Keith Rabois
speaker
686 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jul 2025
Keith Rabois’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It used to be just Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and they added environment and all these politically correct things, so hopefully they'll subtract all that stuff and just go back to Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs.
I think it's very obvious watching from afar that the way Trump makes decisions is he likes to ask a lot of people a lot of different questions, and then he makes the decision. That's why he's, to some people, the media...
enemies very unpredictable is he doesn't just take one source of input and so you can never totally predict the output but he arrays an interesting cast of characters and listens to them like so for example i haven't spent that much time with him but insofar as i have he would go around the room and ask every single person a dinner what's your view on x and literally go around a room of 28 people and listen to every single person so i think that's how he makes decisions
Well, I share, actually, you're both right in some ways. If you look at who's Trump's pick, these successful people, they're not typically being assigned to industries they came from. So it's not like he's taking drugging. He's actually taking the opposite, like you think of RFK, for example. So actually, I think you can take successful people who have proven themselves through merit.
I think that's one of the other benefits of the real world is the only way you get ahead is you're in a Darwinistic experiment with other people that are comparable. And to be successful, you have to outthink, outwork, et cetera. And that shows up ultimately in promotions and net worths and various other metrics.
So Trump has taken a lot of successful people, and I think we want a society where we aspire for our kids to be successful. We want to emulate successful people. That only yields more success. Having Elon involved in the government will yield more success than if you penalize successful people. You stigmatize it, you get less of it.
So I think if you transplant successful people into industries that they're not from and that they have no interest in going to after the government, you might get the best of both worlds. Because I can see some of the critiques of, you know, you're regulating your friends' companies and you're going to make money later. That said, most of Trump's people are not going to do that.
You can also pass laws like, you know, you can't lobby, you can't work for X years after. Yeah. There's also this great data point. I think it's in the last 60 years. Trump is the only president whose net worth went down after office. Every other president took a relatively modest net worth or mediocre net worth and turned it into a stratosphere.
So you think about the president as the signature example. It's great that Trump is setting the opposite illustration.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's critical in venture to not really fall for that trap. I always mention that I don't like people with expertise, typically, as founders. I think in what I call due diligence or call experts, I only ask one question, which is, what is metaphysically impossible about this working? Like, is there a law of physics that I don't understand that makes this actually impossible?
And if they can't isolate a very specific principle that makes it or fact that makes it actually impossible, then I just ignore everything they're saying, you know, write a check.
Well, they're experts in a prior world, right? They've learned why not. And this is actually like to combine a couple of topics here. The reason why Trump is so effective. So the most interesting question to me over the last year was, how is this guy who everybody in the media and everybody in the legal groups of various things is trying to attack and hate and all these people publish these books.
Why is he on the precipice of being elected president of the United States twice? You must have a superpower or two. Most people do not get elected president of the United States twice. And most of the people who are attacked by everybody who has power in the establishment definitely do not get elected president twice.
So what it came down to, and I interviewed a lot of people who are critics of him, but knew him well, like ex-cabinet people that don't like him. Comes down to, he just asks a lot of why. Like, why do we do this? Why do we have to do it this way? Why have we done it this way?
And it turns out in politics and in DC, most of the answers are pretty mediocre or weak or poor or haven't been rethought for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. And so he just constantly dives in and says, why, why, why, why? And that's actually what predicts success for founders is in a domain they don't know anything about. They're just like, why?
Why do we take these hotel things for granted in the Airbnb case? Why should they be so expensive? Why should scarcity prevail in New York for four months of the year, et cetera, et cetera?
Yeah, so I think... First of all, I think there's a long time before this becomes a commercial product or application of any sort. So, you know, it's great that they're taking money, but think about it as like almost like Stanford takes money or the US government funds basic research in some ways. This is at least a decade out kind of thing.
There's another, I mean, this area way beyond my expertise, but I've been talking to a lot of smart people because I do do financial services innovation. And obviously encryption is pretty critical, whether it's Bitcoin or other places. And there's a couple of concerns. One is it's not even clear that you can verify that this is true, by the way.
Like standard computing, to explain sort of the magnitude of difference, standard computing would take 10 to the 25th years to verify that Google analysis is accurate. So there's a chance that it's not even true.
And then to be practical, like, so assuming you solve all this and it's accurate and blah, blah, blah, you make it fast and all that. Second, then, there is the post-quantum computing encryption, which, you know, a lot of people, a lot of things, a lot of important things have switched over to. So you have historical communications, right?
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