend a hand and see how that hand is received. I think I can be helpful here. Are they receiving... Are they accepting... Are we getting along? Are we getting some shit done? Is their chemistry good? And all these things kind of come together. By the time we end up raising money, we've already been working together. With Travis, my wife, Crystal, who is my partner in all this, she and I worked with Travis and Garrett and Ryan at Uber for six months before we invested, and we were the first investors. And so we just... Ryan quit his job in Chicago and drove out to San Francisco. But most people know this. I don't live in San Francisco. But I live in the mountains near Lake Tahoe. So he stayed at our house, and we worked on Uber then, and Travis and Garrett would come up. And so it's... And I can think about that. The Twitter guys. I mean, I was in the first users of Twitter and was working with them for at least six to eight months before I ever put money into Twitter. It was... And so to your question, it's about what you know or who you know. It's... You don't have to have a big pre-example. But you have to have the emotional intelligence to build meaningful relationships that you know are not just going to be, hey, this is one of the most important guys or gals in my life, and I love them, but I have deep belief that they know how to get shit done and ship code and get stuff out the door to users. And I also have deep belief that I am going to be able to personally impact this company, and I know that the way in which I'm going to impact it is something they're open to and embracing, and we're going to get it done together. And so that's... And we basically have these rules. We're like, that. Find something we understand that we can impact. We have another rule, which is be proud of everything we invest in. I don't want to explain to my daughters I got rich by being a porn merchant or something like that. Actually, the other fuck-up for fuck-up night was Snapchat. I gave a talk in L.A., and the guys came up to me, we're big fans of your work. And I heard... I'm like, this is Snapchat stuff. It's going wild on college campuses. I hear about it. And they're like, we'd love to have you in. This is literally their seed round. And I was like, I don't know, guys. The dick pics? I don't really see how it goes. It goes beyond that. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Anyway. But the idea was I wanted to be really proud of our investment. I didn't want to tell the girls like, hey, a bunch of dick pics got us rich. That's how daddy bought this car. 11-year-olds exposing themselves to other 11-year-olds. It's an amazing... I'm glad they've since pivoted, but... but... but... which I won't work with anyone who hasn't had a shitty job. I just won't. I don't... If that keeps me out of the game, I don't give a fuck. I will not work with somebody who doesn't realize that our worst days in tech do not compare to the worst days of a woman walking four and a half hours each way to fetch water into great Ethiopia for her kids. I will not for a minute work with anyone who hasn't been, you know, side by side with poor Americans or the working poor, people who have been sick, or the elderly, or anyone disadvantaged in this economy and understand exactly the travails of their lives and how really, really lucky we have. I've seen people break up in tears at Google because Microsoft launched a competitive product. I'm like, get over yourself. Jesus. We still have the fucking buffet over here today. There's a lot of founders here that are running their company out of Europe. And everybody's telling them that they should go to San Francisco and along. And hiring in San Francisco is like three times the price. What's your view on presence in San Francisco? Well, that's a good reason for some people to go there if they get the job offer. But, no, look, Silicon Valley, I get asked all the time, I used to do a lot of public speaking. I don't do it anymore. I just like Copenhagen, so I agreed to do this one. No, I really, by the way, I really, really do. I don't know if you know, like, I spent all summer here with my kids. Yeah. In fact, when I walked here tonight, you might have seen me. I didn't, I just walked. I have a new hole about me. You have a new hole about you. That's awesome. But, yeah, Copenhagen is particularly special. Denmark's pretty amazing. But I get asked all the time, so how do we replicate, you know, these, like, chambers of commerce want to replicate Silicon Valley in their place? And so I don't want to, like, give lip service, like, it's, you know, it's a way of thinking, or it's a platform or whatever. But what Silicon Valley has is not unique. It's just all the dials are turned up to 11. And so in order to make something, you know, a real community come together, you have to have really fucking smart people. You have to have really driven, driven, driven people. You have to have a culture of risk and of embrace the capital. You have to have access to skills, to people who actually have some of the unique skills you need to build, whether it's your shipping software or hardware. You have to have bankers that you can walk in and talk to and their eyes don't glaze over when you explain you don't have sales yet. You know, and so these things can happen other places, and they can happen other places increasingly for lower costs and with better life balance and happier entrepreneurs and shipping better product with more worldview baked into it than is going to happen in San Francisco. I mean, San Francisco is an insane, insane bubble right now. You watch that show Silicon Valley? Yeah, the hardest, Mike Judge, who writes that show, is a buddy of mine, and, you know, he says the hardest part of that show is trying to stay ahead of reality. Yeah. Right, like, they write that stuff as outlandish fiction, and then it fucking happens. Like, oh, God. So, you know, I certainly wouldn't be the, I would not stand here and say, hey, look, your company only has a real shot if you go ship it over to San Francisco. I think that's bullshit. But I do think when you're not in San Francisco, you have to work a little harder to find the other people who speak your language, who have your skills, who are willing to finance you, who understand what a convertible note is and are used to those terms and you're not re-educating all the time. But I also think you have the added advantage of being in a town where people ride bikes around and drink beers out, you know, with four-hour-long sunsets. I think you have the added advantage of being so close to so many people with diverse perspectives across Europe, across the Middle East and Africa. I think you benefit from growing up, not internationally, and already having that global awareness. And we were joking about, I was sure I was going to get asked about Donald Trump here. And yet, you know, conversely, if you came and spoke at our event, I probably wouldn't ask you about the prime minister, the, you know, the defense. By the way, I was at Andy's bar last night. I ran into the ex-defense minister, the one-day ex-defense minister. I don't know Danish politics. I'm Swedish. That's right. It was sad. It was sad. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it just, like, a guy, like, you know. Anyway, we had a few drinks. My last question is, what's next summer, Copenhagen to you? You're planning to move here? Are we seriously not going to talk about Donald Trump this whole time? Yeah, okay. If you can educate the audience, like, what's Donald Trump? Like, seriously. Are we going to take some audience questions? What's after this? Are there more people after this? I'm serious. Sorry. I got here late, so I didn't know. Are there people after this? Yeah. No, no. Other people are speaking? Yeah? Keep going. I don't want to screw anybody else up. But honestly, I have an honest question. Most people in the room here are not American. So, honestly, like Donald Trump, we read it filtered through Facebook fake news. So that's our way of looking at it. What's actually... I mean, his way of looking at it, too. Yeah, probably. Exactly. It's fucking tragic. It's tragic. It's, um... You know, I worked on both the president's campaigns as well as, um... I worked hard for Hillary. And, um... There are a lot of reasons we didn't win. Um... But... And the recount won't win. It could reveal some structural flaws in our voting system. But we're not going to win on the recount. I classify... I take everything horrible about him. And a buddy of mine who works at the White House calls it a cascade of terrible. And it's true. It's just every day there's three or four more shitty things going on. But, um... But I bucket them into two different categories. One are the policies. And one are the institutional aspects. So the policies. You know, he and the Republicans are going to take away Medicare. Take away Medicaid. Obamacare. Gut Social Security. Like, all these things that make Denmark work are going away in the United States. Our half-assed... Our already half-assed versions of them are just going away. Right? You know, he's going to ruin overtime pay for people when he's going to give me a huge tax break. He's going to take away the... the tax breaks for charitable deductions. I mean, there's just no part of the policy side that he isn't going to savage and let the Republican leaders come along with him and do that. As angry as I am about that, I feel like that is part of the game. And that if my whole tribe takes over, Jesus Christ, it's going to be a big kumbaya. And we'll, you know... But that's part of the game, is you get to change those rules. And there will be some horrible, horrible losers in that situation. And most of the people who are going to be the most adversely affected by his policies are the people who voted. They voted for him. So it's the people across the Midwest who just don't know. So what's really, really keeping me up at night right now, though... You know, I'm a very proud American. I've been lucky to live overseas throughout Europe and Latin America. And as much as it's fun to kind of tease us about we're fat and our cars, you know, are too big and the cheesecake factory portions are, like, this big when you come over and eat, you know, like... I do... I deeply believe in the fundamental democratic institution. And I believe in the transparency and accountability of our justice system. I really believe that we're a special country in that way. I'm not saying it's American exceptionalism, but I have deeply believed that people who try and cheat our system are dealt with, you know, and are shamed. And I'm watching our democracy just be put through the ringer and trampled on right now. The guy doesn't... The guy doesn't want to live in the White House. Like, the guy doesn't want to divest his businesses. He's taking his time right now to speak on the phone with world leaders and promote his hotel projects or get them cleared for permitting other places. He openly lies to the public many times a day. Like, not just one time. He assails the press. He threatens his enemies. He has an enemies list. Like, I... Shockingly, I think we're... We went from, you know, a clown from a reality show to, I think we might be in a... Full-blown kleptocracy. You know, an authoritarian kleptocrat. And we're not ready for it. Our press is not accustomed to this stuff. We're very, very untooled. And so that's what I'm most worried about right now are the foundations of our democracy. Do you think there's going to come anything at all, seriously, anything at all, good up to Trump being a president? Well, I think you've read that... President Obama might be getting back in the game. So... This is all public now. Yeah, President Obama was looking at being an investor, actually. He was looking at doing social impact investing. This whole space is something really intriguing. So we've been spending a lot of time together talking about that. But after the election, he realized there's something else he has to do first, which is help us unfuck ourselves and help us learn to tell our story again. You know, I think we... Hillary Clinton, I deeply respect her. And I think she would have been an incredible, incredible president. There's no doubt she would have been very effective in that job. But these are incredibly different times that require a different type of candidate now. You know, he has a direct relationship with his followers. And he knows how to make... My... As a result of television. In fact, I stopped investing and just... I do this television show. But what changes is the way people interact with me. Like, it's fucking fascinating. The minute you're labeled a billionaire, and a television billionaire, then everything you say should just be written down in ink as fact. No one questions it again. And the only people who are allowed to question it are people who presumably have more money. So, like, when Mark Cuban and I get in a fight, which is basically my job on the show, like, people will chime in and be like, hey, hey, hey, you might be right, but shut the fuck up because Mark has more money than you do. Like, that's the arbiter of it. That's why it was so important for Donald Trump's... You know, to perpetuate this myth that he's a billionaire. He's not. He's worth about $250 million. So... But he would sue... He would threaten to sue for... Forbes, unless they printed he was worth $10 billion because he needed to be above Cuban stack, right? He's got a big rivalry with Mark, and so he's got to show he's higher. But we now have an audience that just eats that shit alive. You know, we have a new type of mirror neurons, these people who are on television not playing a character but playing themselves. We have not biologically evolved to accept that we don't actually know that person. Literally, because there was no evolutionary precursor for television, we don't realize that this person who is in my living room isn't actually my friend, but I hear from them, I get attached to them. It's strange. Like, when people come up and say hi to me, they're not like, oh my God, Chris, it's so fucking... They're just like, hey man, how was dinner last night? And they roll up like, good to see you, buddy. And I'm like, do I know this person or not? And my wife would be like, stranger danger. You know, you can tell you don't like... But they're so convinced they know me because they know me from TV or from podcasts that I start to think I must know them. Yeah. It's... It's... It's literally a biological level of this. And so people feel like they know Donald Trump. Absolutely. They feel like they have a relationship with him. He fucking hates those people. He wouldn't let them in his fucking buildings. He wants nothing to do with them. He's the most racist, elitist piece of shit, fake billionaire ever. But they feel like they know him. No, and I think... I mean, it is, in a sense, it is Reagan, Reagan 2.0. I mean, it's like making an actor a president. I was very, very close once to run up and hug Hillary outside... a big building in New York. And my wife stopped me and was like, do you really know her? And I was like, yeah, I really know her. And she was like, I know her too, but I think it's Hillary Clinton. Well, the thing I would ask for you on behalf of all Americans is if an American makes it to Denmark, the odds are extremely high they did not vote for him. Okay? So just give them the benefit of the doubt. That's a very good point. I mean, I think hiking Americans, if you're hiking out in the forest to meet Americans... I had a lot of American friends that now put Canadian flags... on their backpacks. Yeah. Back in 2005, I was negotiating... I was at Google and I was doing a deal with the Danish government... Sorry, the Dutch government to get... I know. They're the hustlers, both of them. They're very similar actually. I almost made it. I almost made it. No, I was doing a deal with the Dutch government to... It was like 300 million euro of incentives to build a data center in the Netherlands. For three days we sat there and the Dutch guys and the EU officials just had their arms folded like this. And the US ambassador... So this is during George W. Bush's time. The US ambassador was an old W. Bush fundraiser. He wasn't helping. You know, like these guys, just every proposal I put there, they just had their arms folded. And so on the third day I said, hey, let's all go get a beer. And we're standing in Groningen, a little town in the north. And Sky News came on and it showed... It showed W. Bush deplaning from like Air Force One or something. And I said under my breath, oh, that fucking clown. You see, we have kind of like red states and blue states. And while I kind of... Not my president. Oh, man. One of my... So long story short, half hour later we had signed a deal and I got 300 million euro of incentives to do this thing. I just needed to disavow... Yeah. Your president. Our warmongering president. So anyway, please on behalf of our country, we fucking apologize. We apologize for the climate and what we're about to do to that treaty. Apologize to everything we're going to do to fuck up the refugee situation even worse and what we're not going to do in Syria and a war will probably start in Iran and just a bunch of other disasters. So, you know, but don't hold it against us. We really didn't vote for that guy. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Chris, pleasure to have you here. That was... Just wait a second. I mean, it's... There... You have... You have... There's so many stories to tell. I think you come back to Copenhagen, right? And you tell the community more about those follow-ups and how we fix all those problems, right? Was that a dare or a threat or what is that? It is an open invitation. An open invitation. Yeah, I don't need an open invitation to come to Copenhagen. I'm here all the time. Great. Actually, by the way, I'm about to... So a long time ago, I got to meet Rene Redzepi, the Noma guy, and I'm a super fan. What Silicon Valley is for food, you guys... I'm sorry. What Silicon Valley is for tech, Copenhagen is for food. The spirit of innovation and stuff here. But, I am about... I ate lunch at Noma today and I'm about to go have dinner there. First non-employee in history to eat two meals. So that's like 40 plus courses in the same day. I'm saying this right now in case any of you see me lying in an alley or a street tonight. Just pick me up, pump my stomach, and then I'll see you in Christiania, okay? We'll do it.