Peter Rex | How Do We Beat Big Tech?

All right. Well, Peter, first of all, you’ve start­ed your own com­pa­ny and before we kind of dive into some of the things you’ve done, tell us a lit­tle bit of your sto­ry. How did that come into be, tell us a lit­tle bit about your busi­ness so we can all get a good under­stand­ing of where you’re com­ing from.

- Yeah, Doug. So I’ll start out by giv­ing a real­ly high lev­el suc­cinct sum­ma­ry of what we cur­rent­ly do. Then I’ll give you a back­drop of how that came about. So-

- Great.

- What Rex does is, Rex builds tech­nol­o­gy to serve own­ers and oper­a­tors in real estate. So we have 10 tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies we’ve built all solv­ing the most lucra­tive biggest pain points in the real estate indus­try, rang­ing from insur­ance to pay­ments, to asset man­age­ment or invest­ing. So we’ve got a elite tech team based here in Austin, we moved it from San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle from the West Coast a cou­ple years ago, which we can get into. I’m sure as we run here, we’ve got deep domain real estate expe­ri­ence, which will come across as we’re talk­ing. And we’ve got a lot of assets in house that we own about 10,000 apart­ments that we, so bil­lions of dol­lars of assets we man­age as well in the real estate space, mak­ing for excel­lent test­ing ground for real­ly serv­ing our own needs. And that said, that the 10 com­pa­nies are all in mar­ket, they have trac­tion and they’re grow­ing. So that’s a quick sum­ma­ry of what we do at Rex. And then how did I get to this posi­tion of run­ning these tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. Well, back when I start­ed, about 16 years ago in entre­pre­neur­ship, I came out­ta col­lege like many oth­er kids com­ing out­ta col­lege, not know­ing what I was gonna do, right. So actu­al­ly spent a cou­ple weeks in a Chris­t­ian monastery and med­i­tat­ed and prayed in silence and talked to one of the monks there also first from spir­it direc­tion here and there, but main­ly spent time in prayer and tried to lis­ten to that still qui­et voice and under­stand what the Holy Spir­it was ask­ing me to do. And I felt called out of all things to go into entre­pre­neur­ship and I had no busi­ness back­ground at all. So I found my way try­ing to get into busi­ness, feel­ing a call, but not know­ing what I was doing. So I came through ulti­mate­ly the real estate side because peo­ple were will­ing to back asset rather than me, ​’cause who am I? I was a phi­los­o­phy, polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy back­ground type per­son, and then built up over time, a cou­ple bil­lion dol­lars of assets in real estate, large­ly bet­ting dur­ing the down­turn of the great finan­cial cri­sis, heav­i­ly doing a con­trar­i­an bed in the areas of Tex­an, Flori­da, even though I’m from New York. And along the way, I got a Har­vard Law JD and a CPA as well and took a cou­ple bar exams and passed them as well. So that’s a quick summary.

- Wow. That’s a fan­tas­tic sum­ma­ry. What a won­der­ful thing to do. One of the great­est things we could all think about is to take time to lis­ten. And that’s a big piece of why we wan­na do this pod­cast so peo­ple can hear, and I love doing this so I can hear from you. To hear your sto­ry and take some time to lis­ten to things so you can process and be thought­ful about next steps going for­ward from there. You do have one sto­ry from col­lege that I’m aware of that I’d love you to tell about, a class at Har­vard that you strug­gled with a lit­tle bit and the professor.

- Yeah, well, I did­n’t strug­gle with the class too much, but I was very com­fort­ably skip­ping all the class­es. So I was at Har­vard Law and I was as a typ­i­cal entre­pre­neur doing a lot of entre­pre­neur­ial behav­iors rather than sit­ting in class. So I, but the pro­fes­sor there was Eliz­a­beth War­ren who cur­rent­ly, every­one knows who that is. And she was one of the few pro­fes­sors that absolute­ly did­n’t like that idea. So she want­ed to be there sit­ting there lis­ten­ing to her spiel and what­ev­er oth­er stu­dents had to say dur­ing, just going there and sit­ting down. And that’s not real­ly the way I learned any­ways, I learned bet­ter from books and every­one learns dif­fer­ent­ly, right. So I did­n’t wan­na do that. We had a dis­agree­ment about that and even­tu­al­ly she issued some warn­ings over to me, which I dis­re­gard­ed, and so she offi­cial­ly failed me and.

- Oh gosh. I love it.

- In her entire his­to­ry as a pro­fes­sor, which I guess had stretched over a cou­ple decades is she’s only failed one oth­er per­son. So I felt, wow, that makes me feel real spe­cial, but I was able to lit­i­gate my way back and argued my way back in to take the final exam. And I was able to pass it with­out too much stress. And I did­n’t even, I end­ed up get­ting a B in the course, so it was fine. But you had to do it, the way they grade is by blind, they don’t even know who they’re grad­ing. So I argued to take that exam. And I said I under­stood the mate­r­i­al, which I did. I just had to study it. So.

- Yeah. I love it. That’s such a great sto­ry. And not only because the per­son­al­i­ties involved with Sen­a­tor War­ren, but just of how we all learn dif­fer­ent­ly. And we all approach things dif­fer­ent­ly. And the entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it can take a dif­fer­ent path in peo­ple’s lives. And so the fact that find­ing the right way to learn the infor­ma­tion or to process the infor­ma­tion and be able to under­stand it and demon­strate that, we all do that a lit­tle differently.

- Yeah, and if at the time Doug, if I knew she was a native Amer­i­can, I would’ve gone, it would’ve been more inter­est­ing, but she was­n’t upfront about it at the time, so.

- That’s right. Exact­ly. Oh, real­ly good. I love it. Well, thank you for shar­ing some of that back­ground. So now here you are, you’ve built a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, you’ve been in this space. You’ve been in the ear­ly stages of start­ing a com­pa­ny of being in the process, help us under­stand what that was like. In those ear­ly days, work­ing in this space. And real­ly, as you talk about tech­nol­o­gy, it’s the peo­ple behind the tech­nol­o­gy that are impor­tant, help us under­stand what you expe­ri­enced dur­ing that time.

- Yeah, so, I mean, now, why are we in tech­nol­o­gy? Well, it’s because of my back­ground in entre­pre­neur­ship, I was build­ing out on real estate. I noticed a huge amount of prob­lems there. I also had an immense desire to serve every­one every­where in the world. And tech is inter­est­ing in that, I explained it like this, ​’cause a lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand how to make mon­ey off tech or how do you invest in tech, how do you think about it? Well, it turns out, I think the secret’s out that tech is the most prof­itable type of invest­ment in the world. And if you look at the top five, even pub­lic com­pa­nies now I think all five of them are tech com­pa­nies, even after the cor­rec­tion recent­ly. So, and if you look at a lot of the wealth­i­est folks in the last 20 years on the list, any of the new­er ones, almost all the new­er ones are from the tech side. So it’s a tremen­dous­ly prof­itable. And why is that? Because you can cre­ate, I say this, so it’s almost as if you can cre­ate a beau­ti­ful chair and some­thing you’d love to sit in, right. But, and then, but it turns out you can cre­ate that beau­ti­ful chair, design it real­ly well, but you can sell it mil­lions of times with­out hav­ing to man­u­fac­ture the next chair. You just cre­ate it once and you repli­cate and sell it. And each time you sell it, you can make mon­ey off it. So your upfront cost is only one time, your major upfront cost, build­ing that chair. So it reflects almost like a real estate devel­op­ment in that sense, you put a lot of mon­ey up front with no cash flows, but then once it’s up there, you then get the cash flows lat­er. But unlike real estate devel­op­ment, you could sell it again and again, and again, and again, and again, where real estate devel­op­ment, you build some­thing, say you build a thou­sand apart­ments, right? When you sell those, you can only sell one apart­ment. You can sell only the thou­sand apart­ments that you built. You can’t go and sell ​‘em a mil­lion times. So that’s the thing with tech. And that’s why tech is so prof­itable. And what brought me in there was this desire to serve every­body every­where in the world. So my per­son­al mot­to is, ​“To serve Jesus in busi­ness.” And that’s been my per­son­al mot­to since I got into busi­ness on my own. And I got that actu­al­ly from Moth­er Tere­sa’s sis­ters. So when I was at back in the day, when I start­ed, I start­ed at Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege actu­al­ly. And then I trans­ferred to a place called Ave Maria Col­lege, which actu­al­ly was up in Ypsi­lan­ti, Michi­gan, which is not as nice as Grand Rapids from what I understand.

- Was that, I’m try­ing to, who was involved with that school the founder of Domi­noes, as I recall?

- Yes.

- Tom Donahue.

- Tom Monaghan.

- Mon­aghan, Mon­aghan. Yeah, yeah. Right, okay, good.

- So I went there and then after that trans­ferred to George­town Uni­ver­si­ty. But when I was at George­town, I start­ed a group called Moth­er Tere­sa Hoy­a’s. And at Moth­er Tere­sa Hoy­a’s, we would get, what hap­pened was, I was just get­ting kind of, I was think­ing I don’t do any­thing for the poor. And I was, just kind of in the area where George­town Uni­ver­si­ty is, is very wealthy and there is no, they don’t even allow a metro stops there to keep the less, keep peo­ple from com­ing into that neigh­bor­hood, that area, right.

- Wow.

- Which ends up cre­at­ing a real­ly rich pock­et, almost a bub­ble. And I thought, man, being a Chris­t­ian, you lis­ten to gospel and you got­ta serve peo­ple. You serve poor, help peo­ple. And as a col­lege stu­dent, I just, one night said, I got­ta do some­thing. I end­ed up stay­ing up like in about 3:00 AM or so, just think­ing about what can I do? And then I was, I had this idea of research­ing, well, what can I serve? And I found Moth­er Tere­sa’s sis­ters had, they were in South­east DC, so they, oppo­site side. And I thought, okay, that’s a good idea. So in the morn­ing I got up fair­ly ear­ly and I just start­ed tak­ing a bus to a bus to anoth­er bus, showed up on site. I said, ​“Hey, I’m a stu­dent at George­town.” And they were like, ​“George­town? We nev­er had a stu­dent from George­town ever.” And I said, ​“I wan­na serve here.” It was an AIDS hos­pice. So a hos­pice for AIDS patients. And I went in, end­ed up serv­ing with them. And then I start­ed a group behind that. So we used to go in and serve, but their mot­to is ​“Serv­ing Jesus and the poor.” So, and what I did there is I took that mot­to and they’re also no non­sense, real­ly prin­ci­pled peo­ple. It was great for stu­dents com­ing in. They would, peo­ple that would nev­er lis­ten to me are def­i­nite­ly gonna lis­ten to these tough nuns, telling ​‘em about pro-life issues, what­ev­er you’re like, any issue you name it, they’ll be very direct.

- Sure, sure.

- Great role mod­el. And in doing that, they had the mot­to serv­ing, ​“Jesus and the poor.” And I took that and I put, ​“Serv­ing Jesus and busi­ness.” That’s my mot­to sense. So once I felt I called in the busi­ness, I thought, you could serve Jesus any­where. And entre­pre­neur­ship is I think, espe­cial­ly a vac­u­um where you don’t have a lot of folks that are in there bring­ing the Chris­t­ian mes­sage in there. And that the pow­er of the Chris­t­ian mes­sage is per­fect for entre­pre­neur­ship. If you think about it, because who are we as entre­pre­neur? What are we as a Chris­t­ian? Right? We are fol­low­ers of a per­son who nev­er, a per­son who lives and is here with us, right. And that’s Jesus, he’s res­ur­rect­ed. So we are the peo­ple of the res­ur­rec­tion. So when you wan­na talk about cre­ation, I mean, we are the peo­ple of cre­ation. We’re peo­ple of the new cre­ation and con­stant­ly, we need to be build­ing the new heav­ens on the new earth we’re peo­ple of the res­ur­rec­tion, and I think that real­ly flows real­ly well into some­one who’s in entre­pre­neur­ship. That is very much, almost a source of ener­gy for me to be out there try­ing to look at what is it, how can we make it bet­ter, how can we recre­ate it? How can we cre­ate some­thing or some­thing brand new that can make the lives of peo­ple bet­ter through busi­ness? And busi­ness is great because the respon­siv­i­ty is right from your con­sumer, from the per­son who gets the good, they can either pay you or not. If you don’t do well, then you’re out, which is good, ​’cause it’s a dis­ci­pline, right. So, but any­ways, we can go all day on this, I’m sure, Doug, but I’ll kick it back over to you.

- Wow. I mean, it’s just fas­ci­nat­ing how you fol­low your faith and then how you see that you can express your faith. And for all of us who are liv­ing our lives every day, what­ev­er role we may have, we still have a chance to live our val­ues, to express our faith and to serve oth­er peo­ple. I’m involved with the Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter. And when they talk about the words of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and life, lib­er­ty, and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. Hap­pi­ness was not as self­ish, sort of hap­pi­ness, hap­pi­ness as defined in that time, and through a lot of peo­ple smarter than me who have talked about it’s about, how you find ful­fill­ment or pur­pose and mean­ing by serv­ing oth­ers? And so, again, the link­ages are real­ly impor­tant, that’s how you find hap­pi­ness. It’s not about your­self. So you’re find­ing ways through your busi­ness to enhance the lives of peo­ple, to enhance the lives of your cus­tomers. But is that always the way peo­ple think about it in tech­nol­o­gy or even in busi­ness in gen­er­al, not just tech­nol­o­gy? But you’ve had a win­dow there. Talk a lit­tle bit about, is that con­sis­tent or is that kind of a very dif­fer­ent way to look at things?

- Well I think that the proof is in the pud­ding, right? So you know the tree by its fruit and the fruit is not good, right? And I think we’ve tast­ed that fruit of the last cou­ple years of tech and we could see the fruit is not good. Well, why is the fruit not good? It’s ​’cause the tree, there’s prob­lems in the tree out there in Sil­i­con Val­ley, in Seat­tle, and that’s where all the tech is com­ing from. If you look at Microsoft, Ama­zon, Google, Apple, et cetera, Stripe, Visa, all these com­pa­nies deplat­form­ing peo­ple, cen­ter­ing peo­ple going right against all these lib­er­ties that we stand for, that we’ve all ben­e­fit­ed from. Well, they are obvi­ous­ly have anti-Amer­i­can ideals. I would also say, and I think I’m cor­rect about this is they have anti-Chris­t­ian ideals as well. And the real­i­ty is also, and this is per­haps an even more impor­tant point and some­thing I noticed out there is they actu­al­ly don’t real­ly have con­crete ideals. They have ever chang­ing ideals, sort of that take on the zeit­geist at the time, which is a very dan­ger­ous type of sit­u­a­tion where they have a vac­u­um. They don’t have sol­id prin­ci­ples. And I some­times boil that down to being Judeo-Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, Judeo-Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples mean­ing that, does­n’t mean you’re Jew­ish or Chris­t­ian, but you have these prin­ci­ples that you think are good for soci­ety. So Ben­jamin Franklin was a deist right? And he was­n’t such a strict deist that he thought, God did­n’t do any­thing. He actu­al­ly thought that God was involved in the rev­o­lu­tion. He felt Prov­i­dence’s hand was behind it. Now George Wash­ing­ton, the key founder of all was a devout Chris­t­ian. And he’s one of my heroes, and so I know a lot about him now. He was devout Chris­t­ian and he led this sys­tem that cre­at­ed the biggest tent pos­si­ble. Now the thing about Chris­t­ian ideals are, as these Chris­t­ian ideals are the biggest tent that you could pos­si­bly imag­ine, ​’cause it allows any­body to believe any­thing, even if they dis­agree with us, it even says to love your ene­my. But if you don’t have these prin­ci­ples, these rules of behav­ior, some of them are actu­al­ly rules of what you can’t do, some of them in Chris­tian­i­ty are rules of what you should do, such as love your ene­my, these proac­tive rules and serve those who are in need, what you do the least of my peo­ple that you do under me, these types of pre­scrip­tions to help and love oth­ers. But we also have the 10 com­mand­ments that restrains neg­a­tive behav­ior. Now, if you don’t have these things, you don’t actu­al­ly have ground­ed prin­ci­ples, then you’re a very dan­ger­ous man, if you have pow­er. Because then you are will­ing to do what­ev­er you think, that you think is right in your own judg­ment, but not teth­ered by what has proven to be right and wrong and what is apart from you as in what is true. So if you don’t have these beliefs and you have tremen­dous pow­er, which the tech indus­try does, that’s a big prob­lem. And one of the things we’re doing on a lay­er beneath here is that on the top lay­er, I explain that we are serv­ing own­ers and oper­a­tors with tech­nol­o­gy in real estate, right. In the real estate indus­try we’re serv­ing own­ers and oper­a­tors with tech. How­ev­er, a deep­er lay­er is we are dis­rupt­ing woke tech. Our idea here is dis­rupt the tech indus­try, the woke tech indus­try. And it’s not just big tech, it’s all of tech, it’s GoFundMe block­ing truck­ers from doing their thing, get­ting non­prof­it monies out in Cana­da, it’s Stripe, derail­ing peo­ple off pay­ments. not allow­ing ​‘em to get mon­ey. It’s GoDad­dy get­ting Texas Right to Life deplat­formed on just a web­site ser­vice. AWS remov­ing peo­ple from servers. Ama­zon, the book sell­er and the online sales retail com­pa­ny kick­ing off books like Ryan Ander­son­’s book about gen­der issues. It’s going after all the whole tech area has bad soil and that’s cre­at­ing trees that are real­ly bear­ing poi­so­nous fruit. And that’s part of why I moved the com­pa­ny out of that soil, that envi­ron­ment into a bet­ter soil hill here in Texas.

- Wow. Peter, you have unpacked or you have touched on so many impor­tant things. I’m gonna try to go back a lit­tle bit for some of those things and maybe ask you to dive a lit­tle bit deep­er. Tell us a lit­tle bit more about some of those things. You talk about this idea and I’ll start with this one, this pow­er with­out prin­ci­ples. And there’s a lot of pow­er in this tech­nol­o­gy. You men­tioned all the deci­sions that peo­ple have made, or com­pa­nies have made that maybe in a vac­u­um for some­body, they made sense, but in over the course of time, they may not make sense for those of us who kind of look at it, maybe in that way. How do we spot that and how do we spot that? And what’s a way for action to be tak­en to com­bat that? Because you also talked about dis­rupt­ing woke tech, and there’s a lot of talk about gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, how gov­ern­ment should be more involved, maybe take those two, those pow­er then prin­ci­ples and dis­rupt­ing woke tech. Elab­o­rate a lit­tle bit fur­ther on those to help us get your per­spec­tive a lit­tle bit more.

- Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Doug. When I saw I’d be talk­ing to you, I thought, oh man, Doug and I, we could talk about a lot of things. We could go in a lot of direc­tions ​’cause we share a lot of com­mon themes here. you’re mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful in entre­pre­neur­ship and have done won­der­ful things. You and also your fam­i­ly has fig­ured out a way to con­tin­ue this, right? And you share deeply held Chris­t­ian views that I also share as well.

- Thank you very much.

- So we’ll take it one at a time here and prob­a­bly not be able to get into every­thing that we could go into. But when we think about the tech prob­lem as a whole, and I talk about these, the absence of virtue com­bined with pow­er. So if you have pow­er with­out any virtue, any ground­ing, essen­tial­ly, they often talk about val­ues, but val­ues are not teth­ered to time­less prin­ci­ples, right? And this is some­thing I’m very famil­iar with in San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle. you have a lot of folks that have made a lot of mon­ey. Many of whom are not well edu­cat­ed out­side of tech­ni­cal things, but in the tech­ni­cal area, they are genius lev­el. It would be like Tiger Woods or something,

- Sure, sure. The dif­fer­ence is Tiger Woods is no, I’m just mak­ing it up. The dif­fer­ence is these peo­ple actu­al­ly con­trol the rails of our com­merce, Ama­zon, these retail com­pa­nies, but they also con­trol our data where we store it, which is the new econ­o­my, right? You’re run­ning, every every­thing’s online. We’re talk­ing right here on a Zoom pod­cast or on a face to face pod­cast here that you are going to pub­lish and peo­ple can watch it using cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy that you guys use to get this done in a good way. But view­ers are gonna watch this from wher­ev­er they are, right, through­out the world. So this is the new way. This is actu­al­ly the mod­ern eco­nom­ic and com­mu­ni­ca­tion pub­lic square. So the pub­lic square, Twit­ter, Face­book, et cetera, you have even where you keep your web­sites. And so, a tremen­dous amount of pow­er. Now I’ve already men­tioned how prof­itable tech is. I think I men­tioned this because, and by the way, I’m say­ing these things, but I’m not some kind of per­son that’s out there say­ing, oh, every­one else needs to go do this and this and this. No, I’m doing this. I’m already been full all in. I’ve put in tremen­dous amounts of my own blood, sweat, and tears, and a lot of cash. And what I’m doing, build­ing this all out at tremen­dous sac­ri­fice, real­ly, and doing what we’re doing. And so is our team, our lead­er­ship’s tak­en mas­sive sac­ri­fice to do what we’re doing and it’s not easy, right. And we’re fight­ing. And we’ve also been out­spo­ken pub­licly about against these oth­er com­pa­nies. And we are stand­ing some­what alone, but we are gonna, and all you need is real­ly one, any­ways, we’ve got more than one on our team, but we are build­ing out its tax­es to cre­ate a new tech ecosys­tem and dis­rupt the woke tech indus­try. So I’m putting my cash where my mouth is and we’re doing what we got­ta do. But so, I just want­ed to say, I’m not some kind of hyp­ocrite say­ing, every­one’s got­ta do this. I’m actu­al­ly doing it myself.

- Right, right. Exactly.

- So, but what I’d say is, well, this tech­nol­o­gy is mas­sive­ly prof­itable, which is one thing I’m mak­ing a point of, because a lot of what peo­ple, con­ser­v­a­tives, Chris­tians, lib­er­tar­i­ans, some lib­er­tar­i­ans as well don’t quite under­stand how prof­itable this is. And we need these folks to get involved. Because right now, the amount of folks that invest in tech is very minus­cule. It’s like one out­ta like say 10,000 actu­al­ly under­stand and invest in tech. And they’re all locat­ed gen­er­al­ly in the Sil­i­con Val­ley’s splash zone area or Seat­tle area, the zone out there on the West Coast, A lot of oth­er folks don’t quite get it, so they’re stay­ing on the side­lines. How­ev­er, they’ve got­ta under­stand, this is mas­sive­ly prof­itable. This is not dou­ble bot­tom line type thing where you kind of don’t make that, no, you make mas­sive mon­ey here and attach­ing a mis­sion to it, you even make more any­ways, ​’cause com­pa­nies with a mis­sion actu­al­ly make more mon­ey any­ways. But the peo­ple on the right, this is a sep­a­rate issue of, I’d almost wan­na do a full pod­cast just on that, how we got­ta get folks that are Chris­t­ian, peo­ple of val­ues, peo­ple of good will jump­ing into mis­sion-based like hard dri­ving tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. We can do that sep­a­rate­ly anoth­er time, or we can get all-

- All right, I’m gonna take you up on that, Peter. I’m gonna take you up on that. We’ll do anoth­er one on that in the future.

- Yeah, we will. I’m down. ​‘Cause this needs to get out and we got­ta get folks, They got­ta under­stand this, this needs to hap­pen. Oth­er­wise we won’t shift the base of pow­er. This won’t hap­pen. You can’t just have peo­ple out here, like, we need help, we’re not gonna do it alone, right. So we got­ta get peo­ple come behind us and we need peo­ple to under­stand gen­er­al­ly so they stay involved and they get part of this new econ­o­my. Oth­er­wise it’s gonna, the folks that con­trol, that get the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the econ­o­my, so not only the con­trol the rails of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, that’s just tech­ni­cal­ly the con­trol the rails of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So it’s absolute­ly impor­tant that we get the right entre­pre­neurs that are behind this, right? But they also make mas­sive amounts of prof­itabil­i­ty. Take a look at who has been aggre­gat­ing the most bil­lions and bil­lions, right? It’s folks con­cen­trat­ed in the tech indus­try. Now that is raw pow­er as well. In addi­tion to the fact they’re con­trol­ling our pub­lic square and all these oth­er things, things they’re mak­ing a ton, a ton of mon­ey, and that mon­ey has raw pow­er. I mean you’re busi­ness­man and you know the pow­er of mon­ey, right? This in our econ­o­my, Amer­i­ca, is an entre­pre­neur­ial lead econ­o­my. It has been from the begin­ning, George Wash­ing­ton was an entre­pre­neur, so has Ben­jamin Franklin. I mean, that makes us very dif­fer­ent than the Euro­peans, right? Who gen­er­al­ly had a clas­si­fied sys­tem that did­n’t quite allow the mid­dle, low­er class, any room to real­ly move up, back in the day. Now they’re becom­ing a lit­tle bit more like us. But the heart of Amer­i­ca was oppor­tu­ni­ty real­ly. And this is allow­ing peo­ple to access things. So Amer­i­ca has been led from the begin­ning by entre­pre­neurs. And the dif­fer­ence now is we have entre­pre­neur­ial lead­ers that do not actu­al­ly share gener­ic Chris­t­ian val­ues. They have been, I would say, com­ing out of these sys­tems that they’ve been brain­washed in, uni­ver­si­ties, and high schools hon­est­ly, and stuff like that. They get brain­washed into think­ing actu­al­ly being an Amer­i­can some­thing to apol­o­gize about. Like as if, yes, every­one’s had bad things, but Amer­i­ca’s a tremen­dous­ly, it’s a tremen­dous bless­ing, you basi­cal­ly won the lot­to if you’re born in this coun­try. And if you don’t real­ize it, then bye, you can leave. Why are you here? Like, and if you’re just not quite sure, but you wan­na learn, well, go get on a flight tick­et and go to oth­er coun­tries and go see what it’s like. And spend some time in some oth­er coun­try, you’ll see how many peo­ple would love to become a cit­i­zen of this country.

- Sure.

- So our Amer­i­can sys­tem is amaz­ing, and it’s also set up by entre­pre­neurs and we got­ta get peo­ple involved and active in it. But any­ways, I’m kind of run­ning on that hole, I’ll push it back over to you, Doug.

- Okay, well. I want you to keep going there. Let’s go to, let’s talk about you move. You men­tioned that in pass­ing, but that’s a big deal to move your com­pa­ny, to be in this ecosys­tem. There’s a lot of the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment work that you’ll hear in any state, you got­ta cre­ate this ecosys­tem, you got­ta have all the peo­ple, it’s real­ly the peo­ple. So, you got­ta put the col­leges or the tech­ni­cal uni­ver­si­ties or what­ev­er there to attract the busi­ness­es because they’re look­ing for peo­ple. And you were in that place with that tech­nol­o­gy, but you felt you need­ed to find great peo­ple with tech­nol­o­gy skills, but as you say, con­nect­ed to the val­ues that were impor­tant. So you moved to tech, that’s a huge under­tak­ing. And, so talk about that a lit­tle bit, the move, how you’ve expe­ri­enced that move, and then how that is impor­tant in your per­spec­tive to cre­at­ing that dis­rup­tion in the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try and in our econ­o­my as a whole.

- Yeah, absolute­ly so. And because we share com­mon val­ues in Chris­tian­i­ty, I could real­ly speak from what I’d call my third lay­er of, my deep­est lay­er of rea­sons of why I do things and where I draw a lot of my ener­gy from, right, and that comes from Chris­t­ian ideals. I mean, every morn­ing I lis­ten to the scrip­ture and I med­i­tate on philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal things from a Pope Benedick 16^th is think­ing on, is bril­liant. So I’ll med­i­tate upon that as well after­wards after I’m done with the scrip­ture about dif­fer­ent con­cepts today, they’re talk­ing about the res­ur­rec­tion. He had some writ­ings on this. So, any­way, so I’ll draw from this depths of scrip­ture and the gospel real­ly, ​’cause the great­est entre­pre­neur of all time is Jesus Christ, right? So he had the most rad­i­cal ideas that still we can’t fol­low and it came from nowhere else on the earth. I’ve been to 100 coun­tries, right? Every time I go to coun­tries, I always go to the reli­gious cen­ters and cul­tur­al cen­ters, no mat­ter where it is, whether it’s mosques or Hin­du tem­ples, what­ev­er it is, I go right in there and I ask a lot of ques­tions. Nowhere on earth, any­where you find any­thing so rad­i­cal as love your ene­my or even this idea of lov­ing this, com­mand to love oth­ers. It had no oth­er source besides in that area in Jerusalem, that’s where it comes from, from Jesus. So any­ways, but so, lemme quote from scrip­ture a lit­tle bit here, just one lit­tle quote that I sort of got in my head when I was in the West Coast and it’s, what prophet does a man gain if he gets the whole world, but he los­es his soul in the process? And I think we all know the pow­er of that quote, right. But what I thought on that was what prof­it do I gain if I build this com­pa­ny out over the next 30, 60 years, but I lose the soul of the com­pa­ny? Because then it goes on to do bad things. And we’ve seen this with oth­er com­pa­nies that we’re built by good entre­pre­neurs. Look at Dis­ney right now with Dis­ney’s , I mean, it’s unbe­liev­able what Dis­ney’s doing, But Walt Dis­ney, very he was a Chris­t­ian guy with very Amer­i­can ideals and the com­pa­ny’s now, the soul of the com­pa­ny is some­what off. But anyway.

- We could do a whole nother pod­cast on that one, but we won’t. Yeah, yeah. So that gets my point.

- Yeah, important.

- Occu­pied by bad folks who then can use it for bad and to sup­press peo­ple. So, or to cor­rupt their chil­dren and cut around the par­ents or what­ev­er with in the case of Dis­ney. But when I think about the com­pa­ny, you build it out, so the real­i­ty is, when you build a com­pa­ny, who real­ly runs the com­pa­ny? Is the CEO, like me, run the com­pa­ny? No, I don’t. I set vision, I help select lead­ers. I try to set pro­to­cols and sys­tems and real­ly pick excel­lent invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties of allo­ca­tions of our human resources and our mon­ey in order to dri­ve the com­pa­ny for­ward. That’s real­ly what I have to focus on ​’cause nobody else can do that, and I need to do that. The rea­son why no one else can do is ​’cause I have the glob­al view of the com­pa­ny and that’s what a great CEO needs to do, right? But then who real­ly runs the com­pa­ny? Well, is all the employ­ees. Well, where do you get your employ­ees from? Do they just come from like your imag­i­na­tion? You think, oh, I’m gonna go hire peo­ple. No, they tend to come from your local envi­ron­ment. So in Seat­tle, you’re gonna get ​‘em from the Seat­tle area and San Fran­cis­co, you’re get ​‘em from the San Fran­cis­co area, 80% of the time, right. I mean, yes, peo­ple will move and every­thing else, but gen­er­al­ly you’re gonna pull from your local base. And I’ve seen this with oth­er com­pa­nies that you say Ama­zon, right? So for exam­ple, Ama­zon, I noticed it with them, where I noticed the com­pa­ny was far more rad­i­cal­ized left than Jeff Bezos was. So Bezos is the founder CEO of Ama­zon. I noticed that it was far more rad­i­cal left than he was. And then, but at a cer­tain point, can he actu­al­ly con­trol that? No, he can’t real­ly con­trol what’s gonna hap­pen, because you have too many folks like that in your com­pa­ny. And real­ly, per­son­nel is pol­i­cy. So, I mean, you have all these peo­ple and they’re gonna make their own calls and they’re gonna pro­mote agen­das that could be very rad­i­cal. And actu­al­ly, he’s a lib­er­tar­i­an, at least he was in the past. I don’t know cur­rent­ly, but he’s a lib­er­tar­i­an in ori­en­ta­tion about law and free­doms. I mean, that com­pa­ny has done oppo­site type of things. They’re not the worst cul­prit of all of ​‘em, but still you see where they’re going. And that I noticed, and I thought, man, that will hap­pen to my com­pa­ny ulti­mate­ly, if I’m out of that. So I made that move to Texas in order to be on the right soil. Because Texas is got a pret­ty fierce pop­u­la­tion. I’m sure peo­ple real­ize that. And it’s got about 30 mil­lion peo­ple and they got a great econ­o­my and they’re mak­ing, they’re call­ing a lot of the right shots. So I made that move for that rea­son. And also for rea­sons of, so for the employ­ee base, much bet­ter to sur­round myself in a place like Texas. Also, when I looked at fam­i­lies and afford­able hous­ing, hous­ing that peo­ple can afford, so peo­ple can buy homes, Texas is also bet­ter in those accounts and many oth­ers as well. And I had increas­ing­ly become con­cern on the West Coast, had a con­cern on the West Coast of this envi­ron­ment, hav­ing a neg­a­tive impact on abil­i­ty of some­one to raise their kids. And I could keep going and oth­er neg­a­tive things. But key points there is pick a bet­ter spot to build a com­pa­ny that caus­es human flour­ish­ing and has the right ele­ments in order to both tech­ni­cal­ly, pio­neer­ing wise, and it’s a lit­tle bit, it is more dif­fi­cult to get tech­ni­cal tal­ent here, but they are here and we’re able to pull them, also, Austin sells while we’re in Austin, Texas, so it’s a good sale and you can get oth­er folks that are kind of the rebels in Sil­i­con val­ley in Seat­tle that are like, ​“Hey, I want out too.” So we’re pulling these guys in as well. So.

- Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s a great com­mit­ment. It’s a great thought­ful nature and for all of us in our per­son­al lives, who you sur­round your­self with, who are your friends? I remem­ber my par­ents ear­ly on say­ing the friends that you have, the peo­ple you’re with, they’re gonna cre­ate that envi­ron­ment around you. And I love the idea that the busi­ness is an exten­sion of the entre­pre­neur or the founder, who­ev­er it is, and that you need every­body to be on the same page or else you’ll lose the soul of the busi­ness. We did a num­ber of years ago at Amway, we looked at our 50^th anniver­sary. We looked at the top, 10 com­pa­nies, 50 years ago when we were start­ed and four of them did­n’t exist any­more. It was a real eye­open­er that when the com­pa­ny los­es its way, it los­es every­thing and it los­es itself. And so being aware of that is impor­tant. So thank you for going through. I think that gives us a lot and all of us lis­ten­ing to this think­ing about those con­nec­tions and con­nect­ing the dots in that way. So thank you for doing that. Let me shift.

- And Doug, just on that a lit­tle bit, ​’cause we’re spir­i­tu­al beings, right? We’re not just flesh. We’re not like, we’re spir­i­tu­al beings and we take on and we’re sharp iron, sharp­ens iron, right. And you take on a bit of what’s around you or you got­ta fight against it. And it could help build you up or it could break you down and we do resis­tance is good, it builds mus­cle, but too much, and it breaks it. And you need to have folks around that you can draw from that share ideals ​’cause they effec­tive­ly embody the com­pa­ny and they actu­al­ly run the com­pa­ny even­tu­al­ly, right, so.

- And those employ­ees, as you talked and you spent a lot of time think­ing about fam­i­lies. A lot of the com­pa­nies are peo­ple that I know here in Grand Rapid small, medi­um size com­pa­nies, what­ev­er, when they’re a founder, when they’re run­ning it, they think about their employ­ees and their fam­i­lies all the time. And if they ever have to make a deci­sion, a down­turn to let some­body go, it just breaks them. It breaks all of us when­ev­er we have that sort of stuff, because you know these are faces, these are real you know the impact on the fam­i­ly, but for you to be proac­tive­ly think­ing about then how that con­tin­ues the soul of the com­pa­ny touch­es those fam­i­lies and you’ve made pro­vi­sion for that.

- Yeah. Yeah. Inter­est­ing. Yeah, real­ly impor­tant for us to under­stand that. Okay, let me shift gears a again here a lit­tle bit, you talked about the rails of com­merce. That’s what tech­nol­o­gy is pro­vid­ing today. And that the way we inter­act and com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er, make it the pub­lic square. This is how we talk. This is how we com­mu­ni­cate. This is how we con­nect if we can’t phys­i­cal­ly be in the same place with peo­ple. And so there’s a lot of peo­ple that would say, well, if it’s a pub­lic squares, the pub­lic good, then obvi­ous­ly the gov­ern­ment needs to go in and tell us what to do with this, whether it’s through reg­u­la­tion or tax­a­tion or what­ev­er, the case may be, help us under­stand the role that gov­ern­ment or gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion could or should or should­n’t have in the tech space or in the entre­pre­neur­ial busi­ness space in gen­er­al? But how, maybe focus a lit­tle bit on tech, how have you seen it play out? How do you see the things they’re talk­ing about or think­ing about and what do you see of the impact? Help us under­stand that a lit­tle bit.

- Yeah, so Doug, when and this an impor­tant, I’d say more pol­i­cy point, but effect in the U.S. it’s impor­tant for the peo­ple in gen­er­al, because it should be still a coun­try run by the peo­ple, right, by and for the peo­ple. So it’s impor­tant for the peo­ple to under­stand this is that, first of all, I find it’s some­what iron­ic that, and real­ly it’s some­thing we got­ta pause and reflect on the fact that we even have peo­ple who are con­ser­v­a­tives that are out there and Chris­tians say­ing, the gov­ern­men­t’s going to save us. I mean, that’s already, pause and say, ​“Hey, hold on. What are we talk­ing about?”

- That’s the first time we should go. ​“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.”

- When we fin­ished off in 1776, we fin­ished off the rev­o­lu­tion even­tu­al­ly when we won that we have a Sec­ond Amend­ment gun rights, right. And free­dom of speech, what are these bill of rights? What are they against? The bill of rights are against the gov­ern­ment. It’s the same idea of the Magna Car­ta, it was against the king it’s rights against the king, abus­ing his author­i­ty. So, well, why you’re wor­ried about the gov­ern­ment abus­ing author­i­ty ​’cause there’s a ten­den­cy there, if you empow­er it too much, right? So we got­ta be care­ful with the gov­ern­ment giv­ing them too much pow­er. Now I do think that, I’m not an extreme lib­er­tar­i­an by any means, but I am lib­er­tar­i­an ori­ent­ed in that sense. And I think any prop­er­ly sen­si­ble per­son should be lib­er­tar­i­an ori­ent­ed because you got­ta have some, gov­ern­ments have shown through­out his­to­ry a ten­den­cy to abuse their pow­er when giv­en the chance to do so. And I think every­one knows enough about his­to­ry to prob­a­bly know that, obvi­ous­ly we can go into tons of exam­ples here. Take a look at our, what I say, what we got­ta real­ly watch out for is going from being in the fry­ing pan, to being in the fire. The fry­ing pan being, tech. Tech is bad. Yes, there’s a prob­lem. But if we jump over in the gov­ern­men­t’s hand, we’re nev­er get­ting out­ta that trap because the gov­ern­ment does­n’t tend to get small­er. It does­n’t tend to let go of what it grabs onto eas­i­ly. So you look at the Roe ver­sus Wade sit­u­a­tion with abor­tion, right? You had a gov­ern­ment over­step clear­ly a leg­is­la­tion from the bench. Now our sys­tem is a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem where the peo­ple should select what they want through their rep­re­sen­ta­tives that actu­al­ly leg­is­late on their behalf. But you had in Roe ver­sus Wade, you had Supreme court jus­tices step in and make a polit­i­cal, basi­cal­ly politi­cized the courts where they pushed onto the entire Amer­i­can pub­lic, like a tyrant would, these rights that they found in the penum­bra of the con­sti­tu­tion, which means the shad­ows of the con­sti­tu­tion, total nuts, total crazy, would be some­thing you nev­er think would hap­pen and was not envi­sioned as pos­si­ble by the founders of the coun­try. But it did hap­pen. It took like 40 years to get that ripped out of their claws. Right, now it’s back to the peo­ple where it belongs or the peo­ple can make their deci­sion. That’s our sys­tem. Right? So in oth­er words, you got­ta be care­ful, what­ev­er you give to the gov­ern­ment, man, you don’t get it back easy. So and then also you got­ta take a look, Sil­i­con Val­ley, yes, very rad­i­cal­ized, crazy at this point, right? They’re basi­cal­ly, they’re out of it because they’re in an echo cham­ber. They’re very rad­i­cal. They think they’re, they prob­a­bly think they’re mod­er­ate hon­est­ly, if you had a con­ver­sa­tion with them, they’re not though. Amer­i­ca is left of the rest of the world. I’ve been to 100 coun­tries, I can tell you, we are left of the rest of the world. But Sil­i­con Val­ley is extreme­ly falling off the map left. They’re rad­i­cal, rad­i­cal­ized. Right now, now where is DC? DC’s prob­a­bly, I don’t know, some­where in between Amer­i­ca work­ing class and the rad­i­cal­ized Sil­i­con Val­ley. So they’re not even as bad, yet they are rad­i­cal left. Now what’s dif­fer­ent about DC is if you ask peo­ple in DC, they actu­al­ly know that they’re like pret­ty, pret­ty far lib­er­al left, right? They idea.

- Well, that’s good. I guess that’s a good thing, huh?

- What good they have, just being aware of where they stand, right? But still you’re talk­ing like prob­a­bly 70% of them, more, it’s a lot in DC. It’s rep­re­sent­ing the entire coun­try and it’s not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the coun­try. So we got­ta be care­ful of giv­ing them any­thing and includ­ing try­ing to reg­u­late these com­pa­nies. And the idea that they’re gonna reg­u­late these folks, maybe they need to do some of that, fine. Do what they got­ta do, just be care­ful what they’re doing. Be sur­gi­cal in the approach and real­ize that will not be the long term solu­tion, because it just won’t be, like, think about it. No argu­ment they’ve made actu­al­ly makes sense that that will be our solu­tion. If you take Face­book and you break it up into 50 Face­books, great, you get 50 peo­ple, 50 dif­fer­ent Face­books, same types of peo­ple run­ning their sys­tems, right? That’s not gonna be any bet­ter. You need to cre­ate a new tech eco. You got­ta dis­rupt the whole woke indus­try and you got­ta do it through entre­pre­neur­ship. That’s the long term solu­tion. Now that is not easy. That requires action. And long term, you need entre­pre­neur­ial cap­i­tal. Cap­i­tal that’s got, got some guts and you also need peo­ple with guts that are entre­pre­neurs com­ing in and entre­pre­neur­ial peo­ple join­ing these folks and push­ing out and cre­at­ing some­thing new. And that is very dif­fer­ent than what cur­rent­ly is. That is the way for­ward. Because then you build new infra­struc­ture run by peo­ple that are aligned with our val­ues. Now, they can actu­al­ly take it the House and com­pete with them. Cur­rent­ly that does­n’t exist. So if we want­ed to say, ​“Oh, you know what? Face­book’s so bad. And Twit­ter’s so bad. I’m nev­er gonna post on there any­more because I don’t wan­na par­tic­i­pate in that plat­form.” Well guess what? That’s like say­ing, I don’t want to use a gun in a war because it’s made by the oth­er side. It’s like, well, guess what? Like what are you gonna do? Fight with a knife? Every­one’s got guns now. So in oth­er words, you have to use it. It’s impos­si­ble not to use it. It is the pub­lic square, but there is no alter­na­tive. There’s no com­pe­ti­tion. And the com­pe­ti­tion needs to come from a robust new source of cap­i­tal that is aligned, that is get­ting into deck and also entre­pre­neurs that are aligned with gener­ic Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples. And what we need to do is bet on the ear­ly stage tech com­pa­nies, the ones that will then rule in the next 10 to 20 years, you need to start bet­ting on them now. ​‘Cause it’s the same thing that they did with Roe ver­sus Wade. The way that over­turned that, they took a longer term view and they played the strate­gic game to win. Let’s take long term games and win rather than short. Like some of the ideas you see like truth social and these things, I’m a fan, like do their thing or what­ev­er. But it’s not a very strate­gic approach because you’re going after effec­tive­ly a monop­oly and you’re try­ing to go after net­work effect, head on. It’s like, oh we got­ta go take Berlin, so let’s go invade Berlin direct­ly dur­ing World War II. Well it turns out Berlin’s fair­ly well secured and you’re just gonna, just be like a slaugh­ter house. You got­ta go in through like a Nor­mandy strat­e­gy. So any­ways, what I think we got­ta do here is bet on ear­ly stage, take a long view, bet entre­pre­neurs that are aligned of Judeo-Chris­t­ian val­ues. And I’m doing this myself. That’s what I’m doing. We’re blown out. We’re tak­ing investors as well, which we need to grow, but oth­er peo­ple need to get involved and become entre­pre­neurs, get into it, joint com­pa­nies like ours. I went to Hills­dale for exam­ple, year and a half ago or so.

- I love it. I love it. Hills­dale. What a great place.

- Great school. Exact­ly. I went there and part of it was, I want­ed to make the alum­ni base aware of these prob­lems. But part of it is that, I’m serv­ing our com­pa­ny and I wan­na get tal­ent like that to get into tech. They don’t have to join my com­pa­ny. That’s fine. I mean, I pre­fer they do, but they need to get involved some­how long term because we need peo­ple that are able to rea­son and that are seri­ous peo­ple to get into the tech indus­try and start ear­ly though. The ear­ly stage com­pa­nies now are the ones that will rule, they will over­throw the tech industry.

- Sure.

- In the next 10 to 20 years. ​‘Cause that’s the cre­ative destruc­tion cycle that hap­pens with­in cap­i­tal­ism, so.

- Yeah, some of us are like me, I’m old enough to remem­ber when Wal­mart came in and it was very dis­rup­tive to the retail space. Then it’s like every­one, ​“Oh, what’s gonna hap­pen. They’re gonna dom­i­nate.” And just, you draw the line, they’re gonna con­tin­ue to grow. Well then Ama­zon comes in and dis­rupts Wal­mart, even though Wal­mart stills around, but Ama­zon come, some­one’s gonna come in. And if we trust our sys­tem, like you say, invest in it, takes time, it takes patience. But don’t ask our gov­ern­ment, what I’m hear­ing from you say, don’t ask the gov­ern­ment to try to come in and fix it. One, because they don’t know how to do that. Two, it does­n’t work. And three, it could cre­ate more prob­lems than as you say, than we had in the first place. So that’s a good thing for us to keep through, to have faith. If we believe in the entre­pre­neur­ial sys­tem, we believe in our style of eco­nom­ic val­ues, then we can have faith that we’ll be able to deal with these things. May not hap­pen quick­ly, but we’ll have be able to deal with it. In the time that we have here, let’s kind of talk a lit­tle bit about, you talked about the prin­ci­ples, you’ve touched on them through­out. Then maybe ask you to expand a lit­tle bit more on these ideas of free speech, of reli­gious lib­er­ty, you’ve talked about dig­ni­ty and respect for human­i­ty. Talk about and help us under­stand how you’ve built those prin­ci­ples in and how as VC, as new star­tups come through, how those prin­ci­ples can be built in and how we can see them or how we can sup­port that hap­pen­ing. Because as you said, this echo cham­ber of con­for­mi­ty, that seems to have hap­pened in big tech, real­ly dis­rupts that, where this idea of free speech is some­times on, in some places, a for­eign con­cept. But for many of us, it’s absolute­ly vital for who we are ​’cause you can’t take away. What I think my speech is only a reflec­tion of what I think. And so to take that away, takes away my right to think or believe the way I do. So talk a lit­tle bit about that and then we’ll have some clos­ing com­ments after that. But talk a lit­tle bit about that. Help us under­stand how you see that, how you put that into play, how that works in your space.

- Yeah, and this whole need for new lead­er­ship, right, is not just about, this is one thing I try to point to peo­ple on because the free­dom of speech thing is some­thing they notice, it’s more obvi­ous, right? When peo­ple get deplat­formed from Twit­ter, shad­ow banned or on Face­book, what­ev­er they’re doing, mess­ing with the algo­rithms behind the scenes, bias­ing against, I ran into a guy from Hero­ic Media at an event recent­ly in Napa. I was giv­en a talk there with Kevin Roberts, from Her­itage Foun­da­tion, we were dis­cussing these issues. And after­wards, a guy came up to me and said, hey actu­al­ly, even Google is mess­ing with our ads and the ads are out tar­get­ing women who are preg­nant to give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to keep the life and where they make them mess with their ads and put things on it that actu­al­ly low­ers the chance of a click through. So, oh, wow. And they’ve been get­ting more aggres­sive on and he was explain­ing this to me and I thought, okay. So you could see how the things that we notice are just their prob­lems and they’re huge issue, right, free­dom of speech and all those oth­er things, but there’s oth­er issues too, com­merce, how we’re doing all of our com­merce, a lot of it’s going online, is already online, it will stay online. It’s not all of it, but it’s a lot of it, right? It’s the new econ­o­my. And then you have all the pay­ments too. Your pay­ment struc­tures are going online. They already are online. Visa is locat­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley. And so is Stripe, which is a new pay­ments prod­uct. And same with Square. A lot of these pay­ments things they’re able to deplat­form peo­ple, and they have deplat­formed peo­ple. And same with non­prof­it fund­ing like GoFundMe and GoDad­dy. So I men­tioned that before, but I just men­tioned it again because so, and that gets to how I am set­ting up the com­pa­ny and why I can’t real­ly just pick off one or two dif­fer­ent prob­lems. I real­ly, what I need to do is, and what I’m doing is, and for clar­i­ty, we build tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. Now we’re tak­ing direct investors into us, but these are direct invest­ments into our com­pa­nies. So we’re not, right, at this stage, we’re not tak­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal funds to invest us. We’re going past the mid­dle man, tak­ing direct cap­i­tal in. So, and this for a num­ber of rea­sons, includ­ing, I don’t want a VC, a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist fund, and they love entre­pre­neurs like me, but I don’t want them, and they’ll tell me every­thing I wan­na hear, but I know law pret­ty well. I know the law.

- You’ve done it.

- Yeah, yeah. I know it. And I prac­ticed in the area. And so, I under­stand what’s in their con­tracts and effec­tive­ly they can remove me as CEO and do a lot of oth­er things for rea­sons that could be pre­texts. And I’m out there tak­ing stances for exam­ple, that a lot of ​‘em won’t like, or their boards won’t like. So recent­ly I took a stance pub­licly as a com­pa­ny in my own count, but then we put it out there and it’s from the com­pa­ny as well. So what hap­pened was when Roe v. Wade was over­turned, I thought, wow, that’s great for the coun­try. It’s like a dread Scott thing, right, it’s been over­turned final­ly. Great, we final­ly have pro­tec­tion for human life in the womb. And every­body knows it’s human life. It’s sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly proven. It’s lin­ear log­ic, you know it as well. And by using rea­son­ing also, for any three areas you can con­clude the same thing. So on that issue of human life, I said, okay, we want, I’m not gonna gloat, I’ll stay qui­et. But then what hap­pened was 250 CEOs came out in favor of pay­ing peo­ple to kill their babies and they’ll move ​‘em out­ta the coun­try to have, to kill their babies. So abor­tion, using abor­tion with a high­er doc­tor to kill a baby. So I say it in very grotesque way, because I wan­na get to what actu­al­ly is the issue, is killing babies and abor­tion. So, and it’s hard to hear and hard to even say, but I say it because it’s true. And I sat there and I thought, okay, I’m not gonna say any­thing now. And yet 250 CEOs are out there speak­ing on their mind. And every tech CEO, not one of ​‘em said any­thing pro-life. So what I said was that’s it in the morn­ing I woke up and I was think­ing very ear­ly in the morn­ing, it was like 4:00 AM or so I was think­ing about, say­ing some­thing because I’m not gonna stay silent. If now, if we had a bunch of peo­ple came out and said pro-life things, I would’ve just been fine, I would­n’t have said any­thing. But since no one did any­thing, I said, that’s it, I’m gonna say some­thing. I can’t allow, I can­not dream­ing qui­et in the face of this injus­tice and also in the face of this type of lead­er­ship, stand­ing off for one side, which is not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Amer­i­ca, by the way. If you talk to most Amer­i­cans, most peo­ple, even the ones who are pro-abor­tion, they know it’s like a nasty thing. It’s like slav­ery, the ones who are pro-slav­ery, it was­n’t like, ​“Slav­ery is great.” I mean, very few peo­ple thought it was great. They actu­al­ly all were like-

- Not great.

- It’s a ter­ri­bly evil thing that we have to, we can’t change, we have to keep it for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Sim­i­lar to abor­tion, almost nobody thinks abor­tion’s good. Almost no one, I mean, a cou­ple, very few rad­i­cal, crazy lunatics, maybe, but that’s it. And I don’t even know who these peo­ple are. I’ve nev­er talked to them. Even guys at Har­vard Live, we had a debate about it. And by the way, you can nev­er lose this debate about the abor­tion issue. You always win. You always win the pro-life debate. It’s very easy to win, ​’cause it’s very obvi­ous. It’s like say­ing a Jew human. It’s like, yes, obvi­ous­ly the Jew­ish per­son­’s human, but instead of depict­ing them as a prob­lem, which is what they’re doing, say no, the prob­lem’s not them, it’s you and that’s a human being. But any­way, so what I did was I said, 250 are say­ing this, I’m gonna say some­thing. So what we did was I said, I’m gonna pay for adop­tion. That’s a very Chris­t­ian thing to do, right? It’s very pro-life, but it’s also good. It’s a good­ness thing, which we like to step out on good­ness issues, right? And I said, all right, I’m gonna come out and do some­thing. And I’m gonna say, we’re gonna pay for adop­tion. And we decid­ed to pay the most what­ev­er com­pa­ny we found was gonna pay for an abor­tion, we will pay for an adop­tion, will match the high­est amount. So 7,500 is where they’re pay­ing as an incen­tive to have some­one as an incen­tive to get an abor­tion. So we have an incen­tive and we announced that and we pub­lished it in Newsweek, actu­al­ly. I was sur­prised they got that pub­lished, but we put it in Newsweek. And we’ve actu­al­ly had Tim Bush, who is a great man. He runs net the Napa Insti­tute and a bunch of oth­er great . He’s-

- Great guy.

- But to total­ly piv­ot on a dif­fer­ent point is, there’s so many issues here, right? That lead­er­ship has a, as an influ­ence on Amer­i­ca. We’re talk­ing about entre­pre­neurs right now have a bul­ly pul­pit. You can, peo­ple lis­ten to you, a lot of young peo­ple look up to entre­pre­neurs, right, that are suc­cess­ful. And they reach out, they wan­na know how do they should live their life, they look for guid­ance. And there’s such a lack of guid­ance in the pub­lic square, right. And so I see it as also a bur­den that we need folks that can actu­al­ly be good lead­ers in so many areas, mak­ing so many deci­sions, not just deci­sions to make sure you don’t cen­sor peo­ple. Yes, we got, we don’t cen­sor peo­ple. That’s obvi­ous. Don’t do that. Deci­sions that you don’t deplat­form some­one just ​’cause you dis­agree with them. Even if my neigh­bor is what­ev­er, drag queen or some­thing, like I might tell my kids, we dis­agree with this lifestyle, but we love that person.

- Love the per­son. Absolute­ly. They need help, what­ev­er it is, I’m gonna help them. I don’t care who they are, what­ev­er their lifestyle is. Like, I’m gonna love them. And that’s what we got­ta do, right? And this affects, so per­son­nel’s pol­i­cy, that’s my approach right now. And we’ll cod­i­fy things lat­er, but the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of things fol­lows the inter­nal virtues. So we’ve got­ta hire peo­ple vir­tu­ous, and we’ve been doing that and we’ve got an amaz­ing team, peo­ple that, one of my philoso­phies is hire peo­ple bet­ter than your­self, and you become like that. And we’ve got peo­ple even in my team that helps out with the media stuff that are, I would say they’re bet­ter peo­ple than me, which is prob­a­bly not so hard actu­al­ly. But I admire them in dif­fer­ent areas. And then I start find­ing myself get­ting bet­ter in dif­fer­ent areas, right. So I’ve hired ahead of myself on peo­ple. It’s kind of like when you mar­ry, you wan­na mar­ry you up, right, which I did.

- Exact­ly. Exactly.

- So you wan­na hire up and that’s what we’re doing. That’s our pol­i­cy. ​‘Cause the peo­ple will do all these deci­sions on their own. They’ll decide, okay, we’re gonna go, not hire. They make hir­ing deci­sions too, right. So they’ll say, ​“You know what? I’m not gonna hire this per­son. They are obvi­ous­ly a rad­i­cal type per­son.” ​‘Cause we have a lot of folks from the West Coast that try to apply to our com­pa­ny and they’ll, some­one might say, oh great, but they have spent last 10 years at Face­book and how could you be at Face­book dur­ing all this and not leave? If the per­son can’t answer that ques­tion, they’re not gonna get through. They’re not gonna be hired. Because how could you stay and par­tic­i­pate, even if you’re world class, how could you par­tic­i­pate the whole time? And by the way, we do have peo­ple that were at Google ven­tures and these oth­er groups. But they did­n’t stay for too long. And when they saw where it was going, they went to green­er pas­tures. They would­n’t be part of some­thing that they knew was not up to good things. So, any­ways, it affects so many things. The one instance I gave you here was, we could­n’t have pre­dict that the Roe v. Wade would’ve been over­turned, but then all of a sud­den it got over­turned. And then all these com­pa­nies lined up, 250 CEOs lined up all pro-abor­tion. Nobody says any­thing pos­i­tive. And then I’m met with a moral dilem­ma. Do I say some­thing? And then I say, yes, we’re going to. And I’ll tell you my lead­er­ship, man, now they came around to back it up actu­al­ly. And besides, the cou­ple of folks on the invest­ment team I men­tioned, a lot of our oth­er lead­ers already agreed with it actu­al­ly. And they were real­ly pumped up that I said some­thing, ​’cause they said, man, I’m so proud to be a part of a com­pa­ny that’s gonna take a coura­geous stance. And that’s just one instance, right? So we’ll have all these dif­fer­ent things hap­pen as you’re build­ing a com­pa­ny and you make deci­sions that have moral­i­ty nat­u­ral­ly baked into it. So if you don’t have moral under­pin­nings with Judeo-Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, how do you make your deci­sion? You could be an athe­ist in the com­pa­ny and I’m okay with that. But if you don’t have prin­ci­ples you can point to, then how do you cal­cu­late, how you make a right or wrong deci­sion? Is it about what you want in the short term? Well, that’s not good, because that could be in con­flict with what the oth­er, is good for that oth­er per­son­’s long term, what­ev­er it might be, health free­doms. If it’s bet­ter for you, you might say, well, if no one’s look­ing, I’ll just stick ​‘em, I’ll stick it to ​‘em. Or I’ll exploit our cus­tomers. I’ll exploit our investors. All these deci­sions hap­pen behind the scenes and there’s, and even you put up all the rules and you put all the code, you say here’s our code of con­duct and every­thing else, which we’re gonna do. We have an idea of com­ing out with a Magna Car­ta, a Magna Car­ta of rights and the rights are not our rights, they’re the rights of con­sumers. So and then what we’re gonna do is this is kind of inside base­ball here what we’re think­ing about doing, is chal­leng­ing oth­er com­pa­nies to sign this Magna Car­ta, ​’cause it restricts them. It says, I can’t cen­sor peo­ple. I can’t do this and I can’t do this. So anyways.

- I love it. I love it. Well, Peter, thank you so much for your time. As you go through these things, as you talk about lead­er­ship in the indus­try, as you talk about the belief in entre­pre­neur­ship, free enter­prise sys­tems, you talk about per­son­al beliefs and hav­ing that free­dom of speech that not only you don’t want to restrict some­one else, but you wan­na exer­cise your­self. That gives us a lot to, that gives us all a lot to think about and to land on our own, in our own belief sys­tems. Because you talk about your belief sys­tem, but you also talked a lot about how you respect and appre­ci­ate oth­ers. Does­n’t mean you stop what you believe, but your job, like my job, we’re here to love oth­er peo­ple and here to think about oth­ers in a way, but that does­n’t stop us from being our­selves either. So any final thoughts as we kind of bring this to a close that you’d wan­na share?

- Yeah, I mean, look, my final thought is just, is kind of a, it’s both a warn­ing and it’s a mes­sage of hope is that if we don’t stand up and fight, we could end up like North Africa, used to be all Chris­t­ian, that’s where San­ta Augus­ta was locat­ed was in North Africa. That place is not Chris­t­ian, there used to be 300 bish­ops there. Well, if you don’t stand up and fight for your prin­ci­ples, you will lose, that is a fact. There are good guys. There are bad guys out there. If you don’t stand up and fight for the prin­ci­ples. And one of the most coura­geous ways to fight is with your mon­ey. When peo­ple don’t invest their mon­ey eas­i­ly, right, back it up with your mon­ey, back it up with your, if you’re younger, entre­pre­neur­ial tal­ent, or even old­er, does­n’t mat­ter. You’re already still act­ing as an entre­pre­neur, even in a dif­fer­ent area here, Doug. You’re out here with the pod­cast get­ting the word out in a dif­fer­ent area, right? Using your plat­form as a suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man and now stand­ing on top of that and doing some­thing through the media side, that’s cut­ting edge. So we got­ta fight and we will win though if we fight. Because, heav­en’s on our side, we just got­ta have courage. And that’s my mes­sage of hope. So it’s cou­pled in with the warn­ing is that we got­ta step up, we got­ta fight. But if we do, we will win, because heav­en is on our side. We just got­ta have the courage to do it. And then boom, we’ll have that, act and God will act. I have a shirt that has Joan of Arc on it, on the back says, ​“Act and God will act.” That’s from Joan of Arc. She stood up only per­son that said, that did any­thing. She stood up coura­geous­ly at 15 or 16 years old. France was com­plete­ly over­run by the British and looked like it was all, hope was gone. Even the King of France was already, had sub­mit­ted basi­cal­ly and resolved that it was over. And she stood up alone and she decid­ed, no, it’s not. And she basi­cal­ly respond­ed to God. I almost think like it must have been the last per­son God got to because it was like, He prob­a­bly like approached a num­ber of peo­ple. It was like, hey, I need you to stand up here, more like­ly one. But she was like a peas­ant farmer girl. Right. And so she stood up though. And then from there you don’t, the Eng­lish have not stepped one foot on the con­ti­nent of Europe since. They they don’t even have the lan­guage of Eng­lish on the con­ti­nent of Europe after that. So she suc­cess­ful­ly stood up and oth­ers stood behind her and pushed it all right off, right. So we are in a much bet­ter posi­tion than France was in that time peri­od and we can def­i­nite­ly win. But as a warn­ing, we can end up like North Africa, and we can lose and nev­er get it back. And our kids, our gen­er­a­tion will also lose as well. And the next gov­ern­ment that will come about will not be an open gov­ern­ment. It will be hos­tile to our val­ues because the open gov­ern­ment that we have is ground­ed on Judeo-Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, which are very unique and put pro­tec­tions against the gov­ern­ment, against oth­er peo­ple from approach­ing upon your lib­er­ties. So it’s both the hap­pi­est place to live for an athe­ist and for a Chris­t­ian. But if you put some­one in place that is the next group and in vac­u­um on val­ues, they can turn on us and they will turn on us and then we will lose it all. And our kids will lose as well, but it have to be the case. We got­ta just step up and we step up. We’re gonna win.

- Yeah. I love it. Have the courage to step up and act, to take action and the faith that it’ll be sup­port­ed because it’s about the future. So we can all, and I love, hap­pi­est place for peo­ple on both sides of the spectrum.