The Exchanges

Q What books, what biographies, you said you read a lot of biographies. What were you reading that changed your life?

A I've probably read over a hundred, maybe even 200 biographies at this point. And, uh, like for example, I would go on deep dives of trying to understand certain world history events like World War II. And so, one interesting biography I read is of a gentleman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was trying to assassinate Hitler. And so, you understand World War II, and he was deeply religious. You understand World War II and Germany and Nazism through the frame of this individual and his plans to go about and his observations about what other people were doing in the community. And so, I found, like, these, these biographies provided This back door on how to understand events as they were told to me in school. In school, you have this highly compressed version of history of like, all right, everybody, let's get on the same page if we understand these big things that happened, but you really miss out on the nuance. And we all know how flawed historical accounts are because of just the nature of, of humans and the way people write history. And so these biographies helped me start to Piece together an understanding of reality that was much more nuanced and sometimes contrary to, to primary narratives. And so it, it, um, it invites me to always reject the first narrative that's offered and understand it not for a factual statement, but for a wishful attempt to be understood. To be accepted.

AI assessment note: “one interesting biography I read is of a gentleman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

Q you, uh, you talked about basically like goal alignment first with your body, right? And you were able to solve that and blueprint is a good example. What's another example of how you would take this idea of cooperation or goal alignment and what would be like a more specific like point of attack or, or, or like product or service or whatever that would be created along those lines?

A I mean, the brain, like, so I would love to tackle my brain next. And that's what kernel is. If I have this device and I can measure my brain. If you think about it in like what we eat today as a dietary input to our bodies, and you think about what is my diet for my brain? Like the news sources, the social media sources, my friends, my environment, we have no idea what's happening. We don't, we haven't, we don't have it measured. And so is it possible that we basically eat 90% junk food in a given day to our brains? Because that's just the way society is structured. And so I'd love to address that of getting the baseline of where I am with my brain. And then, uh, more broadly, I've been talking to several people, uh, who, uh, specialists in math and computational methodologies to try to figure out, are there mathematical approaches? In the same way that John Nash came up with, um, you know, uh, game theory, are there mathematical approaches to think about how we might solve this, uh, between humans, between humans and AI, between the human AI and the planet? And so, you know, again, I can do this with my body. It's a, it's a pretty straightforward thing to do now, but it's just gonna get more complicated, uh, the more agents you have in the game.

AI assessment note: “I would love to tackle my brain next. And that's what kernel is.”

Q you are and how he thought you looked great. Is it mostly, uh, are you getting any more, uh, attention from women or is it all just guys like Sean who are just like eyeballing you? Cause whenever I, whenever I get in shape, I'm like, oh yeah, my wife's gonna love this. And she's like, eh, I guess you look all right. Uh, it's always dudes. It's only men.

A I think Sam, I would say the, the person most happiest is me. You know, like I, I had terribly complicated emotions looking at myself in my worst years. It just was so, I felt so much shame and guilt and lack of respect because I just felt out of control and powerless. And now when I look at myself, I have such positive emotions that I'm stable, that, uh, things are reliable, that I trust myself. You know, I trust the systems that are built. Uh, it has transformed my relationship with myself. It transforms what I think about, uh, what I can become as a person, uh, the relationships I have. So it's just, it's hard to articulate how significant of a psychological shift has been for me in my own understanding. My own identity.

AI assessment note: “I would say the, the person most happiest is me.”

Q bootstrap a business like that? I mean, I think by like year three or year four, you're doing like eight or nine million in revenue. I mean, you kind of You guys kind of took off. So I understand like how you were able to bootstrap it, bootstrap it once you got to maybe ten million in revenue, but how on earth do you make something like that from scratch?

A I was, I guess it started when I was 21. Uh, I decided that I, I wanted to try to do something meaningful for humanity. I grew up reading a whole bunch of biographies about people who had done things in their time and place. And I admired People who tried to identify the thing on the horizon that was barely reachable during their lifetimes, and they went after it. And at the age of 21, I didn't know what that was, and I didn't know how I could do it. And so I thought, you know, given my options that I might as well, I'll become an entrepreneur, I'll make a whole bunch of money by the age 30, and then at that point, I'll try to go after something. And so it was a naive contemplation of how to go about doing things. I'd grown up in a small town, Basically, you know, with my grandpa on a farm, I didn't meet, um, my, I didn't meet an engineer until I was 2001 or 22 years old. It was very much a, um, a farm boy like, uh, raised in a deep, really deeply religious community. And so I did a bunch of startups and I just accidentally fell into payments, uh, because I, I was building a startup. I was struggling to pay my bills. I had a child at the time and I would do anything for money. I applied for 60 jobs. Nobody even contemplated hiring me. And so I found this job to sell credit card processing services door to door. And so I agreed to do it. And it was a hundred percent commission a…

AI assessment note: “I found this job to sell credit card processing services door to door.”

Q Have you not done that at all? Have you had any splurges since you've started this? And do you ever intend to do that?

A I have had infractions. Yes. Although this is, I think this is, I think this is the most interesting part of the entire thing. Just to be clear, the starting point, this is a big deviation from how society is structured right now. Right now, our minds have unquestioned authority in deciding what we eat. So if you think about your daily life, you go to the store and you walk down aisles, you're like, ah, maybe this, maybe that. You decide how much you put on your plate. You decide if you go to a restaurant, you're presented with a menu, you decide if you're going to have a pizza party, you decide if you're going to eat Doritos, like you're making these decisions all the time. And it's a combination of how you feel, what you want, like, you know, you're trying to be good or whatever, but you're basically giving your mind unquestioned authority to do it. Blueprint flips that. And it says, my mind has zero authority. My body has a hundred percent authority. So it, the measurement of my heart and liver and lungs and DNA methylation patterns, it directly asks for what it wants via data. And I can never override it. And so in this idea, so the thought experiment is if you could achieve perfect health and maintain perfect health, but it, but it required you to accept Uh, basically what an algorithm was doing to deliver what you eat and when you eat, would you do it? And then in that th…

AI assessment note: “I have had infractions. Yes. Although this is, I think this is”

Q have bought that for twenty eight million. I think like only five, only like five or six or seven years into Braintree, like pretty early into Braintree's existence. Did you pay mostly cash for that? I mean, how did you finance that deal? And what do you think that that's worth now? Cause you keep saying Braintree Venmo as if like Venmo is as powerful or as valuable as Braintree.

A I don't know the current values. I mean, I, I sold the company several years ago. I know it's very valuable and so is Braintree. And so this was a decision I made when, when I did sell Braintree Venmo for eight hundred million. It was a decision of, okay, so I'm now 34 years old. I want to move on to this next stage of life. Uh, accumulation of money was not my objective. And I could have stuck with the company and we could have made more, you know, been more valuable, but it was like, okay, so if I do this, it's three hundred million. That's a good enough starting base to go off into these other things. And because they were going to be in the areas of, you know, deep tech, I knew they would take a decade or so to start. It was just going to be a long startup process. And so, and looking at the prime of my years, I thought, I'll take this. I'll have a go at this and try to do something meaningful there. But it was just a calculation of time and reconfiguring my life towards that.

AI assessment note: “I don't know the current values. I mean, I, I sold the company”