Dave Morin is co-founder and managing partner of Offline Ventures, a $100M venture fund backed by Apple as anchor investor. He was an early Facebook employee who co-created Facebook Platform and Connect, then founded Path, the mobile social network acquired by Kakao. He also co-founded Slow Ventures, which invested in Slack, Pinterest, Nextdoor, and Solana.

In this episode of World of DaaS, Dave and Auren discuss:

Auren and Dave Morin discuss how advertising became the unavoidable model for social networks. Morin explains that Facebook’s ad machine works because it perfectly predicts user interests - something few other companies like Netflix or Amazon have matched. After Apple’s privacy updates, Meta doubled down on AI and GPUs to refine recommendations, turning ads into its most successful product.

Morin argues that today’s AI models still don’t understand the real world—they can predict words, not experiences. Hoffman imagines a future assistant that books a restaurant when it sees you haven’t had a date night in weeks. Morin says we’re close but not there yet; AI still lacks the context and intuition needed for truly useful personalization.

Morin explains his fund, Offline Ventures, which combines a traditional VC model with an in-house startup studio. About 80% of capital goes to outside startups, while 20% is used to incubate ideas internally. This gives Offline larger ownership stakes and keeps Morin close to building products, not just funding them.

Morin says social media replaced real friendships with “parasocial” ones—people feeling connected to influencers instead of actual friends. He worries AI could deepen that disconnect. In his work on depression, he’s found that purpose, relationships, and lifestyle matter as much as treatments. He’s optimistic about new tools like ketamine therapy but emphasizes we’re still far from a “cure.”

The full transcript of the podcast can be found below:

Auren Hoffman (00:00.856) Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Dave Morin. Dave is the co-founder and managing partner of Offline Ventures, a venture fund backed by Apple as the anchor investor. He was also an early employee in Facebook and then he founded the mobile social network path. He also co-founded Slow Ventures. Dave, welcome to World of DaaS.

Dave Morin (00:20.923) thanks, Aron. It's so good to be here. Always love talking to you. And yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (00:25.806) Yeah, this by the way, I've been a long time coming. You and I have been long time friends. and I have so many questions for you that I'm like, I love the fact that I get to ask them here. so, you know, you, you kind of helped build the Facebook platform connect, in the mid two thousands, which is like 20 years ago now, which is kind of crazy. look, do you, do you think there was ever like a realistic off ramp from advertising as the dominant business model for these social networks?

Dave Morin (00:35.214) Hmm.

Dave Morin (00:44.686) It's crazy. So crazy.

Dave Morin (00:55.882) it's a very interesting question. I actually was just debating this with my co-founder from path this morning. and in the watching chat GPT and open AI launch, basically almost the identical thing that we launched for Facebook platform yesterday. It's like, the internet just repeats itself over and over again. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:18.308) Totally. It just keeps rhyming. And everything, by the way, keeps becoming an ad tech company. Like it seems like even Uber is an ad tech company though it is.

Dave Morin (01:24.076) Yeah. I mean, it's a huge business, right? You look at Facebook today, Meta today, it's a one point seven trillion dollar company as of this morning. They have seventy five thousand employees. It's an enormous business and that's it's it's almost entirely an advertising business. There's no other real driver there. And at the end of the day, a lot of these consumer Internet companies are

Auren Hoffman (01:38.628) insane.

Dave Morin (01:54.478) content companies, you know, create a marketplace that incentivizes users to create content. And then, you know, it's always been like 70, 30, 30 % of the users create the content that the other 70 consume. And so you just kind of are in that incentive loop forever. And it's very hard to monetize otherwise. I think that over time, you know, I saw also last week that the EU is starting to

I think there's actually a regulatory change over there that's requiring that Facebook offer a subscription version of the product without ads. And I think they pegged the price at $2 or it's like $2 and 50 cents, I think is, I think per month is the number. Yeah. And so like, that's what you're worth, you know?

Auren Hoffman (02:43.364) Okay, 30 bucks a year.

Auren Hoffman (02:48.548) Yeah, I I pay, I pay for YouTube premium or whatever it is where I don't see the ads and that's great. Um, cause for me, the ads in a YouTube video, like interstitial ad in the middle of a YouTube video is super annoying. I want to watch the video. Um, but the ads that I see on Facebook or Instagram, at least for me personally,

It's like, it's actually like, or usually really great content that I want to see. actually really liked the ads and they do it in a way that it doesn't really mess up the experience. Yeah, of course.

Dave Morin (03:14.531) Yeah.

Which was always the dream, by the way. Yeah, that was always the dream. mean, even back in the 2000s when I was working there, that was always the dream. Like Google had this incredible cash machine where people literally just told them what ad to show. Right. And so the thing at Facebook was always, can we infer what you're most interested in based on the content that you're looking at and the people that you're connected to, what to show you. Right. And for a long time,

it was really difficult to do that by just looking at social graphs and data graphs, until I guess it was about five or six years ago that it looks like what metta decided was I think it was largely because apple made it very difficult for them, to discern who users were based on the cookie thing on mobile. they just decided to point GPUs at it and it turns out GPUs

are like incredibly good at predicting the next piece of content you should look at. And then therefore...

Auren Hoffman (04:21.924) And they're really the only one that have done a good job of that. Like when I go to Netflix, I don't see good recommendations at all. When I go to Amazon, Amazon has history for me for basically 25 years or more of tons of purchases. I don't see any good recommendations at all of things I want to buy. When I go to Spotify, I don't even see good music suggestions of things I want to listen to.

Dave Morin (04:25.005) Yeah.

Dave Morin (04:29.56) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:47.192) Those three companies which have incredibly talented engineering teams, which have tons of data, all are terrible at recommendations.

Dave Morin (04:50.252) Yeah.

Dave Morin (04:54.688) I think that they didn't have the forcing function that Meta had. think when, yeah, and Meta, I think it was like, they lost 30%, I mean, they lost 30 % or more overnight when this Apple change happened, right? And so they were in a really intense business predicament. so they, know, necessity is the mother of all invention. And so they just said like, well, why don't we take all these GPUs?

Auren Hoffman (04:59.778) Yeah, because they don't make they don't really make money from their recommendations. Yeah, maybe Amazon.

Auren Hoffman (05:11.256) Yeah, that's right. Yep.

Dave Morin (05:23.534) that we were buying, you know, to do other things and point them at ads and see if we can actually do better at recommending content and ads to users that way. And we're seeing it work with TikTok. So why wouldn't it work for us? And it works. And it turns out it worked wildly. And you could argue that they're actually the one, they're actually the greatest beneficiary of AI technology right now. They're the only ones with a business that AI is like just crushing.

Auren Hoffman (05:51.202) the only ones that are making money from it. Yeah.

Dave Morin (05:53.248) Yeah, right. And so I don't know the long that's a long and meandering answer to your question, but I don't think it was avoidable. Right.

Auren Hoffman (05:59.46) I still don't understand why like the ads every except for Facebook, I would say ads everywhere are terrible. and they don't show me what I want to see. and in some ways like we pay to see ads, like we pay, I, know, you might pay, the interior designer or your house to show you ads of things you did buy. We pay a real estate agent to show you ads of homes for you to take a look at. Like we pay.

people all the time for as we're actually often paying for stuff like this. If someone shows you stuff you want, that's like an amazing service. I would actually pay for that service in a weird way, right? They could have like a double-sided marketplace.

Dave Morin (06:36.046) Yeah, totally. It's crazy. I think that it's like heuristics algorithms prior to GPU based thinking just weren't good enough, right? It was just like building these huge logitries. It's kind of the same thing that happened with Tesla, right? Where Tesla, I can't remember what the actual number is, but the autopilot code had something like 3 million lines of C code.

up until version 14, which I think it's been less than one year where version 14, which is fully neural network and GPU based, finally shipped to the car. And the prior version was like, you know, I've driven Teslas now, I don't know, since the beginning of Tesla, however long that's been. And it was kind of like, I'm not sure if I trust it. feels strange. Like, and now like I got home from the airport on Saturday.

Auren Hoffman (07:28.42) Holy, yeah.

Dave Morin (07:35.256) And I put it in autopilot at SFO and it.

Auren Hoffman (07:38.062) You went from the San Francisco airport to Marin County. It's a pretty long drive through a city through all on autopilot. Fantastic. That's amazing. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. out of the parking garage, you did it in the parking garage. that's amazing. OK, I do it on my test all the time, but I don't trust it in the parking garage. I barely even trust myself in the parking garage.

Dave Morin (07:42.296) to my house. Didn't touch it. Crossed the Golden Gate, through toll booths, like out of a parking garage. I mean, what? Yeah.

It's crazy.

Dave Morin (08:03.224) To me, this is the example. This is the difference between Meta's ads and the rest of the internet. They're like ads on autopilot. And everybody else is still writing all of this code to try to predict what you might like. And instead, Meta's just running a neural net and guessing, and they're really, really good at it. And it turns out GPUs are great at this, just like they're great at driving a car and probably going to be great at many other things that we haven't even tried yet. But I think that's largely the answer to your question.

Auren Hoffman (08:06.2) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:11.086) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:33.252) For me, I want somebody to send me serendipitous content that I want to see. That could be something to read. It could be a tweet or a YouTube video to look at. It could be something to buy. I want them to send something like actually that would really benefit me. Now, this is obviously a really hard problem. Not something like they're getting the most bids or the most amount of money to send me, but the thing actually that I would benefit from.

Dave Morin (08:51.31) Mmm.

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (09:02.456) That is a service I would just freaking love. And for whatever reason, you know, again, outside of meta, no one's really pulled that off.

Dave Morin (09:11.0) I think that what you've identified is the edge of AI right now. Like the reality is, well, or the non-reality is that AI just has no understanding at all of the real world. It's very good at taking the text that you've loaded into it and then, you know, zipped up into a gigantic zip file and then put a chat interface on the front of it at predicting what the next word is or the next paragraph or the next whatever, the next pixel.

But it doesn't actually have an understanding of the real world at all, which is by the way, why all of the videos look so strange. the thing doesn't understand gravity. doesn't understand, you know, and so predicting what you might like requires an understanding of you, like of, of, of like the internal workings of RN that these things just don't have. And so

Auren Hoffman (10:05.07) Yeah.

Dave Morin (10:08.288) I, you know, there was a great podcast two weeks ago by, Dworkash that he talks to, one of the godfathers of machine learning. And this is his whole articulation. This was this whole articulation of the problem right now is that everybody thinks that LLMs are the like panacea and they're like the building block that we're going to build all the rest of the things on top of, but all of the sort of godfathers of ML are saying like, no, we need actually a totally different.

Auren Hoffman (10:17.764) So yeah, this was very good. Yeah.

Dave Morin (10:37.966) type of system that actually understands and can predict a world. It's like not trying to predict a word, it's trying to predict what the world is going to be like that it's operating in next.

Auren Hoffman (10:49.742) Yeah. I mean, obviously there's like, there's steps we can take. even when I go into chat, GPT today, chat, GPT, I told chat to remember all my dietary preferences and all my family's dietary preferences. So, you when I say, Hey, I'm in this neighborhood, like pick a restaurant for me. will say a based on your dietary references. think this might be better for your family or this one, maybe one you like, or your kids don't like spicy foods. You don't think in there, but when you're by yourself or with your wife, you'll go to the spicy food place. So.

Dave Morin (10:53.516) Yeah.

Dave Morin (11:02.093) Yeah.

Dave Morin (11:09.165) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:18.914) It does an okay job on some of those things. It's not great, but it's, it's, you could see it's way better today than it was a year

Dave Morin (11:20.268) Yeah, sure.

Dave Morin (11:26.552) Totally. But it's still predicting off based what it knows, right? And what you've told it. So to achieve your grand goal of like, show me something truly useful, truly new, something that I can't even predict myself that I would like. Like we're still not there and almost nobody's doing it.

Auren Hoffman (11:42.564) Well, I don't, I'm not even asking you for that. I just want to be like, I want to get, I just want to get a pushed, Hey, there's this new restaurant that recently opened that's within a few miles of your house. And I'm pretty confident you're going to like this. And I saw your calendar and I saw that you and your wife didn't have a date night in the last few weeks. So I'm going to book a night for you and your wife to go on Tuesday to this new restaurant together. Is that okay with you? Like that's not.

crazy like that's not out of the realm to do right that would be like so cool.

Dave Morin (12:12.716) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're probably pretty close to that, actually. I've seen some pitches for things like in this zone, but they're like, seem close enough. It's like two years ago, everybody was using these photo apps that made you look like a, you know, like a character of Game of Thrones or something. And today it's like, whoa, there's like video versions of this and it looks pretty good. Like the difference between then and

Auren Hoffman (12:19.116) Yeah, yeah.

Dave Morin (12:42.542) two years ago is shocking. It strikes me that the use case you just said is probably like pretty close.

Auren Hoffman (12:48.932) Do you see, okay, so this is what's happening to me. don't know if you're having the same thing. So obviously the capabilities of AI is getting better and better and better over time. But at the same time, my expectation of what the capability should be is growing even faster. And so there's this gap of what I expect AI to do and what it can do. And it keeps getting wider because I keep, I keep trying something out and then I keep getting frustrated that it's not working. Even though what I tried out maybe a year ago was working.

Dave Morin (13:05.336) Yeah.

Dave Morin (13:08.814) Hmm.

Dave Morin (13:18.178) Hmm. I think maybe one of the things, the practices that I do to inoculate myself from that is that I try to stay really focused on what I'm doing with things right now. Like what, what, what's possible like right now today? Like what am I using every single day? And it's a practice that I do because I'm a seed investor. Cause I try to stay really grounded and

the reality. The other thing that I'm doing a lot of is just vibe coding like every day to try to understand like what's possible, like how crazy can you get? I really like Claude code and I've been messing around with Gemini a little bit and Codex a little bit. I try all of this, the command line tools because they are quite good at managing their workflows and

Auren Hoffman (13:53.986) What tools are using for vibe coding?

Dave Morin (14:11.896) I'm actually surprised that I like it. I was never a terminal based programmer. Like I've always needed visual tools, but I think that they're good enough at structuring how they work that you can kind of talk to them. Like you're talking to an engineer. Like I have easily the 10,000 hours of talking to engineers. And so the, the skillset that I've found most transferable from my life in Silicon Valley.

is that of talking to engineers and designers. Like I've, I've spent, I don't know, I could go back and catalog it, but I've definitely spent more than 10,000 hours talking to engineers and designers. And so that skillset turns out to be incredibly transferable to these command line interface code tools like Cloud code.

Auren Hoffman (14:57.636) To me, it seems like the main beneficiary of all these tools is the product manager. Like they are the ones, obviously everyone benefits, but the product manager is the one who can benefit the fastest.

Dave Morin (15:08.574) Absolutely. And I think engineers, you know, I was on a, I'm working on a prototype in our incubation studio at offline right now. And I was on a call this morning and the lead server engineer working on the project. He just described how, and he, I, the thing that he made was so shockingly awesome to me that I was, my mouth was, my jaw was open on the floor. like, this is so awesome. And he said, it's so fun being a developer now because I can just write the tests.

that I want a piece of code to accomplish and then it will generate the rest. And so my developer, my way of working a developer has changed so that I'm just writing these tests and then I'm asking it to research. Yeah, I'm asking it to research how do I accomplish this test? And he had this really amazing set of three systems working together that probably would have taken a group of three to five, like six months.

Auren Hoffman (15:44.334) Yeah, that's cool.

Auren Hoffman (15:52.388) You're starting with the end.

Auren Hoffman (15:57.347) Yeah.

Dave Morin (16:08.032) a year ago to do and we had it, you know, two weeks.

Auren Hoffman (16:10.052) One the things also is like a lot of, like a lot of historically I've worked with a lot of backend engineers. Mostly that's where I've worked and they're generally not that good on the front end stuff. And it's just a very different skillset. And now I've noticed so many of them now get to do the front end too, cause they can use all these tools to do so. It's like they have this kind of creative side that they never had access to.

Dave Morin (16:20.376) Same.

Dave Morin (16:26.67) Hmm.

Dave Morin (16:31.613) cool.

Auren Hoffman (16:38.146) And they're like way more dangerous in a good way. Like they can actually just do so much more stuff before they'd have to work like more collaboratively with others who are now it's like the one person. So don't have this communication problem, just can get so much more done.

Dave Morin (16:51.606) It's funny that I'm the opposite version of that engineer. you know, I, I've always been a product guy first, and then I started out building software in the design layer. Like I was in the nineties really into design tools and things like Dreamweaver and, you know, these sort of front end design tools. And I know, and I, I really always came at it through the front end.

Auren Hoffman (16:55.054) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (17:11.844) You're starting to date yourself, Dave.

Dave Morin (17:18.838) And so I've never been a good backend engineer. Like I always have relied on partnership and collaboration with people that are great at that. I think it's like how my mind works. Like I'm just not good at that type of engineering, but that's been really fun that I can do kind of the opposite. can start with a front end idea and then now build out the server and the database really, really easily using these tools and just test stuff out. It's cool.

It's very creative and awesome and it's kind of a beautiful thing. But that's the way that I try to stay, I guess, current. And I try to keep my mind from going to, I want this, I want this. Because like, I find that to be something that pushes me to think about the current investments that I'm doing and perhaps ways that are not productive for me.

Auren Hoffman (18:12.228) And offline is, is both a fun, but it's also a venture studio. It's like, I don't know, 80 % fund and 20 % studio, right. Or something. So that's why you're doing all the vibe coding.

Dave Morin (18:16.718) Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, that's exactly how we split it. Yep. Yeah. I do vibe coding, you we've got the way we structure offline is, um, you know, we've got a standard, uh, GP, a group of people that make investment decisions. We're out there doing your standard pre seed seed, uh, you know, uh, investing I've done now, you know, over a thousand. I've also got the 10,000 hours there.

done over 1,000 pre-seed and seed investments in my career. And so we do that. We're really good at it. I think we're best in class practice at that. could talk about it all day. But I also enjoy building things. And we enjoy building things. And we enjoy helping other people build things and maybe think about the way they're building them differently. And so we also have an incubation studio.

Auren Hoffman (18:48.74) Holy mackerel, that's crazy.

Auren Hoffman (19:14.542) has, is it, do you have like a fun structure and they're separate or are part of the same thing?

Dave Morin (19:21.006) They're all part of the same fund. And the way we've structured it is 80-20. 20 % of our capital goes to the incubation practices. So we run $100 million funds. And so 20 % of that, minus the fees and whatnot, goes to running the studio. And then we have a team, Max Ventilla. I don't know if you know Max. He's been in the Valley forever. So Max leads our studio.

Auren Hoffman (19:45.614) course, Max is amazing.

Dave Morin (19:50.382) And he runs that process with a group of people that many of them actually worked with him on all school. His big school project, Bart Matarasa. cool. Yeah. I mean, I tell everyone that Max is one of the greatest product, product guys in Silicon Valley. Like Aardvark is one of my favorite products of all time. And so the chance he came to me a few years ago and was like, I want to start an incubator.

Auren Hoffman (20:02.296) I was investor in aardvark that was like that really dates me, but that's a great company. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:10.822) I agree.

Dave Morin (20:20.148) And I said, well, we're already incubating things, but we haven't actually made it official. Like we haven't made like a really structured process to that, but we want it to be a a serious endeavor here at offline. We don't want it to be just like a hobby that each GP does.

Auren Hoffman (20:35.79) So when you incubate something and so then it's the fund that owns the common stock in that company that you incubate or something. Okay. Not the GPs or whatever it is or okay.

Dave Morin (20:48.056) Yep. Yeah, we start out, we start out, we have a.

No, no, we, the fun does. and we, you know, we start around two projects per week and we kill around two projects a week and we run a, a nine phase funnel. That's a kind of like DARPA where we give each project a really structured, timeline and budget. And then we have a team we have, around.

Auren Hoffman (21:16.228) And the budget is basically a certain number of hours of people or something. Okay.

Dave Morin (21:18.946) Yep. Yep. Yeah. And then we have a team of around 70 people that work in a part-time way in our studio pool and they will work on that timeline with that budget. They'll figure out if an idea is viable. And then if we decide that it's viable, then it moves on to being prototyped. If we think that the prototype is good and we think there's something here, then we go on and we start trying to figure out like, what's the product that's likely going to find a market.

Right. And then we try to discover product market fit. Once we've discovered product market fit, that's when we actually start recruiting full-time teams to things. And so nothing that

Auren Hoffman (21:57.092) And sorry, and just to, just to like go into brass tacks. obviously like, let's say, let's say, I don't know what your fund is, but let's say it's a two and 20 fund or something like that. So you've got the management fees, but you're saying separate from the management fees, you're taking actually a piece of the fund, 20 % of that fund. you are paying people, um, which could be people on your staff or people, part-time people, whatever, to create these companies. When you do that, if these companies are successful, your, you, your fund.

is getting equity in those companies. And that's how your LPs hopefully eventually make money back. if one of them hits, they're going to make a massive amount of money.

Dave Morin (22:28.226) Yep. Yep.

Dave Morin (22:35.554) Yeah, and we own three X, the amount of equity in things that come out the end of our studio funnel that we do in a typical seed investment. And so that's kind of our main pitch here is that, we end up owning instead of 10%, we own 33 % of everything that comes out of our studio. And so if we do win and we end up with much larger ownership, much bigger wins, right. And so.

And that's partially, you know, comes out of my experience doing seed investing in this market for the last, you know, I've been doing this for just over 15 years now. You know, there's a lot of competition to get that. mean, I know, you know this, Arren, like, you know, know you're new, you just started a new fund. it a year old, two years old?

Auren Hoffman (23:21.988) It's like seven, but you know, who's counting?

Dave Morin (23:23.246) I thought your new one was newer than that.

Auren Hoffman (23:26.934) I it depends what you say, but yeah, I think the current fund of the seven year fund is about a two and a half year old fund. Yeah. Yeah. Flex capital. Yeah.

Dave Morin (23:33.198) Okay. Yeah. So two and a half years. Yeah. Flex. So flex, you know, you're used to this, right? It's super hard to get the 10, you know, 10 % that you want super early on. There's like a lot of competition, you know, you're doing, I think amazing job marketing far better than us.

Auren Hoffman (23:49.476) Yeah, by the way, we usually get one to 2%. Yeah, because we're usually investing, maybe up to 4%. We're investing $300,000 to $500,000 in a company. So we're doing high volume, low dollar in a company. Because these are companies that typically raising $3 million in a pre-seed or seed. And they don't have

Dave Morin (23:52.717) Really?

Dave Morin (24:03.159) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (24:15.746) They don't have 2 million of allocation to give. That's very competitive to get in.

Dave Morin (24:17.976) Totally.

Yeah. And so we're up against that same thing and we, we play the lead role in a lot of those rounds that, you know, and so typically in our, in our, in our normal practice, we're playing the seed or sorry, the lead role in those preceding seed investments. And it's very competitive. Right. And so, the question of how do you, you know, get higher ownership in the things you have the most conviction in.

Auren Hoffman (24:25.86) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (24:37.112) Sure. Yeah.

Dave Morin (24:46.858) is one that I think anybody running a fund should be asking themselves. And so this is the way we've gone about solving for that. And I think on the one hand, and then on other hand, we just love building. I'm a product guy at heart. I just love building things. And occasionally, I'm out there, I'm talking to people. There's an area where I'm like, wow, there's nothing in this zone. Why not? We should try to build something over there.

Auren Hoffman (24:59.214) Fun. Yeah.

Dave Morin (25:14.208) It's nice to be able to do that. And I've always wanted to have that function in the funds that I've worked in or around. And so we just wanted to build it into the fundamental DNA of what we're doing at Offline. And so that's what we've done.

Auren Hoffman (25:31.16) when you have a project, it's not like you quote unquote fund a company. You just pay people kind of directly out of the fund. And then if the company is successful, then you quote unquote fund it or something. Is that the way it works?

Dave Morin (25:44.172) Yeah, it would take me a whole podcast to explain the model. But yeah, we have effectively a model that starts out as a pool of resources. And then as the ideas graduate to a level where they deserve to have a safe, then we fund a safe. And then as those safes pile up, then it turns into a traditional round. And by the time it's turning into a traditional round, like what we've incubated should be to you or anybody that's

Auren Hoffman (25:46.724) Okay.

Dave Morin (26:11.18) got great taste in pre-seed and seed investing. It should look and feel and you should like think it's a great seed investment, you know, and it should feel de-risked. should, you know.

Auren Hoffman (26:18.134) Excited and how do you how do you find the founders? Like how do you how do you find these people? How do you recruit them or how do get these other people involved?

Dave Morin (26:29.634) We view it as a core competency of our studio. And so we've got a great recruiting team that actually works across both our portfolio companies and our studio. Our head of talent, she's been working with Britt and I for across various of our companies for now over 15 years. And so she's super talented. She's got...

Auren Hoffman (26:54.99) And it's a pitch. I mean, if you have two founders and you guys, it's like, Hey, it's like a third, a third, a third ownership in the end. Or how do you, how do you, how do you, do What's the pitch to them?

Dave Morin (27:05.262) It it's always custom. Yeah, it's just like every deal in the valley the you know, the circumstances are different Sometimes the IP that's coming along has more value Sometimes it has less value Sometimes the founder is that a you know, a different cap needs to be a different caliber for this type of company It's it's pretty custom and we've actually found that as we've been building this out. We thought we were gonna have one model

Auren Hoffman (27:06.852) depends.

Auren Hoffman (27:21.77) Superstar. Yeah.

Dave Morin (27:32.526) Of course, that was foolish. We maybe shouldn't have thought that. we've kind of iterated along. And we iterate so much. We have so many iterations going on all of the time that we learn quite quickly. And so

Auren Hoffman (27:44.74) So, mean, really what you guys are, mean, you're also iterating on a business model, like the fund structure. One of the things that interesting is like basically every bunch of venture fund is essentially structured the same way, but every incubator that I've ever seen is a complete snowflake. I've never seen even two incubators that are structured even. you're, you're, you're creating a whole new business model.

Dave Morin (28:03.533) Totally.

Yeah. And I mean, that's why we look at it as like, you know, every business I've ever run, I try to take 20 % of what our, of our capital that we have to, you know, allocate and allocate it to innovation. Right. And so that's been our conversation and our goal, with offline is 80 % of the time we can do world-class seed investing. and we will do that. we will go out and we will buy a portfolio of

20 to 25 companies, every fund, and we'll do that. But for 20 % of our capital, we do think there's an emergent new model here around studios. And I've also seen this in my career that when I'm building, I'm a much better investor. And so some people just do that. They're like, oh, I'm going to be a...

a solo GP and that's going to be my side hobby along with the operating CEO role that I play. Right. There's a lot of that going on. And by the way, I did that for five years. was, you know, running path and I was also, angel investing. And then that turned into, you know, I named my slow venturing or my angel investing practice, slow ventures. And that turned into a fund. and that was all while I was building path. but I.

you know, this time around, like, this is my primary thing. This is the primary, you know, organization that I'm running and help co-running. And so I also want to build, right. And I actually think I can create good returns and higher ownership for my investors by building. And so that's, that's what we're doing too.

Auren Hoffman (29:42.382) Yeah, totally.

Auren Hoffman (29:51.02) And you, people are now having like these personal relationships, truly personal relationships with AI. Like how, how do you think that evolves over time?

Dave Morin (30:02.048) I've done a little bit of writing about this recently. I quit most social media now almost one year ago. I've been off of all meta apps. I'm only on Twitter, largely because that's where the venture capital business happens in a lot of ways. so I, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. the, what I guess you could call it.

Auren Hoffman (30:21.016) Yeah. And LinkedIn, I presume, right? Yeah.

Dave Morin (30:27.182) mainstream social media I am NOT on. Particularly the video based version I'm just I laugh.

Auren Hoffman (30:29.518) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are just, those are, it's like crack cocaine.

Dave Morin (30:35.606) I left. the reason why is that I really. Back to my history working on path, we built path around the idea that the human brain can only maintain 150 stable human relationships at a time, and there's no way to expand this. It's not like the brain's changing or anything, like just because there's mobile phones in everyone's pockets doesn't mean all of a sudden you can have like break this biological limit and.

Auren Hoffman (31:05.099) way like do you think that's true like the do you think like Dumbart number all these things do you think they're actually true like like the number of you do think you personally can only track 50 things 50 relationships going on

Dave Morin (31:12.352) Yes.

Dave Morin (31:19.404) Well, so he has several rings. So when we were doing the product, 150 is the maximum, you know, like. Famously, Gore who makes Gore text, only allowed 150 people per building, right? the other, the next number is 50. So 50 is the, know, the number of people that like, you'd be legitimately sad that they died. Like if you were sort of throwing a

Auren Hoffman (31:22.083) Yeah.

Dave Morin (31:46.254) birthday party you'd probably invite around 50 people and then the next ring in is 15 which is these are the people that you trust that you'd go on a weekend with that you you want to be around yeah yes yes and then you know and that's also you know you're the grand master of dinner parties and small conversational parties right and

Auren Hoffman (31:56.984) Yeah. That if there's something going on in their life, you literally will go fly to Dallas to deal with them. Yeah.

Dave Morin (32:14.382) 12 to 15 is kind of the ultimate size, right? You can't really have a single threaded Jeffersonian conversation beyond 15 people. And even 15 is a lot, right? So there's a natural limit there. Five is the number where it's like, these are your ride or die, right? Like your best friends. And then interestingly, halfway through path, Robin Dunbar said to me, you know, I discovered a new ring. I said,

Auren Hoffman (32:23.896) Yeah, yeah, even 15 is really pushing it, yeah.

Dave Morin (32:43.938) Like, what is it? And he goes, there's one at 1.5. I said, What? Like, does that mean it's like, you know, your wife and half of one of your friends? He's like, no, there's a gender difference. Men only have one best friend. And if they're married, it's their wife. And women have two. They have their husband and then one best girlfriend. And this is like, I found this in all my research. And so back to your question at hand.

What do I think about AI relationships? Well, I think in social media, what happened was people started replacing slots in their 150 with parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are like the relationship everybody has with Taylor Swift. They think she's her friend. You know, they have this like they feel like this person in social media is their friend. Right. And so I started to realize,

Auren Hoffman (33:38.596) We've had that for a while. you know, I had parasocial relationship growing up with Gandalf, right? You know, this like fictional character. And obviously, so many of us, so many people read the Bible and we have parasocial relationships with, you know, biblical figures, Moses and Jesus. And so this is not new.

Dave Morin (33:43.883) Absolutely.

Dave Morin (33:52.918) Yep, absolutely.

No, what social media did was like dramatically and rapidly exploded. And I think the pandemic in particular accelerated it even more dramatically. And so I think when people talk about the, yeah, I think when people are talking about the loneliness crisis, what they're actually talking about is that people have many of their 150, their slots.

Auren Hoffman (34:02.136) explode it. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:10.776) because you weren't seeing people. So yeah.

Dave Morin (34:24.492) in their head taken up by parasocial relationships. So when they go out into the real world, they're not just lonely. They're actually wondering where their friends are. And it turns out that they're not real. They're just in your head. And so when I started to realize this, I was like, man, I'm out. Like, I want all of my energy going towards the people that I'm interacting with in person that I'm, you you and I keep in touch like.

Auren Hoffman (34:33.55) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:47.502) real people. Yep.

Dave Morin (34:51.798) I'm following up with you, let's do the podcast. you know, like the people who you're proactively interacting with and the people who I'm seeing in my real life having dinner with, like, those are the people that should actually be filling my head with the social food that I should be eating, right?

Auren Hoffman (35:07.5) And, and I mean, just, just to kind of double cook on that, like it is much easier if those people are in close proximity to you, like geographically, right? Yeah.

Dave Morin (35:18.552) They should be and they should be right. Like oftentimes when I explain this to people are like, I want to keep in touch with my friend that's from college. And I'm like, well, it's fine. But like you can text them if you want to catch up with them. Right. Like just exposing your mind to this information diet that is full of people that aren't actually in your life is not actually healthy for you. Right. And so that's my view on AI, which is like, is this going to

Auren Hoffman (35:37.836) Yeah. Yep.

Dave Morin (35:46.246) radically accelerate this even more dramatically. Right. But I'm not you know, I'm not sure. I have different worries actually about A.I. that I think are if you look at what social networks did, they they actually stopped us from socializing in person. If you talk to any college kid these days, they'll tell you like, I don't go to the bars anymore. Like your and I's experience of college is radically different than

Auren Hoffman (36:15.364) But when I was in college, I went to bars to meet girls. That was my number one reason because that was really the best way to do it. mean, I didn't know. This was the best way I could think of to go do it. Whereas if I was in college today, I would use the apps. That's just a much more efficient way to meet a girl.

Dave Morin (36:15.618) the way.

Dave Morin (36:19.276) Yep. Absolutely. We all did.

Dave Morin (36:35.756) Yeah, but it turns out that it's not right. Like when you look at all of the, when you look at all the studies, there's tons of them. It's like Tinder optimizes for getting you to swipe, not actually connecting you to people. And, you know, and so it turns out the apps are actually high fructose corn syrup for this. And my joke lately has been just like after World War II and we all stopped working out or we stopped using our bodies and started working in offices. The gymnasium became popular.

Auren Hoffman (36:38.764) Okay. Well, yeah, that he might be right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Morin (37:05.57) that we're probably going to need social gyms now because we've stopped socializing. And it's interesting. I actually saw a pitch last week for Duolingo for socializing. And it's coming from a kid that's in Gen Z and he's just like, we, none of us were taught this. We all ended up in the pandemic. We don't know how to interact with not just girls, like business, you know, associates. And I'm like, wow, here we are. Like having to flex that muscle and figure it out. And so my worry about AI,

Auren Hoffman (37:22.5) Hmm.

Auren Hoffman (37:25.86) people. Yep.

Dave Morin (37:34.924) is actually that we're offloading our cognitive, we're offloading thinking. And that actually 10 years from now, it's going to be like, I don't know, you're going to go to a conference and you're going to be challenged to actually use your mind to think and write an essay and like do the things that we're all offloading into AI. In addition to the worries that, you you've posed, like maybe actually where

Auren Hoffman (37:57.54) I mean, it is weird that I mean, I work, I work out with, you know, go to gym and work out a hundred years ago. No one did that yet. They were probably like way better shape than I am in. and you know, just cause they were that, that was just like part of their day or something. And now like, we have to go to the gym and artificially like lift these big iron things for some, some reason.

Dave Morin (38:05.645) No one did that.

Dave Morin (38:21.41) Yeah. And meanwhile, I'm getting pitches for Duolingo for socializing, right? Like, or for Duolingo for social skills, right? Like, this is the world that we're in, right? Like behind every human invention is is a, is an atrophied human faculty, right? And so, you know, like there's, that's what we're doing, right? Like we've kind of atrophied socializing thanks to social networks. And so are we atrophying thinking now?

Auren Hoffman (38:26.18) Totally.

Auren Hoffman (38:49.304) I mean, there are, you know, there are books, you know, there are all these fictional books about people whispering in your ear to tell you what to say to, you know, to a girl to woo her or something like that. Right. and you know, that that's been a trope for many years where we need help socializing.

Dave Morin (39:07.458) Yeah. Yeah. And look, don't get me wrong. Like I helped build these things. I'm not, I'm not anti, but I'm just kind of trying to be a realist about where are we now? Right. And I think we're, gaining a, mean, AI is amazing. Like you can learn such incredible things. Right. And to your point, like it's pretty amazing to be able to just say, Hey, like, I think one of the coolest use cases of AI is the one that you hear from people all the time where they're like, I had this difficult relationship problem.

at work or in my life and I didn't know what to say. And so I talked to AI and it helped me understand it. Actually, I didn't think of it that way. And so I approached the conversation differently and it actually made the relationship better. Like, that's awesome. Like that use case is awesome.

Auren Hoffman (39:53.134) Yeah, I, have a, we, we have a, think a common friend who had a fifth grader who did this. and it was super helpful in her. She was having an issue with someone. didn't know how to bring it up and she kind of game played it with chat, GBD, and then figured it out herself and then had the conversation and actually went really well. Cause these are hard conversations to have.

Dave Morin (40:09.166) It's amazing.

Dave Morin (40:14.594) Wouldn't that have been awesome to have that in fifth grade, right? Like maybe we all would have been bullied less, I don't know.

Auren Hoffman (40:17.742) Totally. mean, I definitely wouldn't have, I wouldn't have been sure enough in fifth grade to have even thought about it. So I doubt I, it's only a very, very mature fifth grader probably could do that.

Dave Morin (40:29.55) And that's cool, right? So I don't know, we may end up with a bunch of positive, but like a bunch of thinking gyms in 10 years, you know?

Auren Hoffman (40:38.5) Totally. I didn't think about the hardware stuff. mean, there's like the glasses, the pins, know, some of these things kind of like the benefit is they kind of free us from the screen, like looking down at the screen. And, but there's, you know, a little bit more of augmented reality that's happening. Like, where do you, where do you think that's going?

Dave Morin (40:57.622) It's hard to tell. thought, you know, Casey Neistat had a great video about this last week where he showed the difference between Apple's thinking and Metta's thinking. Like Metta's got these like plastic sunglasses with cameras in them and they're kind of janky and cheap. And then on the other hand, Apple has this like whatever $4,000 device that's like ski goggles and they both kind of do the same thing. And so they're kind of

going in the same direction from two wildly different angles, right? That you're going to have these cameras on you that, and this thing you can talk to and it's going to, yeah. Maybe that's right. When I saw that, I'm like, that's cool. But like, do I want people, I was joking that do I want people to have deep fake eyes, which is eyes that are looking at you, but not actually looking at you, you know? Like, I don't know, right? Like,

Auren Hoffman (41:32.718) and potentially a screen in your eye to give you some extra information.

Auren Hoffman (41:50.849) I don't know either.

Dave Morin (41:51.22) Is that the right way? You know, I was an investor in humane. I actually thought that Imran had a lot of really good thinking. Their execution path didn't end up in the right place. A lot of people panned them for it. But in my view, like at least they were trying right. Like. You know, and who knows, like yesterday, OpenAI was doing a developer day and Johnny Ive was on stage and he basically said the same thing. He was like, yo.

Auren Hoffman (42:07.212) Yeah, these are really hard. It's really hard.

Dave Morin (42:19.352) This is hard. We've got a family of things we're working on, but we're kind of not sure. And Sam Altman's like, yep, it's going to be a while. I think that's actually true. Right. And to your point earlier, like, we're probably just marching towards this, you know, kind of incrementally, right? Like I use the meta Ray-Bans all the time. I love them. Like I was just on a, I went on a vacation with my wife and some friends.

Auren Hoffman (42:42.936) Yeah, so do I. I love them too.

Dave Morin (42:48.078) in Europe this summer. And it was so awesome to have those on. It enables you to capture kind of a different part of the experience. It's not the photography that I love doing. I still carry my camera to do the kind of photography that I love. But I really love that I have this new stream of videos in particular that those things can capture.

Auren Hoffman (43:11.524) I went on a safari and yeah, of course you have the camera at the safari or something like that, but just like the meta glasses, if you just have to like a super quick thing, you know, there's no way to get your camera up and even your phone, it would just take too long. It's so much easier to do it with the glasses. And then in some ways allowed me to be more present too.

Dave Morin (43:18.734) They're amazing.

Dave Morin (43:31.67) Yeah, and credit to them, right? Like they actually solved, I think they deserve huge credit for like a breakthrough in a new, and my sense is it was kind of an accident. they were actually, it's like your classic story of innovation. They put something like, you know, the Apollo projects budget into the metaverse and VR. And it like that totally failed. But there was this one thing that was like all the numbers were hockey sticking and it was this, these

Auren Hoffman (43:39.684) It's a great product.

Dave Morin (43:59.052) little plastic Ray-Ban glasses, right? And so they were like, and to their credit, they just like doubled down on that. And they're like, that's where all of our AI metaverse stuff is going, right? Because it's clearly the form factor that works, right?

Auren Hoffman (44:07.928) Yeah. And I love the, mean, I love the new ones where, you know, they, they, they, the lenses change if you're indoors. right. Cause that's like, then it makes it now that it's a, then I can use it instead of my AirPods. Right. So now if I'm indoor outdoor, I don't have to be like switching all the time and stuff. Or if I walk into a store from outdoors, I can keep my glasses on and it's great. I mean, it's a great product. Yeah.

Dave Morin (44:16.568) They're great.

Dave Morin (44:31.03) Yep. Yep. And I think, you know, just like we've all the old William

Auren Hoffman (44:35.374) By the way, we're like, speaking of advertising, look, we are an advertisement right now for this thing, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. We're not getting paid. No one, no one, you and I are not getting paid for this, but we're an advertiser. Like this is the type of advertisement is like, is a good advertisement, right?

Dave Morin (44:39.118) because it's a good product. Like great products deserve to be talked about.

This is like...

Dave Morin (44:49.228) Yeah, it's like focus on making a great product and they sell themselves, right? And it's like, and in this case, I think it's also the answer to your question, which is the famous William Gibson quote, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. Like that fact that all of the technologists are using these are using glasses and loving it kind of, I think actually says like, this is the breakthrough use case. And yeah, not everybody's doing it yet, but

Auren Hoffman (44:52.162) Yeah. Totally.

Dave Morin (45:18.028) I think you should expect to see like a wild Cambrian explosion.

Auren Hoffman (45:19.992) Yeah. I mean, I would love, I mean, again, if it was, if it's light, the lightness is really important to me. Cause I don't want this heavy thing on my nose, but if it's, if it was light, it's light enough. And it's, if I could have, if that, that, that new on screen, you know, display and your right eye, I don't, I don't know if it's going to work that well, but assuming that it will get there over time, like to me, that would be great. It gives me, it gives me a little heads up. It's a little map, you know, if I'm biking.

Dave Morin (45:26.508) Yep. Totally.

Auren Hoffman (45:48.132) Right now, often I'm biking and like, it's hard to look at my phone where I'm going. If that could tell me where to go better or, you know, some of these like, these would be real, but really beneficial things. I know you're a big skier. So if it just like gave you a little bit better map of the trail of where to go and stuff like that, like that'd be amazing.

Dave Morin (46:01.912) Totally. There's great versions of this actually that have, there've been lots of goggles over the years that have had electronics embedded in them. And almost all of them you're like, yeah, this is pretty great. But then they have bad battery life and the displays don't work very good. So yeah, I mean, if you could have, you know, marginally new information, like, you know, altitude, speed, like all kinds of things like that, like what directions your friends are on the mountains. Like, yeah, this is all like great stuff.

Auren Hoffman (46:14.722) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (46:29.634) Yeah. You know, and roles building like these types of things. They're building helmets for the military. Essentially this, right? They're building that there's the helmet. everyone in the military needs a helmet anyway. So you can pack a little bit more. They've got, they're wearing armor so you can put the battery packs and the armor, right? So you have a little bit more ways of moving it there. And then of course you've got the visor and that gives you a little display of letting know what's going on. And of course, you know, in your ears, the comms.

Dave Morin (46:49.132) Makes sense.

Auren Hoffman (46:58.988) So you can talk to other people. So it makes sense to have like an integrated system.

Dave Morin (47:03.98) Yeah. And, I wouldn't be surprised if there were also a sort of voice version of all of this, like some kind of thing you carry around, like the other value, the other like clearly extremely valuable AI use case is that people are getting a lot of value out of note taking and, and summarization and the ability to, know, like, what's the hard, what was one of the hardest things to do in every organization startup company anyone's ever worked in. It's I just had a meeting.

Auren Hoffman (47:21.763) Yeah.

Dave Morin (47:33.454) Uh, we talked about all of this. I'm trying to re-download it to you that this person that wasn't there and like that is now just solved. Right. And so I think what you're also seeing is like a lot of, um, uh, I'm an investor in this company, uh, called rewind. Um, and they, you know, this is, uh, Dan, the founder of optimise Lee.

Auren Hoffman (47:54.574) Yeah, I tried to invest, but I was not able to get in.

Dave Morin (47:58.722) Yeah. And know, he's done a lot of iteration on this. Like how do you create the perfect memory? And you know, they've created a, actual hardware device that's good for this. And is the form factor perfect? I don't know, but there's like a lot of versions of this right now. And here's the other thing I know. And you drive a Tesla. We talked about earlier, like it's kind of awesome. Like my kids love talking to grok in the car. they especially love talking to the version of grok. That's like a surfer bro. and.

I've actually found myself sometimes just talking to Grock about like the local news in my hometown, for example, in Montana, which is like very hard to get actually.

Auren Hoffman (48:35.364) And you like, I mean, I, I somehow I'm still talking, even though I'm in my test, I'm talking to chat GBT on my phone. You just, it's just easier. You like talking to grok like right there. Cause it's, it's just embedded in it. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Morin (48:46.338) Yeah, you can just hit a button. Yeah, I'm surprised, right? And so that's all voice. And so I'm struck by like...

Auren Hoffman (48:52.836) Yeah. I like having the chat, GPT conversation. So yeah, I'll, I'll, I'm going to start doing the grok ones too.

Dave Morin (48:59.554) there might be a device that fits into that zone that looks more like AirPods. Everybody carries this little AirPods thing in their pocket now, right? Maybe there's something like that, right? I could see a whole family of things in this. Which is why it's not surprising to me that ChatGPT and OpenAI are saying we're doing a family of things. There's a few of these kind of use cases that seem clear that are going to be the focus for this.

Auren Hoffman (49:03.714) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:28.782) Now switching topics, I know you're, or maybe even the same topic, I don't know. I know you're focused on like really focused on curing depression, which is like a massively ambitious goal. Like where do think we are along that path?

Dave Morin (49:42.446) Yeah, I started working in mental health in 2015, right after I sold Path. And I've put a lot of philanthropic work over the last decade into trying to move the ball forward on depression, mental health. I used a pretty aggressive phrasing of trying to find the cure to try to just like move through the world. I think that

Auren Hoffman (50:08.952) Yep.

Dave Morin (50:11.854) 10 years later, we have a much deeper understanding of the types of people that are affected by depression in its various forms. We understand lifestyle interventions that are deeply helpful. There are some people that need to exercise more. There are some people that if you tell them to get more exercise, it makes them more depressed, right? So we're getting a lot better at

helping people identify what type of person they are and then what kind of interventions that they need. We also understand much more deeply the social interventions that we need. you know, some of the biggest studies in the world related to depression, at least in the United States, are ones where they look at large populations of people that consistently get depression. So, for example, doctors.

Doctors in training consistently get depression. yeah, yeah, yeah. And it turns out there's a linear relationship with the number of hours that you work and depression. Yeah. And so it turns out the more you work, the more likely it is that it's going to happen. And so you have these things where it's like, it's become very popular in Silicon Valley to like 996. We're going to work ourselves into the ground.

Auren Hoffman (51:12.771) really? I didn't know that.

Auren Hoffman (51:21.42) Really? Skip the call of that, really?

Dave Morin (51:37.76) Anybody who's on a professional sports team knows that if you push it too hard, you're not going to be able to perform on game day. Right. And so there's like a lot of things like this where we're starting to understand the social. I'll send you the study. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:49.476) I'm super skeptical of that. I'm super skeptical. All right, okay. I'm super skeptical that like, I mean, if you're working on things you don't like, sure, you have a terrible boss and you know, whatever. But if you're working on things with like good people and you're working on hard problems, like I feel like that's almost like the antidote to depression. It's like a shared mission that you have with shared colleagues and you're in the trenches together and stuff.

Dave Morin (52:15.262) Not if it cuts into the things, the foundational things, which are nutrition, sleep, right? If you just think of it as a pure sliding scale between sleep and work, if your work cuts into sleep to the point where it damages your circadian rhythm, depression every time. And so that's the simplest way to think of it.

Auren Hoffman (52:24.921) Yeah.

Dave Morin (52:38.944) Now there's a Wiggles room, right? Between like how much work is too much work and creates too much stress that impacts your sleep. So that's another thing. We know that.

Auren Hoffman (52:40.899) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (52:45.38) Yeah. I mean, my guess is most people are on the extreme other side and they need to like, you know, they need to find more meaning in work and need to work more rather than there. I'm sure there's some people who are on this. You know, we might know some people that work too much and like, to cut back. I, I would, I'm skeptical that there's that many of those people. feel like there's way more of the other people that would benefit more from working more and having a more shared mission. And that would, that would be an alleviator for stress. Yeah.

Dave Morin (53:02.264) Yeah.

Dave Morin (53:13.0) sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's no like, you have to have purpose. Again, that's another thing that we know. The other thing I'll say is that we've also found really great treatments that are breakthroughs that were kind of hidden from the world. You know, we know that psychedelics in particular ketamine are incredibly powerful tools in the toolkit. They work for

Auren Hoffman (53:18.317) Yeah.

Dave Morin (53:39.854) many, many people that don't work for everyone, but for the people that they do work for. We have scientific studies that show 80 % plus efficacy. It's so far above the traditional treatments that it's not even close. But there's

Auren Hoffman (53:55.118) And on something like that, because it's it's a bit of a big intervention to go to, use these pharmacological things like, it, okay, is it that kind of thing where, okay, that's something to look at if it's the depression is very severe, I assume there's some degradation and you've tried these five other things and didn't really help you type of thing.

Dave Morin (54:15.406) Yes. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's what you're typically seeing, right? You've got doctors that are out there with patients that have seen no remission in, I don't know, call it five years of psychotherapy combined with lifestyle interventions and nothing worked and they're still suicidally depressed.

Auren Hoffman (54:29.72) Yeah, okay, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (54:36.408) What, what, what, how big of an epidemic is it? Like where, and is it getting worse in the U S and.

Dave Morin (54:42.306) Yeah, it's getting worse. It's getting worse. The numbers.

Auren Hoffman (54:45.508) And is that a, because we're getting richer, is that cause of the social media thing? Is that a.

Dave Morin (54:49.358) There's a lot of different theories. I before social media, I think social media has perhaps accelerated it. I think we were already on our way to 2030 has always been the number where depression would be the number one contributor to the burden of disease in the United States, like above cancer.

Auren Hoffman (54:52.29) Have a few friends. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:08.536) Whoa. Interesting.

Dave Morin (55:09.976) So it is the epidemic that it's number one. Like we're already on the way. a lot of people, like these were numbers that were already, was like, when I first started working this, this was the 2015 to 2020. That was the projection in that time zone. And then we had a pandemic, right? Which I don't think anyone disagrees that that exacerbated the mental health crisis.

Auren Hoffman (55:30.632) Where do you think like there's some debate on things like marijuana, whether it's causing depression, it's accelerating it. There's some other people think it's helpful to, you know, to, and I've seen a lot of different debates on this. Yeah.

Dave Morin (55:44.738) Cannabis is a difficult one. I've researched it, talked to many of the scientists, invested around it. It's a difficult one. I actually agree a lot with...

Auren Hoffman (55:57.828) especially like these 18 year olds maybe inducing things like schizophrenia or some of these other things.

Dave Morin (56:03.268) yeah, no, the science is a hundred percent clear that you should not use cannabis under the age of 21, really. Like the science is super clear. Now, is that actually a reality in the United States? Like it seems like no, kids just get it. But the science is, mean, Andrew Huberman does an amazing episode on cannabis. Yeah. If people want to get really into the science of cannabis and this question, I think his episode is fantastic. He's actually done a couple episodes.

Auren Hoffman (56:10.03) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (56:23.928) He does? Okay.

Dave Morin (56:33.873) It's a difficult one. I've seen it really help people, particularly with anxiety. It can have an enormously positive effect. It doesn't appear to be something that you want to be on long term, but guess what? People are also on antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs for 10, 20, 30 years at a time.

Auren Hoffman (56:51.406) We have Prozac and...

Yeah.

Dave Morin (56:54.582) And so it's hard to look at cannabis as a part of a mental health stack of medications and be like, that's that much different than like taking an SSRI for a long period of time. It's all kind of like, use this tool to get through the, you know, to get yourself back to neutral and then work on the lifestyle interventions that really take you to thriving. Right. Like it's really easy to point out the things that take you to thriving. It's, you know, sleep.

strength training, you know, drinking a lot of water, healthy relationships, not drinking alcohol. if it, you know, don't drink alcohol at all. If you do drink it very carefully, and absolutely do not smoke. you know, if you want to live a long healthy life, right. And so these are like relatively simple, things that have been proven by science. and you know, you can get into

Auren Hoffman (57:28.708) Relationships, healthy relationships, you know.

Dave Morin (57:52.12) Cuberman's podcast on this and Brian Johnson's doing a lot of work on this right now and many of the longevity scientists. But anyway.

Auren Hoffman (57:59.716) One things about SSRIs is, you know, they make your synapses fire more. And another thing that make your synapses fire more is carbs. And so I just, I just have like tons of donuts. I just, I eat tons of donuts and it's just like, makes my synapses fire. And I'm just like, you know, it's just, it's causes happiness.

Dave Morin (58:03.885) Yeah.

Dave Morin (58:08.62) Yep. Yeah. Eat less sugar.

Dave Morin (58:16.941) Totally.

Well, I, you know, look, I think we've, the question you asked was really simple. Where are we on the, on the path to the cure? we're not there. And, you know, I think that everything you've mentioned and that we've talked about are all in the toolkit. but do we have a GLP one of depression? No, we don't. and so we're, we're still, we're still out there searching and you know, the reality is we really don't understand the brain very well. Like we don't know if it's a computer or an antenna.

We don't know what it does. We know functionally how to, when we look at it with an fMRI, we know a lot of things. We know a lot of things biologically, like we still, you know, humanity has a very loose understanding of the brain. And we still have long way to go research wise. All right.

Auren Hoffman (59:06.884) Three more quick questions. One first, okay, you're co-hosting the more or less podcasts with your wife, Britt, and then Jessica and Sam Lesson. What have you learned from doing a podcast? Like what advice do you have as a podcaster?

Dave Morin (59:22.062) that I almost always am wrong about whether the episode was good or not. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (59:28.836) Oh, interesting. So afterwards you're like, that was a crappy episode. And then like, and then it goes through the roof and then the other one, oh, this was great. And like, no one liked it. Oh, interesting.

Dave Morin (59:32.416) Yeah, goes viral. Yeah, that one was great. Never liked it. I have somewhat gotten better at it over time, but I learned that, yeah, I just I don't have a good radar for it. And the other thing is that doing a

Auren Hoffman (59:42.244) Uh-huh.

Auren Hoffman (59:47.438) Hmm. And that's just by, by number of views essentially, or number of listens or yeah.

Dave Morin (59:52.686) You know, you can look at it by views or the amount of feedback you get or listens or Yeah, yeah, I guess yeah looking at my primary metrics, which is you know views and Time right like did they make it all the way through? Sort of the ultimate metric of a podcast is not just a view but like did they make it all the way through?

Auren Hoffman (59:57.336) Feedback again, people are like, like this episode. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:07.704) Yeah. yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:14.562) Right. This is at the end of this podcast. So probably no one's listening at this point. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:00:17.494) Yeah, if you are listening, I always say send me a DM on Twitter. You know, like I love hearing from people. If anything I said was interesting, like let's keep the conversation going. That's like.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:22.788) Yeah, DM me on Twitter, Orin Hoffman, or on Twitter. Totally. Okay, my dad will be DMing me, that'll be it.

Dave Morin (01:00:33.004) Yeah. And that's like, I think one of the hardest things about podcasting is you oftentimes don't know who's out there. you know, but, I've also learned a lot about comedy and how to play different roles in groups, in particular in comedy groups. I, I, I play a role on the podcast, which is known as the straight man. and you know, I'm the Seinfeld to Sam Lessons Kramer. and so.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:39.075) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:55.298) Yeah. Yep.

Dave Morin (01:01:01.752) Being good at that and not competing for the bit is something that I've learned a lot about. I don't know that I'm necessarily even that good at it. Yeah, yeah. I don't know that I'm like that good at it, but I'm like getting better, you know?

Auren Hoffman (01:01:06.136) Mm-hmm.

The Albert and Costello, you're the Albert and he's the Costello. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense based on your two personalities. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:01:18.624) Yeah, that's like a thing I knew nothing about before starting doing this. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:21.828) Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, last two questions we ask all of our guests. What is the conspiracy theory you believe?

Dave Morin (01:01:30.272) I'm really into the UFO question. And like, what are they? know, are they a, you know, all throughout history, in the history of all religions, there've been things in the sky, Ezekiel's chariots. You know, in the Middle Ages, people were seeing ships in the sky. And so, but, and then at the same time, our military seems to have

you know, readings on radars of, of things in the sky. And so I'm really into the question. Like, I don't know whether that is it answered your question. Do I believe in it? I believe in the phenomena. I believe people are experiencing this thing, whether or not they are flying metal objects from another galaxy. I don't know. are they, you know, something that we just don't understand is the world flat. I don't know, but that's, one that I enjoy or, you know, thinking about.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:29.125) That's great. love it. All right. Last question. We ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Dave Morin (01:02:38.154) I already said it. think that, nine, nine, six, sort of this, this notion that you should, destroy yourself, live in a garage, eat ramen, not take care of your health and have no social relationships. And you can still be a good entrepreneur is, is it nonsense.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:42.404) 996.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:56.292) Why, why 99, why, why is that true? Like nine, nine, nine, six doesn't seem that crazy. Like what. It's not that much actually. Like when you think about it, you know, it's like, I mean, you know, cause a lot of people, mean, you know, when I was that age, I was definitely doing, I was doing 11, 11, five, you know, it's, know, whatever, you know, or nine, nine, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:03:01.472) No, it's not that crazy. It's funny. I was... I was jokingly going... Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:03:17.184) It's funny that you say that. I was going to tweet like 996. Like if you Gen Z kids want to create trillion dollar companies, you need to do what we did at Facebook, which was basically like 10, 12, 7 for several years. Right. And look, it almost killed most of those people.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:30.468) Yeah, yeah. mean, that's because it still means like you get you go you you can go out afterwards, you know, you can go to if you go to bed by by one or two, you get a you know, you can get a decent sleep, right? You get the Sunday or Saturday off. And yeah, again, if you don't have kids, like, I don't know, it doesn't seem like that crazy. If you're 24. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:03:49.932) It's not that crazy. Yeah. If you're 24 and you don't have kids, yeah, work all the time. But the reason I pointed out is take care of yourself, like take care of your health. Like don't damage your mental health to the point where you're suicidally depressed. Don't damage your body to the point where it shuts down and you can't show up to work the next day. Right. Like I think I like to be a moderating voice on this because

Auren Hoffman (01:04:14.073) Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:04:15.246) Like I just compare it to sports or athletics. Like even just look at the trend and how musicians are managing their careers now. Like you look at people like, I know, I think Zach Brown's a really good role model. Like he, he on social media, Zach Brown band. He's a, he's kind of a country rock star. Um, on social media, he shows how he brings a gym trailer with him everywhere that he goes. And he treats what he's doing as a sport. And you look at Taylor Swift, for example, like she's now.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:28.932) Who's that? I don't know who that is.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:33.666) Okay.

Dave Morin (01:04:45.164) really talking about how she has to do training and nutrition management. she treats herself like an athlete. And I think if you're going to be a founder and being a founder as athletics, you have to treat yourself like an athlete. It means high performance, intense work, like driving a hard culture of performance, but it doesn't mean destroying your mind and your body in service of it so that you can't do the job.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:50.51) Yep.

Yeah. She is an athlete. mean, yeah.

Dave Morin (01:05:14.742) Right. And so I think that's like to me, there's nuance in that advice that that we should take more seriously.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:20.482) Yeah, honestly, I wish more of my founders were 996. I feel like so many of them are, you know, nine to five, five or something like that. And yeah, I mean, maybe not the founders, but people, people in tech, like they're just, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:05:29.133) Really?

Dave Morin (01:05:33.804) Yeah. And maybe you're right. And maybe that's where this is coming from, right? That, there, maybe there, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe the, maybe the employees are a little bit two, nine to five out there. it's not, that wasn't my experience with startups. I

Auren Hoffman (01:05:45.619) Yeah. I think it's pretty rare for employee at a company, even a tech company to be working even 40 hours a week. Now it is. Yeah. I think very few people at Google work 40 hours a week. I would say a good, a real 40. Um, yeah, I would say they're working 25 to 35 hours. Yeah. I would say almost, I would say it's pretty rare to find anyone at Google, um, pushing 40.

Dave Morin (01:05:54.402) Really? Really?

Dave Morin (01:06:00.268) Really?

Dave Morin (01:06:05.08) What?

Dave Morin (01:06:10.35) you're saying it at the Mag7. But I thought you meant at startups.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:13.604) Yeah, currently at Google. I believe at Nvidia, they're working at least a real 40, but I don't think at Google, they're working a real 40. I don't think at Meta, most people are working a real 40. They might be clocking in, but when they're there, they're spending time on buying things or on social media or on TikTok or whatever. And of course, if they're working from home, I think it's very unlikely that they are.

Dave Morin (01:06:23.394) Interesting.

Dave Morin (01:06:34.762) Interesting.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:42.42) I think it's actually like pretty, I could be wrong, I don't, you know, it's like, I don't have a camera on everyone, but my guess is just like, productivity is not high for that reason.

Dave Morin (01:06:42.7) Interesting.

Dave Morin (01:06:53.87) That's interesting. I thought initially you were saying that this was startups. And so, you know,

Auren Hoffman (01:06:59.96) Yeah, and even in startups, my guess is like, yeah, the first four or five people are usually working, you know, pretty hard. But at some point I feel like it just kind of goes and it just you know, I think they're working harder than they are at Google, but I wouldn't say they're working. It's pretty rare to see like the average person working 60 hours a week. Like that'd be extremely rare to see that at a company. Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:07:23.148) I think it depends largely on the growth path. know, like why was I working? I mean, I think I was easily working over a hundred hours a week. Most of the time I was at Facebook and, but that was a hyper growth situation. Yeah. But I think it was, it's, it's like, it pulls it out of you, right? Like you look at open AI right now and I guarantee you that everyone over there is like working like this because the sheer just like

Auren Hoffman (01:07:32.866) Yeah, but I think that's why Facebook was also successful.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:48.566) I actually, think some people are, I think they have too many people. So I really doubt they are. really do. Because some of those people are just very academic and they're kind of spending time thinking about things. So I know enough people out there, but I don't think they're working that many hours. But there are definitely some people working 80, 90 hours a week there. And obviously that's a very special company. But it's so big that it's just probably, it's just too hard to track at this point.

Dave Morin (01:08:13.378) That's kind of why it's hard question to think about because, you know, my experiences of, know, building a insanely big social network and then a pretty big social network. And anytime that you're dealing with a high growth scenario, it sort of forces you to work because your, number of customers is multiplying so fast, right? You go from tens of thousands of customers to hundreds of thousands, to millions, to tens of millions, to hundreds of millions in like years, right? Yeah, totally.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:28.12) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:36.684) Also, it's exciting. So you want to work, right?

Dave Morin (01:08:41.846) And the feedback coming in is from so many users. And so it's, it's just creates this crazy cycle, but different businesses that aren't doing that.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:47.556) I mean, if the alternative to working is watching a movie on Netflix, right? Or what's the alternative for many people, right? Playing video games. Like, what are people doing when they're not working? Yeah, exactly. Like, that's what they're doing when they're not working. So, it's just like, what's the better alternative? For some people, the better alternative is Instagram and Fortnite. And some people, the alternative is work. Like, it's not like often they're like using that time to build deep and meaningful relationships. Some people are. But a lot of them are just like playing video games.

Dave Morin (01:08:56.344) TikTok, Instagram, and Fortnite. Yeah.

Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:09:17.602) Yeah, fair.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:19.956) This has been amazing. Thank you, Dave Morin, for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you at Dave Morin on X, which is the only social media you're on. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun. I knew this would be great.

Dave Morin (01:09:21.88) Yeah.

Dave Morin (01:09:32.354) Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I always enjoy talking with you and it just means a lot.