Justin Kan was talking about the systems in his life. The serial entrepreneur/founder, who recently announced a pivot and significant layoffs at Atrium, his latest venture, came to speak at last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt in high-fashion black sweats and an extremely colorful pair of Nikes.
After Kan wrapped up his panel, we sat down for a wide-ranging and philosophical interview. And as we left off in part one of our conversation, Kan was explaining his self-described Buddhist philosophy of life.
But in the second part of our interview, I wanted to focus more on Kan’s thoughts about systems in society as a whole. There’s a difference, after all, between working mindfully to change oneself and doing so to change society. As we’ve seen with Adam Neumann, among others, there is a certain class of “spiritual” Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who use their platform in tech to assuage their own inner suffering — and perhaps gain influence by helping similarly influential people alleviate their own. WeWork, for example, cultivated associations with everything from Kabbalah to Deepak Chopra to mindful eating before the company melted under the heat of its own ethical challenges.
I don’t know that there is evidence to place Kan in the above category; maybe he is better understood as a legitimate, if unconventional, Big Thinker. But either way, it would be important to ask: What good is it when tech leaders like Kan seek a Buddhist alleviation of suffering, if the industries that sustain them are, at scale, currently creating enormous and very tangible suffering for countless millions of less fortunate people?
In the conversation below, Kan and I discuss what, for conflict-avoidant people like ourselves, probably amounts to a “Twitter beef” on the ethics of tech. We explore Buddhist philosophy; atheism/secularism/humanism; and the potential dangers of mindfulness, the real source of morality and what a spiritual approach to tech startups has to say about problematic capitalism.
As I said in the previous excerpt from our talk, I may not always agree with Kan, but for those who care about discussing and debating the ideas that animate tech today, he’s a singular and important voice.
TechCrunch: We’ve never met or even interacted much before. After one tweet you posted a few months ago, I might have messaged you to say, “Hey, I’m interested in talking sometime.” Other than that, I’ve just read your stuff like I read a lot of things on Twitter. Then you posted one thing where I just felt the need to chime in. It was about the nature of good and bad.
Justin Kan: Oh, yeah.
That good and bad are —
Constructs?
Constructs, right. I felt the need to weigh in on that, which led to a long conversation, not with you, but with others, including Prayag Narula, who ultimately said, ‘Look, the narcissism that you see in tech leaders reflects a deep pain that they themselves are experiencing.’
Yeah.
My question is…or, let me make one more comment and then I have a question, I promise.
At Harvard, I once taught a student who happened to be a leader in a well-known and respected Buddhist community. And he in turn taught me something I’ll never forget. He essentially said, “Mindfulness and meditation are tools. You can use them to build a house. Or you can use them to hurt people. And they are used all the time in both of those ways.”
How concerned are you about the systemic social problems at the doorstep of the tech industry? The inequality, the poverty, the racism, the misogyny, that sort of thing?
Well, you’d have to go into specific issues. My thoughts are pretty nuanced based on what we’re talking about. So if we’re talking about homelessness in San Francisco, I think there’s a structural problem that has to do with the way the government works here that is exacerbated by technology, but not caused by the tech industry and the [tech boom]. It’s not actually caused by tech people. So, I could talk about that specifically. If you want to talk about more futurist things, like what are we going to do about racism in AI algorithms that do face detection for matching people to jobs or something like that, we can talk about that.
But I think it’s fairly nuanced based on the specific situation. I think in that, I’m probably more like a Sam Harris or [someone] like that, who is a little bit more [inclined] to think about specifics rather than create blanket liberal statements about what tech needs to do better.
If we want to go back to what I was tweeting about, is there a difference between, or, are good and bad real? I think what I said was something like, “your best day and your worst day are the same thing. It’s just a string of conscious experiences.” And people took issue with that because they were, “well, that means you haven’t had a bad day. You’ve never experienced a bad day.” I understand why someone might think that. I don’t feel that that’s the case, but you can have whatever opinion you want. To me, that’s just the idea that your experience and who you are is disconnected from the string of experiences that you experience is very true to me. It’s not a new idea. It’s a Buddhist idea actually. And it’s not to say that it is an excuse. I think people can interpret it as an excuse to live an immoral life and actually that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s your interpretations of the events that are coming through that cause you suffering, not the actual events themselves. And I actually do believe that.
I’m right there with you, on an individual level. I’ve studied Buddhism too and I think that you are, I’ll use the word “faithfully” stating the content of some of these traditions.
It’s really more my experience of it. That is my experience.
Right, but where I find myself questioning it is these are techniques to better understand one’s own individual life, and the stress and strain that one goes through in one’s own individual life.
Yes.
They are also techniques that can be used by some at times to sort of become more successful in one’s own individual life rather, perhaps, than help others.
Yes. Absolutely. These are techniques. It’s like you said. Mindfulness and meditation is just a tool. At a base layer, it’s a tool for being more accepting of what comes to you and maybe that means you’re de-stressed, which means you can continue working as a CEO of an oil company or a weapons company. Is that good or bad? It’s nothing. It just exists.
And so to me, there’s no prescribed morality from things like these tools. If I’m saying, “hey, here’s how you de-stress in your life,” there’s no prescribed morality around that. And maybe you could judge me for that, but to me it’s the same as saying, “here’s how you raise a Series A in a startup.” You could raise a Series A for Juul and sell vapes to kids; you could use it for bad. Or you could use it to raise money for a healthcare startup that helps people, like Verta Health that helps people use the ketogenic diet to fight diabetes. It’s just a tool. There’s no morality around it.
Where does the morality come from, then? Because it sounded like you were phrasing your comments in a way that would suggest that there is no moral difference between the weapons CEO and the health CEO, and I don’t think that’s what you intended.
No, no. I’m saying that these are just techniques. The techniques themselves have no morality. Like you said. The techniques themselves have no morality. The morality has to come, in my experience, and you probably have a lot more experience than I do here —
I want to be as clear as possible here. I happen to be an atheist. I don’t believe that there is any divine power giving us the moral obligation to do anything. But I very much believe we have moral obligations to one another. I’m interested in this question of where do we get our moral obligations and what are our moral obligations?
Yeah, so for me, and this is only for me. I don’t talk about this as much, because I’m not sure that it applies to anyone else. I like to talk about things that I’m learning that I think are applicable to other people. I had a very deep experience a couple of months ago where I was meditating and I felt the presence of God very strongly. Or a universal consciousness. Or I felt an energy that I would say was like an enlightenment-like experience. It was very spontaneous and for the first time in my entire life, I felt two thoughts. One was, if I’m worthy of having this experience, I can love and approve of myself 100% in this moment without reservation. That was one. It was very cathartic. I was crying.
The second was that I recognized that I’d spent the last 36 years of my life living primarily to fulfill my own needs. Now, I’ve been helpful to other people. I think I’ve been very helpful. There’s a lot of people here in Silicon Valley who would say “Justin changed the trajectory of my life or career,” or whatever. But all those things, and most of the things I’m known for starting big companies or whatever, investing, were done for my own ego gratification. They were done to fulfill my own need of being the helpful person, thinking of myself as a helpful person or making people approve of me or love me or whatever. And I realized that even though I’d made those choices in the last 36 years, I do not have to live my life that way for the next 36 years. I can choose to live a life of service to other people. And to reorient myself, my choices, to put other people first in my life.
I was always confused when I was younger. Let’s say two years ago. People would talk about a life of service as something intrinsically tied to closeness to the spiritual or divine, and I never understood that link logically. And I think that it is ineffable in a way, beyond logic. There’s a deep characteristic of humanity that links those things together and it’s probably because of our evolution, we [are] social animals and the way human consciousness functions links those things together. But I deeply feel that.
So that’s where my morality comes from. But I don’t know that [it is] obvious or explainable to other people, so I don’t talk about that as much on Twitter.
There’s an episode of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” where people talking about God here get laughed at. I mean, again, as an atheist, humanist, whatever you want to call me, that’s not my primary concern, but it is interesting.
Anyway, when you talk about being of service to others, I think about you as somebody who is indeed in a position to do a lot. For Atrium, you raised a lot of money relative to the kind of company that it was initially perceived to be. You’re around a lot of successful people and I think as you get older and keep doing this, you’ll become more influential. If you do write a book about Buddhism as you suggested earlier, I’m willing to bet that’ll be influential in these tech circles.
Which all raises a big question for me: If you’re going to be influential to people, what is that influence going to look like? What exactly are you going to influence people to do?
I don’t expect you to have an answer. And I’m about to make an editorial comment here, I admit. Which is, with regard to being of service to others, one person who has spoken influentially about this in the past year, including to me for this column, is the writer Anand Giridharadas, who wrote a book called “Winners Take All” about philanthropic culture, where very successful and wealthy people see themselves as “doing good” through their charity, but the work they do in their day jobs actually contributes even more to injustice and the need for so much charity in the first place. Rather than “giving back,” Giridharadas argues, people like that need to learn how to “take less.”
I’m wondering, now that you’ve been successful in so many different ways and you’re thinking about doing for others or giving back to society as a whole, to what extent are you going to look to give back sort of philanthropically? And how would you compare that, in terms of your own plans, to the idea that successful and therefore privileged people like yourself might need to rein themselves in, take a step back, or “win” less than they currently do?
To me, it’s actually not about the actions that you would see on Twitter or outside. I give a decent amount of money to charitable causes. I could ramp that up. But to me it’s more about, what is my internal motivation, and what are my interactions with people that will inform whether I’m living up to the ideal that I’d like to be living?
And so it’s, “am I interacting with people from a place where I’m genuinely putting their needs first?” In terms of the kind of taking less, I think that if you just looked at the things that I have done, you would say, “those are good things.” Twitch, it’s a job creator for all these people. There’s tens of thousands of people who make money on Twitch, [by] becoming this new form of entertainer. That option was not available for them before. Is it the most useful thing for society? It’s a lot more useful than what a lot of other people are out there doing, but I don’t want to judge myself in comparison to other people. I just don’t think that that has been a form of “I’m profiting at the expense of others.” I think it’s been a positive sum game. So I don’t have any issue with the way I’ve made money and I don’t have any issue with my reward, my compensation for that money that I made.
How do you feel about taxes?
I pay them. We do not really spend money in an efficient way in our government. I’m not against taxes, but I don’t feel like we, locally in California or generally on a federal level, spend money in the most efficient way. So I’m a little disappointed with how we allocate resources and I think we could do a lot more good if government was different in certain ways.
Are you a UBI person?
Yeah, I guess I am a UBI person.
Regarding tech culture, an editor at TechCrunch recently said to me that I needed to understand the way in which a certain kind of tech person really just doesn’t have a very positive outlook on humanity as a whole. He explained that there’s an ethos in the tech world where people feel like they need to transcend humanity through technology, because they don’t like humanity as it is, very much. Do you have a reaction to that?
I think that’s a reflection that people have of themselves. When people need to escape their humanity, they’re really trying to escape their own experience. That’s a reflection of pain. I thought about my death for the first time ever years ago and I was very scared. It occurred to me that I was getting older and I was going to die one day and I was very frightened, so I started investing in life extension companies and researching all the stuff [regarding life extension] that’s a common trope here in Silicon Valley. Is that a judgment of humanity? No. It’s really a judgment of my[self]. It’s really a reflection of my own fear. Eventually I was able to get right with the fact that I will die. I’m able to accept that and be at peace with that. At least I think I am. I don’t know. It’s hard to know before you’re really faced with it.
I think when people are trying to transcend or change or biohack themselves or whatever, it’s really a reflection of their own pain that they’re experiencing of being themselves. And without sounding too preachy, the cure to pain, the cure to suffering is a cessation to suffering, [which] is what will happen if you are able to release your attachments and aversions.
This is the last question I ask at the end of all my TechCrunch interviews. How optimistic are you about our shared human future?
I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I think humanity, the human experience, the individual life, it’s like a flower. You just bloom, then you pass and all of human lives, all 100 billion people who have ever existed, it’s like a sea of flowers. Global warming is the extinguishing event, or we’ll create an Elon Musk-like future and have a nation among the stars. I don’t know what our fate is, but I think that either way is beautiful and acceptable. The key for me is, how do you come to peace with what is happening? But do you accept peace with what your experience is and then also have positive goals, moral goals that you can work towards while accepting the [present] state. That’s the paradox, right? Have positive moral goals while accepting whatever comes. That’s what I’m working towards in my life.
Justin, thank you so much.
Thank you. Peace.