Summary Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #338 - YouTube (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Chamath Palihapitiya In terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them because we will judge you and we will look down on you, And I think the really successful people realize that actually no, it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success. Because your error rate will diminish, the more mistakes that you make, you observe them, You figure out where it's coming from? Is it a psychological thing? Is it a you know, cognitive thing, and then you fix it.
Lex Fridman The following is a conversation with Cha mouth pal. A venture capitalist and engineer, Founder and Ceo, of Social Capital, previously an early senior executive at Facebook and is the c of the all in podcast, a podcast
Lex Fridman that I highly recommend for the wisdom and the cam of the 4 c hosts. Also known as Best.
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Lex Fridman dear your friends, Here's Cha Ba. You grew up in a dysfunctional household on welfare. You've talked about this before. What were for you personally psychologically some difficult moments in your childhood?
Chamath Palihapitiya I'll answer that question in a slightly different way, which is that I think when you grow up in a household that's defined by physical abuse and psychological abuse. You're hyper vigilant all the time. And so it's actually easier for me to 0.2 moments where I was happy, or I felt compassion or I felt safe. Otherwise, every moment, I'll give you a couple of examples like, you know, I was thinking about this a while ago. There was a tree outside of my apartment where we lived when I was growing up.
Chamath Palihapitiya And my father would sometimes would make me go outside to take the tree branch that he would hit me with. And so you can imagine if you're a 10:11 year old kid and you have to deal with that. What do you do? Well, a hyper vigilant child learns how to basically estimate the strength of these branches, right? How far can he go before it breaks?
Chamath Palihapitiya You have to estimate his anger and estimate the effective strength of, you know, branches and bring back something because, you know, I remember these moments where if it was, he would look at it and then he would make me go out again and get it. Right? Get a different 1. Or, you know, there was a certain belt that he wore. That had this kind of belt buckle that stuck out.
Chamath Palihapitiya And you just wanted to make sure if that if that was the thing that you were gonna get hit by, that it wasn't the buckle facing out because that really hurt. And so you became hyper aware of which part of the buckle was facing out versus facing in in those moments. And there are, like hundreds of these little examples. Which essentially I would I would say the through line is that you're just so on edge. Right?
Chamath Palihapitiya And you walk into this house and you're just basically trying to get to the point where you leave the house. And so in that micro cause of growing up, any moment that's not like that is sear in my memory in a way that I just can't describe to a person. I'll give you an example. I volunteered when I was in grade 5 or 6. I can't remember which It I was in the Kindergarten of my school.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I would just go and the teacher would, you know, ask you to clean things up. And at the end of that great 5 year, She took me and 2 other kids to dairy queen. And I'd never been I've never I'd never gone to a restaurant, literally, because we just we didn't have the money. And I remember the first time I tasted this, you know, this dairy queen meal, it was like a a hamburger or fries, a coconut. A blizzard.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I was like, what is this? And I felt so special you know, because you're getting something that most people would take for granted. Oh, it's a Sunday or it's, you know, or I'm really busy, Let me go take my kid to to fast food. I think that, you know, until I left high school, I think... And this is not just specific to me but a lot of the other people.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's... You're in this hyper vigilant loop pun with these incredibly visceral moments of compassion by other people. Know, a different example, we had such a strict budget, and we didn't have a car. And so, you know, I was responsible with my mom to always go shopping. And so I learned very early on how to...
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, look for coupons, how to buy things that were on sale or special. And we had a very basic diet because you have to budget this thing really precisely. But the end of every year where I lived, there was a large grocery chain called lob laws. And lob laws would discount a cheesecake from 7 99 to 4 99. And my parents would buy that once a year, and we probably did that 6 or 7 times.
Chamath Palihapitiya And you can't imagine how special we felt. Myself, my 2 sisters. We would sit there. We would watch the, you know, the New Year's Eve celebration on Tv. We would cut this cheesecake into, you know, 5 pieces.
Chamath Palihapitiya It felt like everything. So that's sort of how, you know, my My existence when I was at that age is for better for worse, that's how I remember it.
Lex Fridman The hyper visual loop. Is that still with you today? What are the of that stove with you today? The good and the bad?
Chamath Palihapitiya If you put yourself... In the mind of a young child. The thing that that does to you is at a very core basic level it says you're worthless. Right? Because if you can step outside of that and you think about any child in the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya They don't deserve to go through that. And at some point, by the, I should tell you, like, I don't blame my parents anymore. It it was a process to get there, but I feel like they did the best they could, and they suffered their own issues and enormous pressures and dresses. And so, you know, I've really for the most part for given them.
Lex Fridman How did you sorry to interrupt let go of that blame?
Chamath Palihapitiya That was a really long process where for I would say the first 35 years of my life, I compartment and I avoided all of those memories. And I saw external validation, Right? Going back to this self worth idea, if you're taught as a child that you're worthless? Because why would somebody do these things to you? It's not because you're worth something, you think to yourself, very visceral you're worth nothing.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so then you go out and you see external validation. Maybe you try to go and get into a great college. You try to get a good job. You try to make a lot of money. You try to, you know, demonstrate in superficial ways with the car you drive, the clothes you wear that you deserve people to care about you, to try to make up for that really deep hole.
Chamath Palihapitiya But at some point, you it doesn't get filled in. And so you have a choice. And so for me, what happened was in in the course of a 6 month period, I lost my best friend and I lost my father. And it was really like the dam broke loose because I... The compartment stopped working because the reminder, of why I was compartment was gone.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so I had to go through this period of to really understand and steel man his perspective. And can you imagine trying to do that, to go through all of the things where you have to now look at it from his perspective, and find compassion and empathy for what he went through. And then I shift, you know, the focus to my mom and I said, Well, you were not the victim, actually, you were somewhat comp as well because you were of sound mind and body and you were in the room when it happened. So then I had to go through that process with her and steel man her perspective. And at the end of it, I never justified what they did, but I've been able to forgive what they did.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think they did the best they could. And at the end of the day, They did the most important thing, which is they gave me and my sisters a shot by emi grading, by giving up everything. By staying in Canada and doing whatever it took between the 2 of them to sort of claw and scrape together enough money to live so that my sisters and I could have a shot. And I'm very thankful for them? Could they have done better obviously, but I'm okay with what has taken place.
Chamath Palihapitiya But it's it's been a long process of of that steel manning so that you can develop some empathy and compassion and forgive
Lex Fridman Do you think if you talk to your dad shortly after he died and you went to that process or today, you'll be able to... Have the same strength to forgive them.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think it would be a very... Complicated journey. I think I've learned to be incredibly open about what has happened, and all of the mistakes I've made. I think it's... It would require him to be pretty radically honest about confirming what I think he went through, because otherwise, it just wouldn't work.
Chamath Palihapitiya Otherwise, I would say, let's keep things where they are, which is I did the work, you know, with with people that have helped me, obviously, but you know, It's better for him to just, you know, kind of, hopefully, he's looking from some place and he's thinking. It was worth it. I think he deserves to think that all of this Yeah. Because, you know, I think the immigrant challenge we're not even the immigrant challenge. The...
Chamath Palihapitiya Lower middle class challenge. Anybody who really wants better for their kids and doesn't have a good toolkit to give it to them. Some of them Just they choke up on the bat. They just get so agitated about this idea that all this sacrifice will not be worth it. That it spills out in really unproductive ways.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I would put him in that category.
Lex Fridman And their self... Evaluation, intros spectrum. They they tunnel vision. So they're not able to often see the damage that did I mean, I... I know like yourself, a few successful people that had very difficult relationships.
Lex Fridman With their dad, I mean, you take the perspective of the dad, they're completely in denial about any of it. So if you actually have a conversation, there would not be a deep honesty there. Oh and that I think this maybe be in part the way of life.
Chamath Palihapitiya There Yeah. And you know, I remember pretty distinctly after I left and in this... You know, in my middle thirties. Where, you know, by all measure, I had roughly become reasonably successful. And my dad didn't particularly care about that which was so odd because I had to confront the fact that, you know, whether it was a title or money or press clipping, He never really cared it.
Chamath Palihapitiya He moved on to a different set of goals, which was more about my character and you know, being a good person to my family and really preparing me to lead our family when he wasn't there, and that bothered me because I thought I thought I got to the finish line and I thought there was going to be a a metal. You know, meaning, like, I can tell you, Le, you know, he never told me that he loved me. I'm not sure if that's normal or not. It was my normality. And I thought there's gonna be something.
Chamath Palihapitiya Some gold star, which never appeared, And so that's like a hard thing to kind of confront? Because you're like, well, now what is this what is this all about? Was this all just kind of a a ar. But then I realized, well, hold on a second. There were these moments.
Chamath Palihapitiya Where in his way again, putting yourself in his shoes, I think he was trying to say he was sorry, he would hold my hand. You know, and he would inter the fingers, which I felt is that's a really intimate way of holding somebody's hand, I think. So I remember those things. So you know, these are the things that are just etched in at least in my mind. And at the end of it, you know, I think I've done a decent job in repairing my relationship with him even though, you know, it was post.
Lex Fridman It does make me wonder in which way. You and I, we might be broken and not see it. And might be hurting others and not see it.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, I think that when you grew up in those kinds of environments and they're all different kinds of this kind of dysfunction. But if what you get from that is that you're not worthwhile, you're not you're less than many, many other people. When you enter adulthood or, you know, semi adulthood in your early twenties, You will be in a cycle where you are hurting other people. You may not know it. Hopefully you find somebody who holds you accountable and tells you, and loves you enough through that.
Chamath Palihapitiya But you are going to take all of that in your childhood and you're gonna inject that into and whether it's your professional relationships or your personal relationships or both until you get to some form of rock bottom and you start to repair, And I think there's a lot of people that resonate with that because they have each suffered their own things. That at some point in their lives have told them that they're less than. And and then they go and cope and when you cope, eventually those coping mechanisms escalate. And at some point, it'll be unhealthy, either for you. But oftentimes it's for the people around you.
Lex Fridman Well, from those humble beginnings, you are now a billionaire. How has money changed your life or maybe the landscape of experience in your life? Does it buy happiness?
Chamath Palihapitiya It doesn't buy happiness, but it buys you a level of comfort. For you to really amplify what happiness is. I kind of think about it in the following way. Let's just say that there's a a hundred things on a table. And the table says find happiness here, and there are different prices.
Chamath Palihapitiya The way that the world works is that many of these experiences are cord off, a little bit behind the Velvet rope, where you think that there's more happiness as the prices of things escalate. Mh. Right? If you live in an apartment, you admire the person with the house, if you live in a house, you admire the person with the bigger house, that person admire the person with, you know, an island. Right.
Chamath Palihapitiya Some person drives their car, admire a person who flies, who admire a person who flies business class, who admire a person who flies first. You know, to private. There's all of these escalation on this table. And most people get to the first 5 or 6 and so they just naturally assume that items, you know, 7 through a hundred is really where happiness is found. And the just to, you know, tell you the the finish line.
Chamath Palihapitiya I've tried a hundred and back and I've got it 2 more hundred do it. And happiness isn't there. But it does give you a level of comfort. I read a study, And I don't know if it's true or not, but it said that the absolute sort of like maximal link between money and happiness, is around 50000000 dollars. And there was it was just like a social studies kind of thing that I think 1 of the ivy leaks put out.
Chamath Palihapitiya And underneath it, the way that they explained it was because you could have a home, you could have all kinds of the creature comforts. You could take care of your family. And then you were left to ponder what it is that you really want. I think the challenge for most people is to realize that this escalating arms race of, you know, more things will solve your problems is not true. More and better is not the solution.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's it's this idea that you are on a very precise journey that's unique to yourself. You are playing a game of which only you are the player, Everybody else is an inter, and you have a responsibility to design the gameplay. And I think a lot of people don't realize that because if they did, I think they would make a lot of different decisions about how they lived their life. And I still do the same thing. I mean revert to basically running around asking other people, what will make you like me more?
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, what will make me more popular in your eyes and I try to do it, and it never works. It is just a complete dead end.
Lex Fridman Is there negative aspects to money? Like, for example, It becoming harder to find people you can trust.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think the most negative aspect is that it amplifies? A 360 degree view of your personality. Because there are a lot of people and society tells you that more money is actually better. You are a better person somehow. And you're factual more worthwhile than some other people that have less money, that's also a lie.
Chamath Palihapitiya But when you're given that kind of attention, it's very easy for you to become a car picture of yourself. That's probably the single worst thing that happens to you. But I say it in the opposite way, I think all I've ever seen in silicon Valley as an example. Is that when somebody gets a hold of a lot of money, it tends to cause them to become exactly who they were meant to be. They're either a kind person, they're either a curious person, They're either a jerk, you know, they're either cheap.
Chamath Palihapitiya And they could use all kinds of masks, but now that there's no expectations and society gives you a get out of Jail free card, You start to behave the way that's most comfortable to you. So you see somebody's in innate personality. And that's really interesting thing to observe because then you can very quickly bucket sort. You where do you wanna spend time and who is really, you know, additive to your gameplay? And who is really a negative d demeanor to your gameplay plan?
Lex Fridman You're an investor, but you're also kinda philosopher. You analyze the world, in all these different perspectives on all in podcasts on Twitter everywhere. Do you worry that money makes... Puts you out of touch from being able to truly empathize with the experience of the general population, which in part, first of on, a human level that could be limiting, but also as an analyst of human civilization that could be
Chamath Palihapitiya limiting. I think it definitely can for a lot of people because it's just a... It's an obstruction for you to stop caring.
Lex Fridman Right.
Chamath Palihapitiya I also think the other thing is that you can very quickly, especially in today's world. Become the scape code just to use a majority and, like, Rey gerard. If you look if you think about, like, mime theory in a nutshell, you know, we're all competing for these very scarce resources that we are told is worthwhile. And if you view the world through that ge guardian lens, What are we really doing? We are all fighting for scarce resources.
Chamath Palihapitiya Whether that's Twitter followers, money, a claim, notoriety, and we all compete with each other. And in that competition, you know, Ge gerard writes, like the only way you escape that loop, is by scape coding, something or somebody. And I think we are in that loop right now where just the fact of being successful is a thing that 1 should scape coat to end all of this, you know, tension that we have in the world. I I think that it's a little misguided because I don't think it's solves the fundamental problem. And we can talk about what the solution to some of these problems are, but That's I think the loop that we're all living.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so if you become a character car, and you feed yourself into it. I mean, you're not doing anything to to early advance things.
Lex Fridman Your nickname is the dictator. How'd did you get the nickname? Since we're talking about the corrupting nature of money?
Chamath Palihapitiya That came from poker. In a poker game, you know, when you sit down, it's chaos, especially like in in our home game, there's a ton of big egos. There's people always watching, you know, rail burning the game, all kinds of interesting folks. And in that, somebody needs to establish hygiene and rules. Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I really care about the integrity of the game. And it would just require somebody to just say, okay, enough. And so... And then people were just like, okay, stop dictating. And that's where that's where that.
Lex Fridman So who to you speaking of which is the greatest poker of player of all time? And why is it phil home youth?
Chamath Palihapitiya Exactly. You know, Youth probably knew this question is coming. Yeah. Here's what I'll say. I think Helm mu is the antidote to computers.
Chamath Palihapitiya More than any other player playing today. And when you see him in a heads up situation. So I think like he's played 9 or 10 heads up tournaments in a row, and he's played like, basically call it 10 of the top 20 people so far, and he's beaten all but 1 of them. When you're playing heads up you, 1V1, that is the most Gt Understandable spot, meaning game theory optimal position. That's where computers can give you an enormous edge.
Chamath Palihapitiya The minute you add even a third player. The value of computers and the value of their recommendations basically falls off a cliff. Okay? So 1 way to think about it is helm youth is forced to play against people that are essentially trained like Ais. And so to be able to beat, you know, 8 out of 9 of them means that you are playing so ortho to what is considered game theory optimal and you're overlay human reasoning.
Chamath Palihapitiya The judgment to say, well, in this spot, I should do x, but I'm going to do y. It's not dissimilar in chess like what makes, you know Magnus Carl so good. You know, sometimes he takes these weird lines, he'll sacrifice positions. You know, he'll over play certain positions... Or certain, you know, bishop versus nights and all of these spots that are very confusing.
Chamath Palihapitiya And what it does is it throws people off their game. I think he just won a recent online tournament and it's like, by Move 6, there is no Gt move for his opponent to make because it's like out of the rule book. Maybe he read some game. You know, I read the quote. It was like, he probably read some game in some bar in Russia 19 54, memorized it.
Chamath Palihapitiya And all of a sudden by 6 moves in, the computer Ai is worthless. So that's what makes how you've great. The... There is 1 person that I think is superior. Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya And and I think it's what Daniel also said and I would echo that because I played Phil as well, but Phil Ivy is the most well rounded cold blooded bloodthirsty thirsty animal. He's he's just and he... He sees into your soul le in a way where you're just like, oh my god. Stop looking at me.
Lex Fridman Have you ever played him?
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. Yeah. We played it. We've played and, you know, he crashes the games. Crush the games.
Lex Fridman So what what is feeling crushed? Mean and feel like and poker. Is it like that you just can't read at all, you being constantly pressured. You feel off balanced, you try to bluff and the person reads you perfectly, that kind of sense.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's it's a there's a really, really excellent question because I think this has parallels a bunch of other things. Okay. Let's just use Poker as a micro chasm to explain a bunch of other systems or games. Maybe it's running a company or investing. Okay?
Chamath Palihapitiya So let's use those 3 examples but we use poker to explain it. What does success look like? While success looks like you have positive expected value. Right? In poker, the simple way to summarize that is your opponent, Let's just say you and I are playing.
Chamath Palihapitiya Mh. Are gonna make a bunch of mistakes. There's a bunch of it that's gonna be absolutely perfect. And then there's a few spots where you make mistakes. And then there's a bunch of places in the Poker game where I play perfectly, and I make a few mistakes.
Chamath Palihapitiya Basically, your mistakes, minus, my mistakes is the edge. Right? Mh That's that's pure... That's how poker works. If I make fewer mistakes than you make, I will make money and I will win.
Chamath Palihapitiya That is the objective of the game. Translate that into business. You're running a company, you have a team of employees. You have a pool of human capital that's capable of of being productive in the world and creating something. But you are going to make mistakes in making that.
Chamath Palihapitiya Maybe it doesn't completely fit the market. Maybe it's mis priced. Maybe it actually doesn't require all of the people that you need, so the margins are wrong. And then there's the competitive set of all the other alternatives, that customer has. Their mistakes, minus your mistakes is the expected value of Google, Facebook, Apple, etcetera.
Chamath Palihapitiya Okay? Now take investing. Every time you buy something, somebody else on the other side is selling it to you. Is that their mistake? We don't know yet.
Chamath Palihapitiya But their mistakes, minus your mistakes. Is how you make a lot of money over long periods of time as an investor. Somebody sold you Google at 40 dollars a share, you bought it and you kept it. Huge mistake on their part, minimum mistakes on your part, the difference of that is the money that you made. So life can be summarized in many ways in that way.
Chamath Palihapitiya So the question is, what can you do about other people's mistakes and the answer is nothing. That is somebody else's game. You can try to influence them. You could try to sub them. Maybe you plan to spy inside of that other person's company to sabotage them.
Chamath Palihapitiya I guess there are things at the edges that you can do. But my firm belief is that life success really boils down to how do you control your mistakes. Now this is a bit counterintuitive. The way you control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes.
Lex Fridman So taking risks.
Chamath Palihapitiya You have to
Lex Fridman It's somehow You have to... Need to minimize the number of mistakes.
Chamath Palihapitiya Let's just say you wanna find love. Yeah. You know, you wanna find some...
Lex Fridman Go on...
Chamath Palihapitiya Deeply connected with. Yeah. Are you do you do that by not going out on dates and... Yes.
Lex Fridman Sorry. Yes. I.
Chamath Palihapitiya And the only person that that's yesterday.
Lex Fridman I'm I'm joking. I'm joking.
Chamath Palihapitiya No But you know what I mean? Like, you have to date people. You have to open yourself up, you have to be authentic and, like, you put you you give yourself a chance to get hurt.
Lex Fridman Yes.
Chamath Palihapitiya But you're a good person. So you know what happens when you get hurt, that is act be their mistake. Okay? And if you are ina, that's your mistake. That's a controllable thing in you, you can tell them the truth, to who you are and say, here's my pluses and minuses.
Chamath Palihapitiya My point is there are very few things in life, that you can't break down, I think into that very simple idea. And in terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them because we will judge you and we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually no it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success. Because your error rate will diminish the more mistakes that you make, You observe them, you figure out where it's coming from? Is it a psychological thing?
Chamath Palihapitiya Is it a, you know cognitive thing and then you fix it.
Lex Fridman So the implied thing there is that there's in in business and investing in poker and dating in life. Is that there's this plato Gt game theory optimal thing out there. And so when you say mistakes, you're always comparing to that optimal path you could have taken.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think slightly different. I would say, mistake is maybe a bad proxy, but it's the best proxy I have for learning. But I'm using the language of what society tells you.
Lex Fridman Sure. Got
Chamath Palihapitiya it. Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn't work, it's a mistake. So I just use that word because it's the word that resonates most with most people. Got it. The real thing that it is is learning.
Lex Fridman Yeah. It's like in neural networks, it's lost.
Chamath Palihapitiya The neural network installed.
Lex Fridman Exactly. Yeah. Right. So you're using the mistake that it's most... The the word that is most understandable.
Lex Fridman Especially by the way people experience it. I guess most of life is a sequence of mistakes. The problem is when you use the word mistake and you think about mistakes, it actually has a counterproductive effect of you becoming conservative in the just being risk ave. So that... If you if you re if you flip it and say, try to maximize the number of successes, somehow that leads you to take more risk.
Lex Fridman Mistake scares people.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think mistakes scare people because society likes these very simplified boundaries, of who is winning and who is losing, and they want to reward people who make traditional choices and succeed. But the thing is what's so cor about that is that they're actually not even being put in a position to actually make a quote unquote mistake and fail. So I'll give you if you look at like getting into an elite school, Right? Society rewards you for being in the Ivy leagues, In a way that, you know, in my opinion, incorrectly, doesn't reward you for being in a non Ivy league school. There's a certain level of status and presumption of intellect and capability that comes with being there.
Chamath Palihapitiya But that system doesn't really have a counter factual because it's not as if you both go to Mit and Ohio state. And then we can see 2 versions of Le friedman so that we can figure out that the jig is up and there was no difference. Mh. Right? And so instead it reinforces this idea that there is no truth seeking function.
Chamath Palihapitiya There is no way to actually make this thing whole. And so it tells you you have to get in here. And if you don't, your life is over, you've made a huge mistake, you know, or you failed completely. And so you have to find different unique ways of dismantling this. This is why, you know, part of what I've realized, where I got very lucky is I had no friends in high school.
Chamath Palihapitiya I had a few cohort of acquaintances But part of being so hyper vigilant when I grew up was I was so ashamed of that world that I had to live in, I didn't want bring anyone into it. I could not see myself that anybody would accept me. But the thing with that, is that I had no definition of what expectations should be. So they were not guided by the people around me. And so I would escape to define my expectations.
Lex Fridman But you didn't feel like you dad. Didn't put you in a prison expectation. Or we... Because like, that's... If you don't have front...
Lex Fridman Like, the... So the flip side of that, you don't have any other signals it's very easy to believe like you're when you're in a cult that...
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, he, you know, he was angry. He pushed me. He used me as a mechanism to alleviate his own frustration, and this may sound very crazy, but he also believed in me. And so that's what created this weird duality where you were just... I was always confused that
Lex Fridman they... You could be somebody great. He believed that... You could be...
Chamath Palihapitiya He did true special him because I couldn't reconcile than the other half of the day. You know, those behaviors. But what it allowed me to do was I escaped in my mind, and I found these types around me that were savior to me. So, you know, I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I grew up right at the point where the telecom boom was happening, companies like Nor and N Networks and Mite mattel, Bell Northern Research.
Chamath Palihapitiya These were all built in in in the suburbs of Ottawa. And so there were these larger than life figures entrepreneurs, Terry Matthews, Michael Cope. And so I thought I'm gonna be like them. I would read Forbes magazine. I would read Fortune magazine.
Chamath Palihapitiya I would look at the rich people on that list and say, I would be like them. Not knowing that maybe that's not who you wanted to be, but it was a lifeline, and it kept my mind relatively whole because I could direct my ambition in a direction. And so why that's so important just circling back to this is I didn't have a group of friends who were like, I'm gonna go to community college. You know, I didn't have a group of friends that said, well, you know, the goal is just to... Go to university, get a simple job and like, you know, join the public service, Have a good life.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so because I had no expectations, and I was so afraid to venture out of my own house. I never saw what middle class life was like. And so I never aspire to it. Now oh I was close to it, I probably would have aspire to it because I... My parents and their best year made 32000 Canadian together.
Chamath Palihapitiya If And if you're trying to raise a family of 5 people on 32000 dollars, it's a complicated job. And most of the time they were probably making 20 something pounds. And I was working since I was 14. So I knew that our station in life was not the destination. We had to get out.
Chamath Palihapitiya But because I didn't have an obvious place it sound like I had a best friend whose house that was going to and I saw some normal functional home. If I had had that in this weird way, I would have aspire to that.
Lex Fridman What was the worst job you yet had to do?
Chamath Palihapitiya The best job. But the worst job was I worked at Burger King when I was 14 years old, and I would do the closing shift. And that was from, like, 6PM till about 2 in the morning. And in Ontario where I lived, Ottawa borders, Quebec, in Ontario, the drinking age is 19, you can see where I'm going with this. The drinking age in Quebec is 18.
Chamath Palihapitiya And that year made all the difference to all these kids. Mh. And so they would go get completely drunk. They would come back, they would come to the burger king, you know, you would see all these kids you went to high school with can you imagine how mo it is, You know, you're working there in this get up? And they would light that place on fire.
Chamath Palihapitiya Can vomit everywhere, p, poo, peeing. And when the thing shuts down at 01:00, you know, You gotta clean that all up, all of it. Changing the garbage, taking it out, it was a grind. And it really teaches you. Okay, I do not want this job.
Lex Fridman I what But it's funny that that didn't push you towards the stability and the security of the middle class. Like, I
Chamath Palihapitiya didn't have any good examples of that. I didn't have those around me. I was so ashamed. I could have never built a relationship where I could have seen those interactions to want that. And so my desires were framed by these 2 random rich people that lived in my town who I'd never met.
Chamath Palihapitiya And what I read in magazines about people like bill gates and warren buffett.
Lex Fridman You were an early senior executive at Facebook during a period of a lot of scaling in the company history. I mean, it's actually a fascinating period of human history in terms of technology. Well, in terms of human civilization honestly. What did you learn from that time about what it takes to build and scale a successful tech company, A company that has almost a immeasurable impact on the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya That was an incredible moment in time because everything was so new. To your point, like, even how the standards of Rep 2 at that time were being defined, we were defining them, You know, I mean, I think if you if you look in sort of the... If you search in the patents patent library, There's a bunch of these patents at, like me and Zach have or, like, Random things like cookies.
Lex Fridman Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, or like, cross side Javascript, Like, all these crazy things that are just like these duh kind of ideas in 2023. We had to invent our way around, How do websites communicate with each other? You know, how do we build in the cloud versus in a data center. How do we actually have high performance systems? Mentioned data science, the term and the.
Chamath Palihapitiya Idea. We invented this... I invented this thing called data scientist because we had a Phd from Google that refused to join unless because he got a job offer that says data analyst. Yeah. And so he said, call them scientist because he was a Phd particle physics.
Chamath Palihapitiya So he really... You know, he was assigned. Nice said great. You're not this year.
Lex Fridman And that launched a discipline.
Chamath Palihapitiya That launch a disney a term,
Lex Fridman you know, what's a Rose the other name. But... Yeah, Like... You know, sometimes words like this can launch entire fields. And it did in that case.
Lex Fridman And you didn't... I mean, I guess at that time, you didn't anticipate the impact of machine learning and the entirety of this whole process because you need machine learning to have both ads and recommend systems have the feed for the social network.
Chamath Palihapitiya Exactly Right. The first real scaled version of machine learning, not Ai, but machine learning. Was this thing that Facebook introduced called PYK, which is people you may know. And the simple idea was that can we initiate a viral mechanic inside the application, where you log in, we grab your credentials, we go to your email inbox. We harvest your address book.
Chamath Palihapitiya We do a compare, we make some guesses and we start to present other people that you may actually know that may not be in your address book. Really simple, You know, couple joins of some tables, whatever. And it started to just go crazy and the number of people that you you were creating this density and entropy inside the social graph, with what was some really simple basic math. And that was eye opening for us and what it what it led us down this path of is really understanding the power of, like all this machine learning. And so that infused itself into news feed.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, and how the content that you saw could be tailored to who you were and the type of person that you were. So there is a moment in time that all of this stuff was so new. How did you translate the app to multiple languages? How do you launch the company in all
Lex Fridman of these countries. How much of it is just kinda stumbling into things using your best, like, first principles gut thinking. And how much is it like 05/10/1520 year vision? Like, how much was thinking about the future of the Internet and the meta and the humanity on all that kind of stuff. Because the news feed.
Lex Fridman Sounds trivial.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'll say something
Lex Fridman That's like changes everything.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, you have to remember, like, you know, news feed. Was named and we had this thing where we would just name things what they were. And at the time, all of these other companies. And if you go back into the way back machine, you can see this. People would vent would invent, you know, and I, you know, an Mp 3 player, and they would come up with some crazy name, or they would invent a software product and come up with a crazy name.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? And it sounded like the pharma industry, You know, blow cas, you know, tag your best friends. Yeah. And you think what is this? This makes no sense.
Chamath Palihapitiya And, you know, this was Z thing. He was like, well, this is a feed of news so we're gonna call it news feed. This is where you tag your photos so we're gonna call out photo tagging. I mean, literally, you know, pretty obvious stuff. So the thing the way that those things came about though was very experimental And this is where I think it's really important for people to understand.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think Bezos explains is the best. There is a tendency after things work to create a narrative fallacy because it feeds your ego. Yeah And you want to have been the person that saw it coming. And I think it's much more honest. To say, we were very good prob thinkers that tried to learn as quickly as possible, meaning to make as many mistakes as possible.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, I mean, if you look at this very famous pla or that Facebook had from back in the day, what did it say? It said move fast and break things. Mh. In societal language, that's saying make mistakes as quickly as you can. Because the minute you break something, that's...
Chamath Palihapitiya You don't do that by design, It's not a feature. Theoretically, it's a bug. But he understood that, and we embraced that idea. I used to run this meeting once a week where the whole goal was I wanna see that there was a thousand experiments that were run. And show me them all from the dumbest to the most impactful.
Chamath Palihapitiya And we would go through that loop and what did it train people, not that you got celebrated for the right answer, but you got celebrated for trying. I ran 12 experiments, 12 failed, and we'd be like, you're the best
Lex Fridman Can can I just take a small tangent on that? Is that move fast and break things has become like a catch phrase of the thing that em embraces the toxic culture of Silicon Valley in today's discourse, which confuses me of course, words and phrases get sort of captured and and so on.
Chamath Palihapitiya Becomes very red productive. You know, that's a very loaded set of words that together can be Many years later, People can view very red productive.
Lex Fridman Can you steal man each side of that? So... Yeah. Pro, move fast and break things Yeah. And against Yeah.
Lex Fridman That as
Chamath Palihapitiya embrace. So I think the pro of move fast and break things is saying the following. There's a space of things we know. And a massive space of things we don't know. And there's a rate of growth of the things we know, but the rate of growth of the things we don't know is actually we have to assume growing faster.
Chamath Palihapitiya So the most important thing, is to move into the space of the things we don't know as quickly as possible. And so in order to acquire knowledge, we're going to assume that the failure mode is the nominal state. And so we just need to move as quickly as we can, break as many things as possible, which means like things are breaking in code, do the, you know, root cause analysis, figure out how to make things better and then rapidly move into this space. And he or she who moves fastest into that space will win.
Lex Fridman It doesn't imply careless. Right? It doesn't imply moving fast without also aggressively picking up the lessons from the mistakes you make.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, again, that let's that's steel manning the pro, which is it's a thoughtful movement around velocity and acquisition of knowledge. Now let's deal man the the Con case. When these systems become big enough, there is no more room to experiment in an open ended way, because the implications have broad societal impacts. Yeah. That are not clear upfront.
Chamath Palihapitiya So let's take a different less controversial example If we said, you know, Lip worked well for all people except South asians, and there's a specific I immune response that we can iterate to. And if we move quickly enough, we can run 10000 experiments and we think the answer is in that space. Well, the problem is that those 10000 experiments may kill 10000000 people. So you have to move methodically. When that drug was experimental, and it wasn't being given to 500000000 people in the world, Moving fa made sense because you could have a pig model, a mouse model, a monkey model, you could figure out toxicity, but we picked all that low hanging fruit.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so now these small iterations have huge impacts that need to be measured and implemented. Different example is like, you know if you work at Boeing, and you have an implementation that gives you a 2 percent efficiency by reshaping the wing or adding wing. There needs to be a methodical move slow b right process because mistakes when they compound when it's already implemented and that's scale have huge external analog that are impossible to measure until after the fact, and you see this in the 07:37 max. So that's how 1 would steel man, the the con case, which is that when an industry becomes critical, you gotta slow down.
Lex Fridman This makes me sad because some industries like Twitter and Facebook are a good example. They achieve scale very quickly before really exploring the big area of things to learn. So you basically pick 1 low hanging fruit. And that became your huge success and now you're sitting there with that stupid fruit really. Well, so you're you're...
Chamath Palihapitiya I think... So as an example, like, you know, if you had to, you know, if if if I was running Facebook for a day. You know, the big opportunity in my opinion was really not the meta, but it was actually getting the closest that anybody could get to Ag he. And in fact, a steel man that product case, Here's what how I would have pitched it to the board and Z, I would have said, listen. There are 3 and a half billion people monthly using this thing.
Chamath Palihapitiya If we think about human intelligence very red productively, We would say that there's a large portion of it, which is cognitive, And then there's a large portion of it, which is emotional. We have the best ability to build a multi model. That basically takes all of these massive inputs together to try to intuit how a system would react to all kinds of stimuli. That to me would been a profound leap forward for humanity.
Lex Fridman Can you dig into that a little bit more? So in terms of...
Chamath Palihapitiya Not this
Lex Fridman is a board meeting. How would that make Facebook money?
Chamath Palihapitiya I think that you have all of these systems over time that that we don't know could benefit from some layer of reasoning to make it better. What does Spotify look like? When instead of just a very simple recommendation engine, it actually understands sort of your emotional context than your mood. And can move you to a body of music that you would like. What does it look like if, you know, your television, instead of having to go in channel surf, you know, 50000 shows on a horrible Ui, you know, instead just has a sense of what you're into and shows it to you.
Chamath Palihapitiya What does it mean when you get in your car and it actually drives you to a place because you should actually eat there even though you don't know it. These are all random things that make no sense, a priority but it starts to make the person or the provider of that service, the critical reasoning layer, for all these everyday products that today would look very flat without that reasoning. And I think you licensed that and you make a lot of money. So in many ways, instead of becoming more of the pixels that you see, you become more of the bare metal that actually creates that experience. And if you and if you look at the company's that are multi decade legacy kinds of businesses.
Chamath Palihapitiya The thing that they have done is quietly and sur move down the stack. You never move up the stack to survive. You need to move down the stack. So if you take that Os reference stack, right? These layers how you build an app, from the physical layer to the transport layer all the way up to the app layer, you can map from the 19 eighties, all the big companies that have been created from right?
Chamath Palihapitiya All the way from fair child semiconductor and not semi to intel to Cisco to 3 com... You know, Oracle nets scape at 1 point all the way up to the Google's and Facebook's of the world. But if you look at where all the lock can happened, It's by companies like Apple who used to make software saying, I'm gonna get 1 close. I'm gonna make the bare metal and I'm gonna become the platform. Or Google.
Chamath Palihapitiya Same thing. I'm gonna create this dominant platform, and I'm gonna create a substrate that organizes all this information. That's just omni present in everywhere. So the key is if you are lucky enough to be 1 of these apps that are in front of people. You better start digging quickly and moving your way down and get out of the way and disappear But by disappearing, you will become much, much bigger and it's impossible to us ser.
Lex Fridman Yeah. I 100 percent agree with you. That's why you're so smart. This is the deep personalization and the algorithms that enable deep personalization almost like a operating some layer. So pushing away from the interface and the actual system that does the personalization.
Lex Fridman I think the challenge there, there's obviously technical challenges some but there's also societal challenges that it's a in a relationship. If you have an intimate algorithm of connection with individual humans, you can do both good and bad. And so there's risks that you're taking. Yeah. You can So if you're making a lot of money now as Twitter and Facebook with ads, surface layer ads, what is the incentive to take the risk?
Lex Fridman Of guiding people more because you can hurt people. You can piss off people, you can... I mean, there is a cost of forming a more intimate relationship with the users in the short term, I think.
Chamath Palihapitiya You said a really, really key thing, which is... Which was a really great emotional instinct reaction, which is when I said the Ag thing you said, well, how would you ever make money from that? That is the key. The presumption is that this thing would not be an important thing at the beginning. And I think what that allows you to do if you were to Twitter or Google or Apple or Facebook, anybody, Microsoft, embarking on building something like this is that you can actually have it Off the critical path.
Chamath Palihapitiya And you can experiment with this for years if that's what it takes to find a version 1 that is special enough where it's worth showcasing. And so in many ways, you get the free option, you're going to be spending any of these companies we'll be spending tens of billions of dollars in Op and Capex every year and all kinds of stuff. It is not a thing that money actually makes more likely to succeed. In fact, you actually don't need to give these kinds of things a lot of money at all because starting in 20 23 or right now, you know, you have the 2 most important t ton shifts that have ever happened in our lifetime in technology, They're not talked about, but these things allow Ag, I think to emerge over the next 10 or 15 years where it wasn't possible for. The first thing is that the marginal cost of energy is 0.
Chamath Palihapitiya Not can pay for anything anymore. Right? And we can double click into why that why that is. And the second is the marginal cost of compute 0. And so when you when you take the multiplication or, you know, you wanna get really fancy mathematically, the convolution of these 2 things together, it's going to change everything.
Chamath Palihapitiya So think about if what a billion dollars gets today, and we can use open As an example. A billion dollars gets open a, a handful of functional models, and a pretty fast iterative loop. Right? But imagine what Open ai had to overcome. That to overcome a compute challenge, they have to strip together a whole bunch Gpus that to build all kinds of scaffolding software, they had to find data center support.
Chamath Palihapitiya That consumes all kinds of money. So that billion dollars didn't go that far. So it's a testament to how clever that open Team is. But in 4 years from now when energy costs 0 and basically, Gpus are like, you know, they're falling off a truck. And and you can use them for effectively for free.
Chamath Palihapitiya Now of a sudden a billion dollars gives you some amount of t flops of compute that is probably the total number of t flops available today in the world. Like that's how ga this move is when you take these 2 variables to 0.
Lex Fridman There's like, a million things to ask. I almost don't wanna get distracted by the marginal cost of energy going to 0 I have no idea what you're talking about there as fascinating.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'm Gonna give you the 30 sessions... Sure.
Lex Fridman Okay. Yes.
Chamath Palihapitiya Okay. So if you look inside of the 2 most progressive states, the 3 most progressive traits, New York? Because California and Massachusetts. A lot of left leaning folks, a lot of people who believe in climate science and climate change. The energy costs in those 3 states are the worst they are In the entire country.
Chamath Palihapitiya And energy is compounding at 3 percent to 4 percent per annum. So every decade to 15 years, energy costs in these states double. In some cases and in some months, our energy costs are increasing by 11 percent a month. But the ability to actually generate energy is now effectively 0. The cost per kilowatt hour to put a solar panel on your roof and a battery wall inside your garage.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's the cheapest it's ever been. The these things are the most efficient they they've ever been. And so to acquire energy from the sun and store it for your use later on, literally is a 0 cost prop.
Lex Fridman So what's... How do you explain the gap between the? Cost going.
Chamath Palihapitiya Great question. So this is the other side of regulatory capture. Right? You know, we all fight to build Monopoly, please. While there are Mono monopoly hiding in plain sight, the utilities are a perfect example.
Chamath Palihapitiya There are a hundred million homes in America, There are about 1700 utilities in America. So they have captive markets. But in return for that captive market, the law says need to invest a certain amount per year in upgrading that power line in changing out that turbine in making sure you transition from coal to wind or whatever. Just as an example, upgrading power lines in the United States over the next decade is a 2000000000000 dollar proposition. These 1700 organizations have to spend, I think it's a quarter of a trillion dollars a year.
Chamath Palihapitiya Just to change the power lines. That is why even though it costs nothing to make energy, you are paying double every 5 every 7 or 8 years. It's Capex and Op have a very brittle old infrastructure. It's like you trying to build an app and being forced to build your own data center. And you say but wait, I just want write Aws.
Chamath Palihapitiya I just wanna to use Gcp. I just want move on. All that complexity is solved for me, And some laws says, no, you can't. You gotta use it. So that's what consumers are dealing with, but it's also what industrial and manufacturing organizations.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's what we all deal with.
Lex Fridman So how do we get rid ourselves of this old infrastructure? That were
Chamath Palihapitiya paying? The thing that's happening today, which I think is... This is why I think it's the most important trend right now in the world. Is that a hundred million homeowners, are each going to become their own little power plant and compete with these 1700 utilities.
Lex Fridman And that is The United states are global.
Chamath Palihapitiya Now, just just deal with the United states for a second, because I think it's easier to see here. A hundred million homes, solar panel in the roof and by the way, just to make it clear. The sun doesn't need to shine, right? These states these panels now work where you have these Uv bands that can actually extrapolate beyond the visible spectrum, So they're usable in all weather conditions. And a simple system can support, you collecting an enough power to not just run your functional day to day life, But then to contribute what's left over back into the grid, for Google's data center or Facebook's data center where you get a small check.
Chamath Palihapitiya The cost is going to 0.
Lex Fridman How obvious is this to people, You're making ourselves? Okay. So... Because this is a pretty profound prediction if the cost is indeed go to 0, that I mean, the compute the cost of compute going is 0, I can
Chamath Palihapitiya So the cost of compute point is 0 is
Lex Fridman you kinda understand, but the energy seems like a radical prediction of yours.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, it it's just it's just naturally what's happening. Right? Now now let me let me give you a a different way of explaining this. If you look at any system, there's a really important thing that happens it's what. Clay Christians and calls crossing the Chasm.
Chamath Palihapitiya If you explained it numerically, here's what I would explain it to, Le. If you introduce a disruptive product, Typically, what happens is the first 3 to 5 percent of people are these zealous believers. Mh. And they ignore All the logical reasons why this product doesn't make any sense, because they believe in the proposition of the future and they buy it. The problem is at 5 percent.
Chamath Palihapitiya If you want a product to get to mass market, you have 1 of 2 choices, which is you either bring the cost down, low enough or the feature set becomes so compelling that even at a high price point. An example of the latter is the iphone. The iphone today, the 14 iphone costs more than the original iphone, it's probably doubled in price over the last 14 or 15 years. But we view it as an essential element of what we need in our daily lives. It turns out that battery Evs and solar panels are an example of the former.
Chamath Palihapitiya Because people like President Biden with all of these subsidies have now introduced so much money for people to just do this where it is a money making proposition for a hundred million homes. And what you're seeing as a result are all of these companies who want to get in front of that trend, why because they want to own the relationship with a hundred million homeowners. They want to manage the power infrastructure, Amazon, Home Depot, lowe's, you know, you just name the company. So if you do that, and you control that relationship, They're gonna show you, they're going, you know for example, Amazon will probably say, if you're a member of Prime, we'll stick the panels on your house for free. We'll do all the work for you for free.
Chamath Palihapitiya And it's just a feature of being a member of prime, and we'll manage all that energy for you. It makes so much sense, and it is mathematically acc for Amazon to do that. It's not acc, for the existing energy industry because they get blown up, it's extremely acc for peace and prosperity, If you think the number of wars we fight over natural resources, take them all off the table if we don't need energy from abroad. There's no reason to fight, you this... You'd have to find a reason to fight.
Chamath Palihapitiya Meaning, sorry, there there'd be a moral reason to fight. But the last number of wars that we fought we're not as much rooted in morality as they were rooted and...
Lex Fridman Yes. It feels like they're very much rooted and conflicts.
Chamath Palihapitiya These are
Lex Fridman scarce over resources energy specifically.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then sorry, just the last thing I wanna say, I keep an emerging policies, but the chips All... What what people want to say is that, you know, now that we're at 2 and 3 nanometer scale for typical kind like transistor fab, we're done. And you know, forget about transistor density, forget about moore's slots over. And I would just say, no, look at t flops and really tariff flops is the combination of Cpus but much much less important and really is the combination of Asics, so application specific Ics and Gpus. And so you put the 2 together, but I mean, if I gave you a billion dollars 5 years from now, the amount of damage you could do damage in good way.
Chamath Palihapitiya In terms of, you know, building racks and racks of Gpus, the kind of models that you could build, the training sets and the data that you could consume to solve a problem. It's it's enough to to do something really powerful. Whereas today, it's not yet quite enough.
Lex Fridman So there's this really interesting idea that you talk about. In terms of Facebook and Twitter that's connected to this that if you were running sort of Twitter or Facebook, that you would move them all to, like, Aws. So you would have somebody else to the compute... The infrastructure to it probably, if you can explain that reasoning means that you believe in this idea of energy go into 0 compute going into 0. So let...
Lex Fridman People that are optimizing that, do the best jobs.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I think that's a, you know, the... Initially, in the early 2 thousands and the beginning of the 2000 tens, if you were big enough scale, Oh, sorry, everybody was building their own stuff. Then between 2010 through 2020, really the the idea was everybody should be on Aws except the biggest of the biggest folks. I think in the 2000 and twenties and thirties. I think the answer is actually everybody should be in these public clouds.
Chamath Palihapitiya And the reason is the engineering velocity of the guts. So, you know, take a simple example, which is, you know, we have not seen a massive iteration in database design until snowflake. Right? I think maybe Post g was like, the last big turn of the dial. Why is that?
Chamath Palihapitiya I don't exactly know. Except that everybody that's on Aws. And everybody that's on Gcp and Azure gets to now benefit from a hundred plus billion dollars of aggregate market cap rapidly iterating, making mistakes, fixing, solving learning, and that is a best in class industry now. Right? Then there's going to be all these Ai layers around analytics so that app companies can make better decisions.
Chamath Palihapitiya All of these things will allow you to build more nimble organizations because you'll have this federated model of development. I'll take these things off the shelf, maybe I'll roll my own stitching over here. Because the thing that where you make money, is still for most people and how the apps provision and experience to a user. And everybody else can make a lot of money just servicing that So they work in a really... They they play well together in the sandbox.
Chamath Palihapitiya So in the future, everybody just should be there. It doesn't make sense for anybody, I don't think. Because, you know, if you were to rule your own data centers, you know, for example, like Google for a long time, had these massive leaps where they had G in big table. Those are really good in the 2 thousands in 2000 intense, And this is not just throw shade at Google, it's very hard for whatever exists that is a that is the Pro of G and Big table to be anywhere near as good as a hundred billion dollar industries. Attempt to build that stack.
Chamath Palihapitiya And and you're putting your organization under enormous pressure to be that good.
Lex Fridman I guess the implied risk taken there is that you could become the next Aws. Like Tesla doing some of the compute in house. I guess the bet there is that you can become the next the next Aws for the new wave of computation if that level if that kind of computation is different. So if it's machine learning, I don't know if anyone's won that battle yet, Which is machine learning centric.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, I. Software has a very powerful property in that there's a lot of things that can happen asynchronously asynchronously, so that real time inference can be actually really lightweight code deployment. And that's why I think you can have a very federated ecosystem. Inside of inside of all of these places. Tesla is very different because in order to build the best car It's kind of like trying to build the best iphone, which is that you need to control it all the way down to the bare metal in order to do it well.
Chamath Palihapitiya And that's just not possible. If you're trying to be a systems integrator, which is what everybody other than this modern generation of car companies, have been, and they've done a very good job of that, but it won't be the experience that allows you to win in in the next 20 years.
Lex Fridman So let's linger on the social media thing. So if you... You said if you ran Facebook for a day. Let's let's let's extend that. If you were to build a new social network today, how would you fix Twitter, how would you fix social media, If you wanna answer a different question is if you were Elon Musk, somebody you know and you were taking over Twitter, what would you?
Lex Fridman Fix.
Chamath Palihapitiya I thought about this a little bit. First of all, let me give you a backdrop. I wouldn't actually build a social media company at all. And the answer is the reasoning is the following. I really tend to believe as you probably got the sense of sort of patterns and probabilities, And if you said to me mouth, prob holistically answer, where where are we going in apps and social experiences, what I would say is Le, We spent the first decade building platforms and getting them to scale.
Chamath Palihapitiya And if you wanna think about it again back to sort of this poke analogy, others mistakes, minus your mistakes is the value. Well the value that was captured was trillions of dollars essentially to Apple and to Google. And they did that by basically attracting billions of monthly active users to their platform. Then this next wave were the apps, Facebook q q 10, tiktok, Twitter, snapchat, that whole pan plea of apps. And interestingly, they were in many ways an atom version of the platforms.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? They sat on top of them, they were an ecosystem participant, but the value they created was the same trillions of dollars of enterprise value, billions of monthly active users. Mh. Well, there's an interesting phenomenon that's kinda hiding in plain sight, which is that the next most obvious atomic unit are content creators Now let me give you 2 examples. Le Friedman, this random crazy guy.
Chamath Palihapitiya Mister Beast.
Lex Fridman Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, Jimmy Donaldson, just the 2 of you alone, add added up, okay? And you guys are going to approach in the next 5 years, a billion people. The only thing that you guys haven't figured out yet is how to capture trillions of dollars of value. Maybe you don't want to and maybe that's not your state situation.
Lex Fridman Right Right. But let's just look at mister Be alone because he is trying to do exactly that probably.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. And I think Jimmy is gonna build an enormous business. But if you take Jimmy in all of the other content creators, right? You guys are atom analyzing what the apps have done. You're providing your own curated news feeds.
Chamath Palihapitiya You're providing your own curated communities. You're allowed you let people move in and out of these things in a very lightweight way and value is acc to. So the honest answer to your question is I would focus on the content, creator side of things because I believe that's where the puck is going. That's a much more important shift in how we all consume information content and are entertained. Things It's through brands like you, individual people that we can human and understand are the filter.
Lex Fridman But aren't you just... Arguing against the point you made earlier, which is what you would recommend is the invest in the Ag, the the deep personalization.
Chamath Palihapitiya Because what... Because they they they could still be a participant in that in that end state if that happens, you have the option value of being an enabler of that. Right? You can help improve what they do. Again, you can be this bare metal service provider where you can be attacks.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. Right? You can participate in every... Thing that you do. Every question that's asked, every comment that's curated, if you could have more intelligence as you provide a service to your fans and your audience, you would probably pay a small percentage of that revenue.
Chamath Palihapitiya I suspect all content creators would. And so it's that stack of services, That is like a smart human being. It's like, you know, how do you help produce this information? You would pay a producer for that. I I mean, maybe you would.
Chamath Palihapitiya But... So back to your question, so what would I do? I think that you have to move into that world pretty aggressively. I think that right now you first have to solve... What is broken inside of these social networks.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I don't think it's a technical problem. So just to put it out there. I don't think it's you know, it's 1 where there are these nefarious organizations that happens. Aggregating XYZ that happens. But the real problem is a psychological 1 that we're dealing with, which is people...
Chamath Palihapitiya Through a whole set of situations have lost belief in themselves. And I think that that comes up as this very virulent form of rejection that they tried to put into these social networks. So if you look inside a comments on anything, Like, you could have a... Like, you could have a person that says on Twitter, I saved this dog from a fiery building, and there would be negative comment. And you're like, well, again, Put yourself in their shoes.
Chamath Palihapitiya What do you... How do I steal man their case? I do this all the time. You know, I get people at me. And I'm like okay, let me steal man their point of view.
Chamath Palihapitiya And the best that I can come up with is, you know, I'm working really hard over here. I'm trying. I played by all the rules that we're told to me. I've played well. I played fairly, and I am not being rewarded in a system of value that you recognize, and that is making me math.
Chamath Palihapitiya And now I need to cope and I need to vent. So back in the day, my dad used to drink, he would make me go at things to hit me with. Today, you go to Twitter, you spot off, You try to deal with the latent anger that you feel. So a social network has to be designed in my opinion. To solve that psychological corner case because it is what makes a network unusable.
Chamath Palihapitiya To get real density, you have to find a way of moving away from that toxicity because it ruins a product experience. You could have the best pixels in the world. But if people are virulent spitting into their keyboards, other people are just gonna say, you know what? I'm done with this. It doesn't make me feel good.
Chamath Palihapitiya So The social network has to have a social cost. You can do it in a couple of ways. 1 is where you have real world identity. So then there's a cost to being virulent. And there's a cost of being caustic.
Chamath Palihapitiya A second way is to actually just overlay an economic framework so that there's a more pertinent and economic value that you assign to basically spout off. And the more you want to spend the more you can say. And I think both have a lot of value. I don't know what the right answer is. I tend to like the latter.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think real world identity shuts down a lot of debate. Because there's still too much... You know, there's a sensation that there... That there'll be some retribution. I think there's more free speech over rare, but it cannot be cost.
Chamath Palihapitiya Because in that, there's a level of toxicity that just makes these products unusable.
Lex Fridman Third option. And by the way, all of these work together. If we look at this, what you call the corner case was just hilarious what I would call the human condition, which which is, you know, that anger... Is rooted with the the challenges of life? And what about having a an algorithm that shows you what you see that's personalized to you and helps you maximize your personal growth in the long term, such that you're challenging yourself, you're improving, you're learning, there's just enough of criticism to keep you on your toes, but just enough of like, the dopamine rush to keep you entertained, and finding that balance for each individual person.
Chamath Palihapitiya You just described an Ag gi of a very empathetic wall rounded friend.
Lex Fridman Yes, Exactly. And and then you can throw that person even anonymous into a pool of this coin percent. And they would be better.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think you're absolutely right. And is a very very, very elegant way of stating it. You're absolutely.
Lex Fridman But like you said the Ag might be a few years away, so that's a huge investment. Like my concern My gut feeling is this thing we're calling Ag is actually not that difficult to build technically, but it requires a certain culture. And it requires certain certain risks to be taken.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think you could red productively boil down the human intellect into cognition and emotion. And, you know, depending on who you are depending on the moment, They're weighted very differently. Obviously. Cognition is so easily done by computers that we should assume that that's a solved problem. So our differentiation is the reasoning part.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's the emotional overlay. It's that it's the. It's the ability to steal man the opposite person's case... And feel why that person... You know, you can forgive them without ex excuse what they did as an example.
Chamath Palihapitiya That is a very difficult thing, I think to capture software, but I think it's a matter of when not if.
Lex Fridman If done crude, it takes a form of censorship, just banning people off the platform. Let let me ask you. Some tricky questions. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? No.
Lex Fridman What's the what's the pro case Can you... I'm having fun here. Still He's steel man each side?
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. Let's steel man get him off the platform. Here we have a guy who is virulent in always ways. He promotes confrontation. He locks decor.
Chamath Palihapitiya He insights the fe believers of his cause to act up and push the boundaries border on and potentially even including breaking the law, He does not observe the social norms of a society that keep us while functioning, including an orderly transition of power. If he is left in a moment where he feels trapped and cornered, he could behave in ways that will confuse the people that believe in him, to act in ways that they so regret that it could bring our democracy to an end or create so much damage or create a wound that's so deep, it will take years of conflict in years of confrontation to heal it. We need to remove him and we need to do it now. It's been too long. We've let it go too long.
Chamath Palihapitiya The other side of the argument would be He was a duly elected person whose views have been run over for way too long, and he uses the ability to say extreme things in order to showcase how corrupt these systems have become, and how insular these organizations are in protecting their own class. And so if you really want to prevent class warfare if you really want to keep the American dream alive for everybody, we need to show that the first amendment, the constitution, the second amendment, and all of this infrastructure is actually bigger than any partisan in view, no matter how bad it is. And that people will make their own decisions. And there are a lot of people that can see past the words he uses, and focus on the substance of what he's trying to get across and more generally agree than disagree. And so when you silence that voice, What you're effectively saying is this is a rigged game.
Chamath Palihapitiya And all of those things that we told we were told were not true are actually true.
Lex Fridman If you were to look at the crude algorithms of Twitter, of course, I don't have any insider knowledge. But I could imagine that they saw the... Let's say, there's a metric that measures how negative the experiences of the platform. And they probably saw in several ways you could look at this. But the presence of Donald Trump on the platform was consistently increasing how shitty people are feeling, short term and long term.
Lex Fridman Because they're probably yelling at each other, having worse and worse and worse experience, if you even do a survey of how do you feel about using this platform over the last week? They would say horrible relative to maybe a year ago? When Donald Trump was not actively actually tweeting or so on. So here you're sitting at Twitter and saying, okay. I I And I know everyone's talking about, speech and all that kind of stuff, but I kinda wanna build a platform where the users are happy.
Lex Fridman And they're becoming more and more and happy. How do I solve this happiness problem? Well, let's ban let's let's... Yeah. Let's ban the sources of the unhappiness.
Lex Fridman Now we can't just say you're a source of unhappiness will ban you. Let's wait until that source, say something that we can claim breaks our rules. Like inside violence or so on.
Chamath Palihapitiya That would work to if you could measure your of happiness properly. The problem is, I think what Twitter looked at were active comment and got it confused for overall system happiness. Because for every piece of content that's created on the Internet of the hundred people that consume it maybe be 1 or 2 people comment on it. And so by over amplifying that signal and assuming that it was the plural polarity of people, that's where they actually made a huge blu. Because there was no scientific method, I think, to get to the answer of d platforming him.
Chamath Palihapitiya And it did expose this idea that it's a bit of a rigged game and that there are these deep biases that some of these organizations have to opinions that are counter to theirs and to their orthodox view of the world.
Lex Fridman So in general, you lean towards... Keeping... First of all, presidents on the platform, but also controversial voices.
Chamath Palihapitiya All all the time. I think it's really important to keep them there.
Lex Fridman Let me ask you a trick tricky 1 in the recent news that's become especially relevant. For me. What do you think about if you've been paying attention to Yay Kanye West, recent controversial outburst on social media. About and jews, black people, racism general, slavery holocaust, all of these topics that he touched on in in different ways on different platforms, but including Twitter? What do you what what do you do with that?
Lex Fridman And, like, what do you do what do you do with that from a platform perspective what do you do from a humanity perspective of how to add love to the world?
Chamath Palihapitiya Let's should we take both sides of them? Sure. Option 1 is he is... Completely out of line and option 2 is he's not. Just a essentially.
Lex Fridman Right. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya So the path 1, is he's an incredibly important taste in the world that defines the belief system for a lot of people, And there just is no room for any form of racism bias or antisemitism. In today's day and age, particularly by people, whose words and comments will be amplified around the world. We've already paid a large price for that and then the expectation of success is some amount of societal decor. That keeps moving the ball forward. The other side would say, life, I think goes from harmony to to repair.
Chamath Palihapitiya And anybody who has gone through a very complicated divorce We'll tell you that in that moment, your life is extremely dish harmonious, and you are struggling to cope, And because he is famous, we are seeing a person really struggling in a moment, that may need help. And we owe it to him, not for what he said because that stuff isn't ex excuse, but we owe it to him to help him in a way, and particularly his friends. And if he has real friends Hopefully what they see is that. What I see on the outside looking in is a person that is clearly struggling.
Lex Fridman Can I ask you like a human question and I know it's outside looking in, but there's several questions I wanna ask? So 1 is about the pain of going through a divorce and having kids and all that kind of stuff. And 2, when you're rich and powerful, and famous. I don't know. Maybe you can enlighten me to which is the most corrupt.
Lex Fridman But how do you know who are the friends? To trust. So a lot of the world is calling kanye insane. And if Or has mental illness, all that kind of stuff. And so how do you have friends close to you?
Lex Fridman Let's say, let's say something like that message but from a place of love and or they actually care for you, as opposed to trying to get you to shut up. The reason I asked all those questions, I think, if you care about the guy, how do you help them?
Chamath Palihapitiya Right. I've been through a divorce. It's gut wrench. The most horrible part is having to tell your kids. I can't even describe it to you.
Chamath Palihapitiya How proud I am and how resilient these 3 beautiful little creatures were when... My ex wife and I had to sit them down and talk through it. And for that thing, I'll be this so protective of them and so proud of them and it's hard. Now I don't know that that's what he went through. But it doesn't matter.
Chamath Palihapitiya In that moment, there's no fame. There's no money. There's nothing. There's just the raw of a nuclear family. Breaking up and that, there is a death and it's the death of that idea.
Chamath Palihapitiya And that is extremely extremely profound in its impact, especially in your children. It is really hard, really hard.
Lex Fridman Could you have seen yourself in the way you see the world being cloud during especially at first, to where you would make poor decisions outside of your... Outside of that nuclear family. So, like, biz poor business decisions, poor tweeting decisions for...
Chamath Palihapitiya I think that... Writing... If I had to boil down a lot of those, What I would say is that there are moments in my life flex where I have felt meaningfully less than. And in those moments, the loop that I would fall into is I would look to cope and be seen by other people. So I would throw away All of the work I was doing around my own internal validation, and I would try to say something or do something that would get the attention of others.
Chamath Palihapitiya And oftentimes, you know, when that loop was was unproductive, it's because those things had really crappy consequences. So you know, that was that was... Yeah. So, yeah, I I went through that as well. So I had to go through, you know, this dish harmonious phase in my life and then to repair it.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, I had the benefit of meeting someone and building a relationship, block by block, where there is just enormous accountability where my partner nat had has, just incredible empathy, but accountability. And so she can put herself in my shoes, Sometimes when I'm a really tough person to be around, but then she doesn't let me off the hook. She can forgive me, but it doesn't make, you know, what I may have said or whatever. You know, ex ex. And that's been really healthy for me.
Chamath Palihapitiya And it's helped me repair my relationships, be a better parent, you know, be a better friend to my ex wife, who's a beautiful woman who, you know, I love deeply, and we'll always love her. And it took me a few years to see that. That it was just a chapter that had come to an end, but she's an incredible mother and an incredible business woman and I'm so thankful that I've had 2 incredible women in my life. That's like a blessing.
Lex Fridman Bless it's hard. So with that, it's hard to find the person, that has that... I mean, a lot of stuff you said is pretty profound. But having the person who has putting empathy and accountability. So basically, that's ultimately what great friendship is, which is people that love you have empathy for your Boss and can also call you out and your bush
Chamath Palihapitiya She's a Lebron James like Fig. And the reason I say that is I've seen and met so many people. I've seen the distribution on the scale of friendship and empathy.
Lex Fridman She's the Lebron James a Friendship.
Chamath Palihapitiya She's a goat. Well, what's so funny is like, you know, we have a dinner around poker, And it's taken on a life of its own, mostly because of her, because these guys looked to her. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. She's sticking like. Her registers are already full.
Chamath Palihapitiya She's thinking all kinds of crap with me. But but it's a it's a it's a very innate skill, and it's paired with, you know, it's but it's not just an emotional thing. Meaning, She's the person that I make all my decisions with. These decisions we're making together as a team. I've never understood that.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know there's that African pop prove like, Go fast go alone, Go far go together. And le since since I was born, I was by myself. And I had to cope. And I didn't have a good toolkit to use to the world. And in these last 5 or 6 years, she helped me.
Chamath Palihapitiya And at first, my toolkit was literally like, sticks, you know. And then I found a way to, you know, she helped me sharpen a little rock and that became a little knife, but even that was crap, and then she showed me fire and then I forged a knife and then... And that's what it feels like. Where now this toolkit is like most average people. And I feel humble to be average because I was here down here on the ground.
Chamath Palihapitiya So it's made all these things more reasonable. So I see what comes from having deep profound friendships and love to help you through these critical moments. I have another friend who who I would say just completely una loves me. This guy Rob Goldberg. He doesn't hold me accountable that much, which I love Like I can say, I killed the homeless person.
Chamath Palihapitiya He's like, bad. They probably deserve it. You know? Whereas that would be like, that was not good. What you just did.
Chamath Palihapitiya So... But I have both... I mean, I have Nat every day, you know, Robert, don't talk to that often, but to have 2 people. Riot 0. I think most people unfortunately have 0.
Chamath Palihapitiya So I think like what what he needs is somebody to just listen, you don't have to put a label on these things, and you just have to try to guide in these very unique moments where you can just like dee escalate what is going on in your mind and I suspect what's going on in his mind again, to play your quarterback. I don't know. Is that he is in a moment where he just feels lower than low. And we all do it. We've all had these moments where we don't know how to get attention.
Chamath Palihapitiya And if you didn't grow up in a healthy environment, you may go through a negative way to get attention. And it's not to excuse it. But it's to understand it.
Lex Fridman That's so profound, the feeling less than and at those low points going externally to find it, and maybe creating conflict and scandal to get that attention.
Chamath Palihapitiya The way that my doctor explained it to me is... You have to think about your yourself worth like a knot. It's inside of a very complicated set of knots. So it's like a... Some people don't have these knots.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's just presented to you on a platter. But for some of us because of the way we grow up, it's covered in all these knots. So the whole goal, is to loosen those knots, and it happens slowly it happens un predictably and it takes a long time. And so why you're doing that, you are gonna have moments where when you feel less than then, you're not prepared to look inside and say, actually, here's how I feel about myself. It's pretty cool.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'm happy with how where I'm at.
Lex Fridman I have to ask on the topic of Friendship. Here's you do an amazing podcast called all in podcast. People should stop listening to this and go listen to that. You just did your hundredth episode. I mean, it's on my favorite podcast, it's incredible for the the the technical and the human psychological wisdom that you guys constantly give in the way you analyze the world, but also just the chemistry between the between you, you're clearly There's there's a tension and there's a cam that's all all laid out on on the table.
Lex Fridman So I don't know the 2 david that well? But I have met, Jason, what do you love about?
Chamath Palihapitiya I mean, I'll I'll give you a little psychological breakdown of all 3 of these guys? Sure. Just my opinion. Yeah. And I love you guys.
Lex Fridman Would they agree with your psychological breakdown there?
Chamath Palihapitiya I don't know. You know. I think that what I would say about Jay call, he is unbelievably loyal to no end. And you know, he's like any of those movies where which are about like, the the mafia, or whatever where like, you know, something bad going wrong and you need somebody to show up, that's G count.
Lex Fridman So if you kill the said proverbial homeless person he would be right there
Chamath Palihapitiya to help body. But he's the 1 that he'll defend you in every way, shape or form. Even if it's not... Doesn't make sense in that moment. He doesn't see...
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah That is an action of whether it'll solve the problem. He sees that as an active devotion to you, your friend. And that's an incredible gift that he gives us. The other side of it is that, you know, J cal needs to learn how to trust that other people love him back as much as he loves us. And that's where he makes mistakes because he assumes that he's not as lovable as the rest of us.
Chamath Palihapitiya But he's infinitely more lovable than he understands. He's I mean, you have to see Le like he is unbelievably funny. I mean, I cannot tell you how funny this guy is. Next level funny.
Lex Fridman It his timing. Timing.
Chamath Palihapitiya Everything charm, the care he takes, So he is as lovable, but he doesn't believe himself to be and not manifest itself in areas that drive us all crazy from time to time.
Lex Fridman Which makes it for a very pleasant listening experience. Okay. So what about the the the 2 David's, Dave Sacks and David Fried.
Chamath Palihapitiya Dave David Sa is the 1 that I would say. I have the most emotional connection with. He and I can go a year without talking, and then we'll talk for 4 hours straight, and then we know where we are, and we have this ability to pick up and have a level of intimacy with each other. And I think that's just because I've known David for so long now. That I find really comforting.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then Free is this person who I think similar to me had a very turbulent up upbringing, has fought through it to build an incredible life for himself. And I have this enormous respect for his journey. I don't particularly care about his outcomes to be honest, but I just have... I look at that guy and I think and he did it. And so if I didn't do it, I would be glad that he did it if it makes any sense.
Chamath Palihapitiya And you can see that he feels like his entire responsibility is really around his kids. And just kind of like give a better counter factual. And And you know, sometimes, I think he gets that right and wrong, but he's a very special human would be in that way.
Lex Fridman On that show, the 2 you have a very kinda. Like, from a geopolitics perspective, I don't know. There's just a very effective way to think deeply about the world, the the big picture of the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya He's a very systems level thinker with
Lex Fridman like a really put it. Yeah. Very very...
Chamath Palihapitiya Absolutely. Very systems low. So never... Very rooted in, you know, a broad body of knowledge, which I have a tremendous respect for. He brings all these things and Sa is incredible because he has this unbelievable understanding of things, but it has a core nucleus, So Free can just basically abstract a whole bunch of systems and talk about it.
Chamath Palihapitiya I tend to be more like that where I try to kind of... I find it to be more of a puzzle. Sa is more like anchored in, you know, a philosophical and historical context as the answer. And he starts there, but he gets to these profound understanding of systems as well.
Lex Fridman On the podcast in life, you guys hold to your pain pretty strong. What's what's the secret to being able to argue passionately with friends. So hold your position, but also not murder each other. Which you guys seem to come close to?
Chamath Palihapitiya I think it's like strong opinions weekly held. So I think that's
Lex Fridman pretty with? Is that... Is that a high cool? Or is it... Can you explain that, please?
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. Like, you know, like, look today. You and I. Yeah. What do we we steel man like the 2 sides of 3 different things.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. Now you could be confused and think I... Believe in those things. Mh. I believe that it's important to be able to intellectually traverse there, whether I believe in it or not.
Chamath Palihapitiya And like steel man, not straight Like, That's a really...
Lex Fridman But we intro those things by saying, let us steal in this position. Sometimes you guys skip the... Let we skip...
Chamath Palihapitiya You're right. We we added those things out and sometimes we'll sit on either sides and we'll just kind of bat things back and forth just to see what the other person thinks.
Lex Fridman So that's how like, as fans, we should listen to that sometimes. Like... So sometimes... Because because you hold a strong opinion, sometimes, like, for example, the... Cost of energy going to 0?
Lex Fridman Is that, like, what's the degree of certainty on that? Is is this kinda like you really taking a prediction of how the world will un enroll. And if it does, this will benefit a huge amount of companies and people that will believe that idea. So you really... You you're like...
Lex Fridman You spend a few days a few weeks with that idea.
Chamath Palihapitiya I've been spending 2 years with that idea. And that idea has manifested into many pages and pages of... More and more branches of a tree. But it started with that idea. So if you think about this tree, this logical tree that I built.
Chamath Palihapitiya I would consider it more of a mosaic, And that the at the base or route, however you want to talk about it, is this idea, the incremental cost of energy goes to 0. How does it manifest? And so I talked about 1 t, which is the competition of households versus utilities. But if even some of that comes to pass, we're going to see a bunch of other implications from a regulatory and technology perspective. If some of those come to pass.
Chamath Palihapitiya So I've tried to think think, sort of this, you know, 678 hops forward. And I have some... Like, to use the chest analogy, I have a bunch of short lines, which I think can work. And I've started to test those by making investments, tens of millions over here to hundred millions over there But it's a distribution based on how prob I think this these outcomes are and how downside protected I can be and how much I will learn. Many mistakes I can make, you know, etcetera.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then very quickly over the next 2 years, some of those things will happen or not happen, and I will rapidly re under and I'll rewrite that tree. And then I'll get some more data. I'll make some more investments. And I'll rapidly re under right. So, you know, in order for me to get to this tree, maybe you can ask how did I get there?
Chamath Palihapitiya It was complete accident. The way that it happened was I have a friend of mine who works at a great organization called Fortress. His name is Drew Mc ignite, and he called me 1 day. And he said, hey Doing a deal where you anchor it. We're going public.
Chamath Palihapitiya And it's a rare Earth mining company. And I said, Drew, like, if I'm gonna get hard and feather in silicon Valley for backing a mining company. Yeah. And he said Mouth, just talk to the guy and learn. And the guy Jim Lit blew me away.
Chamath Palihapitiya He's like, here's what he means for energy. Here's what it means for the supply chain. Here's what it means for the United States Was China. But Lax I did that deal and then it did 7 others. And and that deal made money.
Chamath Palihapitiya The 7 others don. But I learned, I made enough mistakes where the net it, was I got to a thesis that I believed and I could see it. And I was like, okay, I paid the price. I acquired the learning. I made my mistakes.
Chamath Palihapitiya I know where I at and this is step 1. And then I learned a little bit more. I made some more investments. And that's how I that's how I do the job, that's... The minute that you...
Chamath Palihapitiya Try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet either on yourself or a company, a girlfriend whatever, it's too late.
Lex Fridman So if we just linger on that, tree. It seems like a lot of geopolitics, a lot of international military even conflict is around energy. So how does your thinking about energy connect to what you see happening the next 10:20 years. Maybe you can look at the war in Ukraine or relationship with China and other places through the lens of energy. What what's the hopeful?
Lex Fridman What's the cynical trajectory that the world might take through with this drive towards 0 energy, 0 cost energy.
Chamath Palihapitiya So the United States was in a period of energy surplus until the last few years. Some number of years in Trump, and I think some number... Now the current administration with President Biden. But we know what it means to basically have more than enough energy. To fund our own domestic manufacturing and living standards.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I think that by being able to generate this energy from the sun that is very Capex efficient. That is very climate efficient gives us a huge tailwind. The second thing is that we are now in a world in a regime for many years to come of non 0 interest rates. And it may interest you to note that the really the last time that, we had long dated wars supported, you know, at low interest rates was World war 2 where I think the average interest rates was like 1.07 percent in the tenure. And every other war tends to have these very quick open and closes because these long protracted fights get very difficult to finance.
Chamath Palihapitiya When rates are non 0. So just as an example, even starting in 20 23. So the practical example today in the United States is president Biden budget is about 1500000000000.0 for next year, That's not including the entitlement spending. Okay? Meaning Medicare or Social Security.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? So the stuff that he wants to spend that he has discretion over is about 1 point 582 trillion is the exact number. Next year, our interest payments are going to be 4 55000000000 dollars. That's 29 percent of every budget dollar is going to pay interest. So you have these 2 worlds coming together.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right, Le? If you have us you know, hurt forward, to being able to generate our own energy and the economic peril that comes with trying to under write several trillion dollars for war which we can't afford to pay when rates are at 5 percent means that despite all the blu, the prob distribution of us engaging in war with Russia and Ukraine seems relatively low. The the override would obviously be a moral reason to do it, that may or may not come if there's some nuclear proliferation. But now you have to steal man the other side of the equation, which is well what were to happen, if you were sitting there and you were Putin, let's steel man setting off a tactical nuke someplace place. Okay I'm getting calls every other day from my 2 largest energy buyers India and China, telling me slow my role.
Chamath Palihapitiya I have the entire world looking to find the final excuse to turn me off and unplug me from the entire world economy. The only morally rep thing that's left in my arsenal that could do all of these things together would be to set off a attack nuke. I would be the only person since world war 2 to have done that. I mean, you know, it's it seems like it's a really, really, really big step to take. And so I think that x of the clamoring for war, that the military industrial complex wants us to buy into.
Chamath Palihapitiya The financial reasons to do it and the natural reason resources needs to do it are making it very unlikely. That is not just true for us. I think it's also true for Europe, I think the European economy is going to roll over. I think it's going... I see a very hard landing for them.
Chamath Palihapitiya Which means that if the economy slows down, there's gonna be less need for energy. And so it starts to become a thing where a negotiated settlement is actually the win win for everybody. But none of this would be possible without 0 interest rates. In a world of 0 interest rates, we would be in war.
Lex Fridman So you believe in the financial forces and pressures over powering, that
Chamath Palihapitiya Believe in the human sense. I really do believe in the...
Lex Fridman Even in in international war.
Chamath Palihapitiya More so there. I think the invisible hand And by the invisible hand of the audience, I think really what it means is, you know, the the financial complex and really the central bank complex. And the interplay between fiscal and monetary policy is a very convoluted and complicated set of things, But if we had 0 interest rates, we would be probably in the middle of it now.
Lex Fridman See, there's a complexity to this game at the international level where the nation... Some nations are are authoritarian and are there's significant corruption. And so that adds from a game theoretical optimal perspective, you know, the invisible hand has is operating in the mud,
Chamath Palihapitiya preventing war. The person the person that is the most important figure in the world right now is jerome Powell. He is probably doing more to prevent more than anybody else. He keeps ratchet rates, it's just impossible it's some mathematical impossibility for the United States. Unless there is such a cataclysmic moral trans aggression by Russia.
Chamath Palihapitiya So there is tail risk that it is possible. Or we say, forget it, all bets are off, we're going back to 0 rates issue a hundred year bond. We're going to finance a war machine. There's a small risk of that. But I think the propensity of the the majority of outcomes is more
Lex Fridman of a negotiated settlement. So what about mean, if you... What's the motivation of Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place? If financial forces are the most... The most powerful forces.
Lex Fridman Why did it happen? Because it seems like there's other forces at play of maintaining super superpower status on the world stage. Yeah. It seems like geopolitics doesn't happen just with the invisible hand in consideration.
Chamath Palihapitiya I agree with that. I can't beg to know, to be honest. I don't know. But he did it. And I think it's easier for me to guess the outcome from here, it would have been impossible for me to really understand it is, what got him to this place.
Chamath Palihapitiya But it seems like there's an game here and there's... There's not much Palihapitiya.
Lex Fridman Yeah. I feel like I'm on on sturdy ground because there's been so many experts. At every stage of this that have been wrong.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, there are no experts.
Lex Fridman Well, on this...
Chamath Palihapitiya There are no experts, Le.
Lex Fridman I understand this. Well, okay. Let's dig into that because there's some... Because we just said Phil helm is the is the greatest book player of all time. He has an opinion.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. He doesn't... He's... So They would be mistaken.
Lex Fridman At Poker.
Chamath Palihapitiya Phil has an opinion. Ivy has an opinion as well and how to play all these games? Meaning an opinion means, here's the lines I take, here are the decisions I make. I live and die by those and if I'm right, I win if I'm wrong, I lose. I've have made more mistakes than my opponent.
Lex Fridman I thought you said there's an optimal. So aren't there people that have a deeper understanding. Higher likelihood of being able to describe and know the optimal, the optimal set of actions here at every layer. Well, there there
Chamath Palihapitiya there being theoretically set of optimal decisions, but you can't play your life Against the computer, like, meaning, the minute that you face an opponent and that person takes you off that optimal path you have to adjust. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Like what happens if a tactical nuke?
Chamath Palihapitiya It would be really bad. I think the world is resilient enough. I think the Ukrainians are resilient enough to overcome it. It would be really bad. It's just an it's an incredibly sad moment in human history street.
Lex Fridman But do you wonder what Us does? Is there any understanding. Do you think people inside the United States understand. Not not the regular citizens, but people in the military. Do you think joe biden understands.
Lex Fridman Do you think
Chamath Palihapitiya I think Joe Biden does understand. I think that...
Lex Fridman I think they have a clear plan.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think that there are few reasons to let the ge democracy rule, but this is 1 of the reasons where I think they are better adept than other people. You know, folks that were around during the bay of pigs, folks that hopefully have studied that than and studied you know, nuclear d escalation will have a better playbook than I do. My suspicion is that there is a, know, in an emergency break glass plan, and I think before military intervention or anything else, I think that there are an enormous number of financial sanctions that you can do to just completely cripple Russia that they haven't undertaken yet. And if you couple that with an economic system in Europe that is less and less in need of energy, because it is going into a recession. It makes it easier for them to be able to walk away.
Chamath Palihapitiya While the Us ships a bunch of, you know, Lng over there. So I I don't know the game theory on all of this, but
Lex Fridman does it make you nervous? That are we're just being temperamental. Does... It feels like the world hangs in a balance. Like, it feels like at least from my naive perspective, I thought we were getting to a place where surely human civilization can't destroy itself.
Lex Fridman And here's a presentation of what it looks like a hot war where multiple parties involved in escalating escalation towards a world war. Is not entirely out of the realm possibility. It's not...
Chamath Palihapitiya I would really, really hope that he... Is spending time with his 2 young twins.
Lex Fridman Well, this is part I really
Chamath Palihapitiya I really hope he's spending time with these kids.
Lex Fridman I agreed, but not kids, not just kids but friends and the the
Chamath Palihapitiya pm may not have friends but it's very hard for anybody to look at their kids and not think about protecting the future.
Lex Fridman Well, there's partially because of the pandemic, but partially because of the nature of power, it feels like you're surrounded but people you can't trust more and more. I do think the pandemic had effect on that too. The isolating effect. Yeah. A lot of people were not their best cells during the pandemic.
Lex Fridman From a super heavy topic, let me go back to the space where you're 1 of the most successful people in the world. How to build companies? How to find good companies? What it takes to find good companies What it takes to build good companies, What advice do you have for someone who wants to build the next super successful startup in the tech space? And, you know, have a chance to be impactful, like Facebook, Apple.
Chamath Palihapitiya That's... I think that's the keyword if your pre condition is to start something successful you've already failed, because you're now you're playing somebody else's game. What success means is not clear. You're walking into the woods. It's murky.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's dark. It's wet, It's raining. There's all these animals about... There's no comfort there. So you better really like hiking.
Chamath Palihapitiya And there's no short way to shortcut that. So Isn't it obvious with successes? Like success is scale
Lex Fridman or so it's not... What is it?
Chamath Palihapitiya No. I think that there's is a very brittle basic definition of success that's outside in, But it's not that's not what it is. You know, I know people that are much much much richer than I am, you know, and they are just so completely broken. And I think to myself, the only difference between you and me is outsider perception of your wealth versus mind. But the the happiness and the joy that I have in the simple basic routines of my life, give me, enormous joy.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so I feel successful, no matter what anybody says about my success lack of success. There are people that live normal lives that have good jobs that have good families. You know, I've have this like, ideal sense, like, I see it on Tiktok all the time. So I know it exists. These neighborhoods where there's like a called d sac and these beautiful homes and these kids are biking around.
Chamath Palihapitiya And every time I see that le I immediately flash back to what I didn't have, and I think that success. Look at how happy those kids are. So no, you... There is no 1 definition. And so if people are starting out to try to make a million dollars, a hundred million dollars a billion dollars you're gonna fail.
Lex Fridman There's a... Definition of personal success, but is there's also some level of that's different from person person, but there's also some level of the responsibility you have if there's a mission to have a positive impact on the world. So I'm not sure that elon is happy.
Chamath Palihapitiya No. In fact, I think if you focus on trying to have an impact on the world, I think you're gonna end up deeply unhappy.
Lex Fridman But does that matter? Like what what
Chamath Palihapitiya may happen happen this matter. It may happen as a byproduct. But I think that you should strive to find your own... Personal happiness and then measure how that manifests as it relates to society and to other people. But if the answer to those questions is 0, that doesn't make you less of a person.
Lex Fridman No. Hundred percent. But then the other way is there times when you just sacrifice your own personal happiness. Force for a bigger thing for... That you've created.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. If you're if you're in a position to do it, I think some folks are tested Elon is probably the best example. And it must be really, really hard to be him. Really hard. I have enormous levels of empathy and care for him.
Chamath Palihapitiya I really love him as a person because I just see that it's not that it's not that fun. And and he has these ways of... Being human that in his position, I just think are so dear, that if he never... I just hope he never loses them. Just a simple example, like, 2 days ago.
Chamath Palihapitiya I don't know why, but I went on Twitter and I saw the perfume thing. Yeah. So I'm like, fuck. I'm just gonna buy some perfume. So I bought his perfume, the burnt hair thing.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. And I said, and I emailed him the receipt and I'm like, alright. You got me for a bottle. And he responded in, like, 8 seconds, and it was just the smiley face or whatever. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya Just deeply normal things that you do amongst people that are just... So nobody sees that. You know what I mean? But it would be... He deserves for that stuff to be seen because the rest of his life is so brutally hard.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. He's just a normal guy that is just caught in this ultra mega vortex.
Lex Fridman Why do you think there's so few elon?
Chamath Palihapitiya It's an extremely lonely set of trade offs. Because to your point, if you get tested, So if you think about it again, prob holistically, there's 8000000000 people in the world, maybe 50 of them get put in a position where they are building something of such colossal importance that they even have this choice. And then of that 50, maybe 10 of them are put in a moment where they actually have to make a trade off. You know, you're not gonna be able to see your family. I'm making this up.
Chamath Palihapitiya You're not gonna be able to see your family. You're not know, you're gonna have to basically move into your factory. You're gonna have to sleep on the floor. But here's the outcome, energy independence and, you know, resource abundance and, piece and your, a massive peace dividend. And then he says to himself, I don't know that he did because I've never had this come.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. You know what? That's worth it. And like, and you look at your kids and you're like, I'm making this decision. I don't know how to explain that to you.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. You wanna be in that position? There's no there's no amount of money where I would wanna be in that position. So that takes an enormous fort and a moral compass. That he has.
Chamath Palihapitiya And that's what I think people need to need to depreciate about that guy.
Lex Fridman It's also on the first number you said it's confusing if there's 50 people. Or 10 people, like that are put in the position to have that level of impact. It's it's sound unclear that that has to be that way. It seems like there could be much more.
Chamath Palihapitiya There should be there's definitely people with the potential. But, you know, think about think about his journey, you know? His mom had to leave a very complicated environment, moved to Canada, moved to Toronto, you know, a small apartment. Just north of bay blue, you know, if you've ever been to Toronto. I remember talking to her about this apartment it's so crazy because I used to live like, around the corner for that place.
Chamath Palihapitiya And raise these 3 kids and just have to... So how many people are going start with those boundary conditions you know, and really grind it out. It's just very few people in the end that will have the resiliency to stick it through, where you don't give into the self doubt. And so it, you know, it's a really It's just a really hard set of boundary conditions where you can have 50 or a hundred of these people. That's why they needed to be really.
Chamath Palihapitiya They need to be really appreciated.
Lex Fridman Yeah. Well, that's true for all humans that follow the the threat of their passion and do something beautiful in this world That could be on a small scale or a big scale. Appreciation is that's a gift you give to the other person, but also gift to yourself. That somehow it becomes like this kinda contagious thing.
Chamath Palihapitiya I went to this... You are so right. You just, like... It... My my brain just lit up because yesterday I went to...
Chamath Palihapitiya An investor day of my friend of mine, describe Brad Ge. And you know, on the 1 very red productive world, Brad and I are theoretically competitors. But we're not. He makes his own set of decisions. I make my own set of decisions, We're both trying to do our own view of what is good work in the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya But he's been profoundly successful and it was really the first moment of my adult life where I could sit in a moment like that and really be appreciative of his success and not feel less than. And so, you know, a little selfish for me, but mostly for him as well, I was so proud to be in the room. That's my friend. That guy placed poker with me every Thursday. He is crushing it.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's awesome. You know? And that's a it's a it's a really amazing feeling.
Lex Fridman I mean, to to linger on the the trade offs, the complicated trade offs with all of this? What's your take on work life balance? In in a in a company that's trying to do big things.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think that you have to have... Some very, very strict boundaries. But otherwise, I think balance is kind of dumb. It will make you limited. I think you need to immerse yourself in the problem, but you need to define that immersion with boundaries.
Chamath Palihapitiya So if you, you know, if you ask me, like, you know, what does like my process look like? It's mono and regiment, but it's all the time, except when it's not, and that's also mono not and regiment. And I think that makes me very good at my craft because it gives me what I need. To stay connected to the problem without feeling resent about the problem.
Lex Fridman Which part the mono naught all in nature? Of it or the the... When you say hard boundaries essentially, go allow until you stop and you don't stop off...
Chamath Palihapitiya I'm in a little bit of a quan right now because I'm trying to redefine my goals. And you're catching me in a moment where I have even in these last few years of evolution, think I've made some good progress, but in 1 very specific way, I'm still very rep. And I'm trying
Lex Fridman to let go. Which was is that exactly? If you can...
Chamath Palihapitiya No. My business, it really gets reduced to what is your annual rate of compounding? That's my d degeneration. You know, Steph Ke Lebron James, Michael Jordan it's how many points did you average? Not just in a season.
Chamath Palihapitiya But over your career. You know? And in their case to really be the greatest of all time. It's points, rebound assists, steals, there's all kinds of measures to be, you know, in that pant of being really, really good at your craft. And in my business, it it's very red productive.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's how well have you compounded. And if you look at all the heroes, that I have put on a pedestal in my mind. They've compounded, you know, at above 30 percent for a very long time. As I, But now I feel like I really need to let go because I think I know how to do the basics of my job. And if I had to summarize, like, an investing challenge or investing.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think really it's, you know, when you first start out investing, you're a momentum person. You sign it in games stop, just a bunch of people each other. And then it goes from momentum, to you start to think about cash flows, you know, how much profit is this person gonna make whatever. So that's like the evolution. You know, this is the this is the basic thing to this is a reasonably sophisticated way.
Chamath Palihapitiya Then a much smaller group of people think about it in terms of macro geopolitics. But then a very finite view crack this special code, which is there's a philosophy, and it's the philosophy that creates the system. And I'm scratching at that furiously, but I cannot break through and I haven't broken through. And I know that in order to break through, I gotta let go. So this is the journey that I'm in as in my in my professional life.
Chamath Palihapitiya So it is an all consuming thing, but I'm always home for dinner, you know, we have very prescribed moments where we take vacation, the weekends, you know, like, if if I I can tell you about my week, if you're curious, but it's like, I would love
Lex Fridman I would love to know you week is since it's regiment
Chamath Palihapitiya and mono. I woke up. I wake up at 06:45. Get the kids, go downstairs. We all have some form of, you know, not super healthy breakfast.
Chamath Palihapitiya I make a latte become and and and the latte is like, I have a machine. I measure the beans. You know, I make sure that the timer is such where I have to pull it for a certain specific ratio. You know, just so you know, 20 grams. I gotta pull 30 grams with the water and Got...
Chamath Palihapitiya Know, I gotta do it in 30 seconds, etcetera.
Lex Fridman So your coffee sn.
Chamath Palihapitiya It helps me stay in rhythm. Sure. Before I used to have another machine, I just pushed the button. Yeah. But then I would push the button religiously in the exact same way.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman K can actually on a on that topic, you know, the morning with kids can be pretty stressful. Thing. Are you able to find sort of happiness? Is that also that morning is a source of happiness?
Chamath Palihapitiya It's great. My kids are lovely. They're man acts. I just see you know, and may maybe I don't... I've never asked This, but I'll just put my words.
Chamath Palihapitiya I see all of the things in moments where there was no compassion given to me. And so I just give him a ton of love and compassion. I have an infinite patience for my children. Not for other kids. Yes.
Chamath Palihapitiya So of course. Love for kids. So anyway, so we have a breakfast thing, and then I go upstairs, and I go the change and And I work out from 8 to 9, And that's, like, the first 15 minutes. I walk up on a steep incline, you know, 12 to 14 percent you know, 3 and a half to 4 miles per hour walk. And then, you know, Monday's is a push day, Tuesdays, front of the legs, Wednesday's pull, Thursdays back of the legs, 8 to 9.
Chamath Palihapitiya Monday, I always start, I talked to my therapist from 9 to 10, as soon as I finish working out, I get on the phone, and I talked to him. And it helps me lock in for the for the... So for the week. And I and I and I'm just talking about the past. And it's just helping me
Lex Fridman a recent past?
Chamath Palihapitiya Usually, sometimes the recent past, but usually it's about the past past. Something that I remember when I was a kid Because that's the work about just loosening those knots. Mh. You know? Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya So I put in that hour of work, respect that hour. Then I'm in the office. And then it's like, you know, I go until 12:15, 12:30. Go home, have lunch. Like a proper, like, go home, sit down.
Chamath Palihapitiya Have lunch. With nat, talk. She leaves her work. And we talk? How are we doing?
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, just check in, our youngest daughter will be there because she's 1, and she's making a mess. And then I... I'll have another coffee. That's it. My my limit for the day.
Lex Fridman Oh, no more Caffeine. That's it.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then I go back to the office and I'll be there till 6, 7, sometimes. And I do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm allowed to have meetings, Wednesday... Nothing it's all reading. Must be, unless it's a complete emergency. It has to be kind of a full reading and reading is a bunch of blogs Youtube videos.
Lex Fridman So no trying not to do when you're talking.
Chamath Palihapitiya No talking. Like being in silence, being present, thinking about things?
Lex Fridman I... By the way, how do you take notes? Do you have
Chamath Palihapitiya us Sketch. I have a pad and I write stuff down. Sometimes I go to my phone. I'm a little all over the place. Sometimes I do Google Docs.
Chamath Palihapitiya I don't have it. This is 1 thing I need to get better at actually. But typically what happens is, I actually do a lot of thinking in my mind, and I'm sort of filing a lot of stuff away. Mh. And then it all spills out and then I have to write.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. And then that gives me a body of work that I can evaluate and think about, and then I usually put it away. And a lot of the time it goes nowhere. But every now and then I come back to it and it just unlocks 2 or 3 things and I have a sense of how else I'm thinking about things. And then Friday at the end of the day, not and I talked to a couple therapist, and that's about checking out properly.
Chamath Palihapitiya So it's like, okay, Now it's like focusing. The weekend is to family, being present, being aware, you know. And if there's email, obviously, if I have to do meetings from time to time, no problem, but there's boundaries.
Lex Fridman Checking up properly. Oh, man. That is so powerful. Just like, yeah. Officially transitioning.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. So these are these are really important boundaries so that I can be immersed. And what what that means is Like, look on a Saturday afternoon, you know, on a random day, She'll be like words Cha mouth, and I'll be up in my room, and I I've found a podcast talking about, like d, which is like duct cancer in C 2 because I've been fascinated about breast cancer surgeries for a while and learning about that. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, listening to podcast about Jesus.
Chamath Palihapitiya Mh. And she's like, what that like, you know, doctor cancer and c 2. And she's like, okay. And so, you know, I so I have time to continue to just constantly learning, learning, putting stuff in my memory banks, to organize into something. And that's like a that's a week.
Chamath Palihapitiya But then in these fixed moments of time phone down, everything down, we go on vacation, you know, we go on a boat. We go to whatever where it's just us and the kids.
Lex Fridman Is there a structure when you're at work? Is there structured to your day in terms of meetings in terms of outside of Wednesday? You know, because you're half keep meetings
Chamath Palihapitiya to less than 30 minutes. Have to. And, you know, oftentimes meetings can be as short as, like, 10 or 15 minutes because then I'm just like, okay. Because I'm trying to reinforce that it's very rare that we all have something really important to say, And so the ritual that becomes really valuable to get scale is not the ritual of meetings, but the ritual of respect the collective time of the unit. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so it's like, you know what folks, I'm gonna assume that you guys are also tackling really important projects you also wanna have good boundaries in this immersion, go back to your kids and have dinner with them every night. It's not just for me, it's for you. So how about this? Why don't you go and do your work? This painting didn't need to be 30 minutes.
Chamath Palihapitiya It could be 5. And the rest of the time is yours and and it's weird because when people join that system at so So capital, They just... It's like facetime and it's like, let me make sure... And let me talk a lot. That's it's like, Say anything.
Chamath Palihapitiya I respect the person that says nothing for 2 years and the first thing that they say is not obvious. That person is immensely more valuable than the person that tries to talk all the time.
Lex Fridman What have you learned from your... So after Facebook, you started social capital or what what is now called social capital. What have you learned from... All the successful investing you've done there, about investing or about life.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah.
Lex Fridman Or about running a team
Chamath Palihapitiya if I'm very loa to give advice because I think it so much of it is situational, but my observation is that starting a business is really hard. Any kind of business? And most people don't know what they're doing. And as a result, we make enormous mistakes. But I would summarize this and this may be a little pet.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think there are only 3 kinds of mistakes. Mh. Because if we go back to what we said before, in the business, It's just learning. You're exploring the dark space to get to the answer faster than other people. And those the mistakes that you make are 3.
Chamath Palihapitiya Or the 3 kinds of decisions let's say. You'll hire somebody and they're really, really, really average, but they're a really good person Oh, yeah. You'll hire somebody, and they really weren't candid with who they are and their real personality and their morality and their ethics only expose them. Over a long period of time. And then you hire somebody, and they're not that good, morally, but they're highly performing.
Chamath Palihapitiya Mh. What do you do with those 3 things? And I think successful companies have figured out how to answer those 3 things because those are the things that In my opinion determines success and failure.
Lex Fridman So it's basically hiring and you just identified 3 failure case. Is for hiring.
Chamath Palihapitiya But very different failure cases and very complicated ones. Right? Like, the highly performing person who's not that great. It is as a human being. Do you keep them around?
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, a lot of people would air towards keeping that person around. What is the right answer? I don't know. It's the context of the situation. And the second 1 is also very tricky.
Chamath Palihapitiya What about if they really turned out that they were just not candid with who they are and it took you a long time to figure out who you were. These are all mistakes of the senior person that's running this organization. I think if you can learn to manage those situations well. Those are the real edge cases where you can make mistakes that are fatal to accompany. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya That's what I've learned over 11 and a half years. Honestly, Otherwise, the business of investing, I feel that it's like a it's a secret. And if you are willing to just keep chipping away, You'll peel back enough of these you know, Layers will come off and you'll see it the scales will come off and you'll eventually see it.
Lex Fridman I really struggle with, maybe you can be my therapist for a little bit. Well, that first case which you originally mentioned because I love people. I see the good in people I really struggle with just a mediocre performing person, who's who's a good human being. That's a tough 1.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'll let you off the hook. Yeah. I think that those are incredibly important and useful people. I think that if a company is like a body, They are like cartilage. Can you replace cartilage?
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. But would you if he didn't have to? No. K? Can I
Lex Fridman can I play devil's advocate? Yeah. So those folks because of their goodness. K make it okay to be mediocre. They they create a culture where...
Lex Fridman Well, we... What's important in life, which is something I agree in my personal life is to be good to each other to be friendly to be good vibes, all that kind of stuff, you know, and as was a Google, just like the good atmosphere. Everyone's playing this it's fun. Fun. Right?
Lex Fridman But to me, like, when I when I put on my hat of, like, having a mission and a goal, what I love to see is the superstars that shine. For some... In some way, like, do something incredible, and I want everyone to also admire that those super sis perhaps not just for the productivity sake or performing or successful company sake. But because that too is an incredible thing that humans are able to accomplish which is shine.
Chamath Palihapitiya I hear you, but that's not a decision you make, meaning you get lucky when you have those people in your company. That's not the hard part for you, The hard part is figuring out what to do with 1, 2 and 3. Yeah. Keep demo promote, promote, fire. What do you do?
Chamath Palihapitiya And this is why it's all about those 3 buckets, I personally believe that folks in that bucket 1. As long as those... Folks aren't more than 50 to 60 percent of a company are good. And they can be managed. As long as they are 1 to 2 degrees away from 1 of those people that you mentioned.
Lex Fridman Yeah. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya Because it's easy then to drag the entire company down, if they're too far away from the Lebron James because you don't know what Lebron James looks and feels and smells and you know... Yeah. So you need that tactile sense of what excellence looks like in front of you. A great example is if you like, if you just go on Youtube and you search these clips of how Kobe Brian's teammates described, not Kobe. But how their own behavior, not performance because there's a bunch of average people that Kobe played with this whole career.
Chamath Palihapitiya But their behavior changed by being somewhat closer to him. And I think that's an important psychological thing to note. For how you can do reasonably good team construction. If you're lucky enough to find those generational talents, you have to find a composition of a team that keeps them roughly close to enough of the Org. That way, that group of people can continue to add value, and then you'll have courage to fire these next 2 groups of people.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I think the answer is to fire those 2 groups of people. Because no matter how good you are, that stuff just inject poison into a into a living organism, and that living organism will die when it's exposed to poison.
Lex Fridman So you invest in a lot of companies. You've looked at a lot of companies. What do you think makes for a good leader? So we talked about building a team, but a good leader for a company. What are the qualities?
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, I when I first meet people, I never asked to see a resume. And when I'm meeting a company Ceo for the first time, I don't couldn't care less about the business. In fact. And I try to take the time to let them reveal themselves. Now in this environment, you know, I'm doing most of the talking.
Chamath Palihapitiya But if this was the other way around and you ever raising capital and you said Math, I'd be interested in you looking at this business. I'd probably say 8 to 10 words. For hours.
Lex Fridman Me just listen.
Chamath Palihapitiya Prod. You know, I throw things out prod, and I'll let you Lean. And in you me, I'm trying to build a sense of who this person is. Once I have a rough sense of that, which is not necessarily right, but it's a starting point, then I can go and understand why this idea makes sense in this moment. And what I'm really trying to do is just kind of like unpack where the biases that may make you, you know, fail, and then we go back to you.
Chamath Palihapitiya The the thing that Silicon Valley has the benefit of those is that they don't have to do any of this stuff if there's momentum. Because then the rule book goes up the window and people clam are to invest. So 1 of the things that I do and this is again back to this. That I inflict on myself is I have these 2 things that I look at. Thing number 1 is I the table, That says, how much should we make from all of our best investments?
Chamath Palihapitiya How much should we lose from all of our worst investments? What is the ratio of winners to losers over 11 years? And in our case, it's 23 to 1 on, you know, billions of dollars. So you can you can kind of like, you can see a lot of signal. But what that allows me to do is really, like, say, wait a minute.
Chamath Palihapitiya Like, we cannot violate these rules around how much money we're willing to commit in an inherent personality. You know? The second is I ask myself of all the other top vcs seasons Silicon Valley, name them all. You know, what's our correlation? Meaning, when I do a deal, silicon How often does anybody from Sequoia Excel benchmark klein?
Chamath Palihapitiya Who you name it? Do it at the same time or after? And vice versa. And then then I look at the data to see how much they do it amongst themselves?
Lex Fridman What's a good sign.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'm I'm 0. As virtually close to 0 as possible. That's
Lex Fridman a good thing.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, it's not a good thing when the markets are way way up because it creates an enormous amount of momentum, so I have to make money the hard way. I have to, you know, because I'm trafficking and things that are highly un correlated. To the the Ge of Silicon Valley, which can be a lonely business, but it's really valuable in moments where markets get crushed because correlation is the first thing that causes massive destruction of of capital. Massive. Because 1 person, all of a sudden with 1 blow up and 1 company, boom the contagion hits everybody, except the person that was, you know, Not.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so now, those are like more sophisticated elements of risk management, which is again, this pug that I inflict on Nobody ask me to do that. Nobody actually at some level when the markets are up really care. But when markets are sideways or own markets are down. I think that That allows me to feel proud of our process, you know?
Lex Fridman But that requires you to think a lot. A lot outside of the box. It's lonely because you're taking risk. Also your public personality. So you say stuff that if it's wrong, you get yell at for constantly.
Lex Fridman It's for for being... I mean, your mistakes aren't private.
Chamath Palihapitiya No. And that's something that has been a really, really healthy moment of growth. It's like an athlete, you know, if you really want to be a winner, you gotta to hit the shot in front of the fans. And if you miss it, you have to be willing to take the responsibility of the fact that you brick it. And over time, hopefully, there's a body of work that says you've generally hit more than you've missed.
Chamath Palihapitiya But if you look at even the best shooters, what are they 52 percent. So these are razor or thin margins at the end of the day, which is really... So then what can you control? I can't control the defense. Yeah I can't control what they throw up me.
Chamath Palihapitiya I can just control my preparation and whether I'm in the best position to launch a reasonable shot.
Lex Fridman You said that the world's first, trillion there will be somebody in climate change in the past. Yeah. Let's update that. What's today as we stand here today, what sector will the world's first trillion air come from.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. I think it's energy transition.
Lex Fridman So energy. So the things we've been talking about. Yeah. Really? So isn't...
Lex Fridman Okay.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think I think the way that I think about
Lex Fridman So this is a single individual start to interrupt. You see their ability to actually build a company that makes huge amount of money. As opposed to this distributed idea that you've been talking to about. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya But I'll give you my philosophy on wealth. Mh. Most of it is not you. An enormous amount of it is the genetic distribution of being born in the right place and blah blah irrespective of the boundary conditions of how you were born. Or where you were raised.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? So, you know, at the end of the day, you and I ended up in the United States. It's a huge benefit to us. Second is the benefit of our age. It's much better and much more likely to be successful as a 46 year old in 20 23 than a 26 year old in 20 23 because in my case, I...
Chamath Palihapitiya Demographics working for me. For the 26 year old, here, she has demographics working slightly against them.
Lex Fridman Can you explain that a little bit? What are
Chamath Palihapitiya the demographics here? In the case of me, the distribution of population in America looks like a pyramid. And in that pyramid, I'm wedged in between these 2 massive population cohorts, the boomers and then these... You know, Gen z and millennials. And that's a very advantageous position.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's not dissimilar to the position that Buffett was where he was you know, packaged in between boomers beneath him and the silent generation above him. And being in between 2 massive cop population cohorts turns out to be extremely advantageous because when the cohort above you transitions power and capital and all of this stuff you're the next person that's likely gets handed it. So we have a disproportionate likelihood to be... You know, we are lucky to be older. Than younger.
Chamath Palihapitiya So that's that's an advantage. And then the other advantage that has nothing to do with me is that I stumbled into technology. I got a degree in electrical engineering and I ended up coming to silicon Valley. And it turned out that in that moment, it was such a transformational wind of change. That was at my back.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? So the wealth that 1 creates is a huge part of those variables, and then the last variable is your direct contributions. In that moment. And the reason why that can create extreme wealth is because when those things come together at the right moment, it's like a chemical reaction. I mean, it's just crazy.
Chamath Palihapitiya So that was sort of part number 1 of what I wanted to say. The second thing is when you look then inside of these systems where you have all these... Sit tailwind. Right? So in tech, I think I'd benefit from these 3 big tailwind.
Chamath Palihapitiya If you build the company or a part of a company or a part of a movement, your economic participation tends to be a direct product. Of the actual value that that thing creates in the world. And the the thing that that creates in the world will be bigger if it is not just an economic system, but it's like a philosophical system. It changes the way that governance happens. It changes the way that people think about all kinds of other things about their lives.
Chamath Palihapitiya So there's a reason I think why database companies are worth x, social companies are worth y, but the military industrial complex is worth, you know, as much. And I think there is a reason why that if you, for example, were to go off and build some new fang source of energy that's clean and hyper abundant and safe. That what you're really going to displace or reshape is trillions and trillions of dollars of worldwide Gdp. So the global Gdp is, I call it 85000000000000, Right it's going at 2 to 3 percent a year. So in the next 10 years we'll be dealing with a hundred trillion dollars of Gdp.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? Somebody who develops clean energy in 2035, will probably shift 10 percent of that around. 10000000000000 dollars. A company can easily capture 30 percent of a market, 3000000000000 dollars. A human being can typically own a third of 1 of these companies, 1000000000000 dollars.
Chamath Palihapitiya So you can kind of get to this answer where it's like, it's gonna happen in our lifetime. But you have to... I think find these systems that are so ga and they exist today. It's more bounded because price discovery takes longer. And an existing thing, it's more un unbalanced because you know what it is, you know the tentacles that energy reaches.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? Of that 80000000000000 dollars of worldwide Gdp I bet you, if you added up all the energy companies, but then you added up all of manufacturing, you know, if you added up all of transport, you'd probably get to, like, 60 of the 80?
Lex Fridman Do you have an idea of which energy, which alternate energy, sustainable energy? Is the most promising.
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, I think that we have to do a better job of exploring what I call the suburbs of the periodic table. So, you know, we're really good in Seattle. You know, the upper northwest.
Lex Fridman Yes.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, we're kind of good in Portland. Mh. But we're not existent in San Diego, and we have 0 plan for North Carolina through Florida. Yeah. And so...
Lex Fridman So you... Is a a fancy way of saying nuclear is should be part of the discussion?
Chamath Palihapitiya I think nuclear... I think room temperature semiconductors. I'm I'm not convinced right now that the existing set of nuclear solutions will do a good job of scaling beyond bench scale. Think there is a lot of complicated technical problems that make it work at a bench scale level, even partially, but the energy equation. Is gonna be very difficult to overcome in the absence of some leaps in material science?
Lex Fridman Have you seen any leaps? I is Promising stuff like, you're you're seeing the cutting edge? From a company perspective. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya I would say not yet. I but the precursor, yes. I have been spending... From a fair amount of time, so talking about like, a new framework that's in my mind is around these room temp super. And so I've been kind of bumbling around in that forest for about a year.
Chamath Palihapitiya I haven't really put together any meaningful perspectives. But again, talking about, like, trafficking in in companies and investments that are very lonely, but they allow me to generate returns that are relatively unique and independent. That's an area where I don't see anybody else when I'm there. I'll give you another area. You know, we I think are about to unleash in a world of 0 energy and and 0 compute costs.
Chamath Palihapitiya Computational biology will replace biochemistry chemistry. And when you do that, you will be able to iterate on tools, that will be able to solve a lot of human disease. I think like if you look at the head of like, the top 400 most recurring rare diseases, I think like half the number 200 is a specific point mutation is just the mis between C. I mean, that's like, whoa, wait. You're telling me in billions of lines of code.
Chamath Palihapitiya I forgot, you know, semi colon right there. That's causing this whole thing to mis compile. I just gotta go in there and it's all done. It's a crazy idea. That was a c plus plus c c map for people that don't know.
Chamath Palihapitiya I said. There's 2 people who are 2 people there. So
Lex Fridman Everybody that just matter of
Chamath Palihapitiya what topic.
Lex Fridman Makes perfect sense.
Chamath Palihapitiya But but...
Lex Fridman So that couldn't that be a truly a source of a huge cup. The competition biology unlocks. I mean, obviously, medicine is begging for...
Chamath Palihapitiya The the thing with G though is that groundwork is well laid. Yeah. And talking about sort of like, the upper bound is well defined, the upper bound in medicine is not well defined because it it is not the sum total of the market cap of the pharma industries. It is actually the sum total of the value of human life. And that's an extremely ethical and moral question.
Lex Fridman Is there special interest that are resisting moving, making progress on the energy side? So how like, governments and how do you break through that? Have to technology acknowledge the reality of that? Right?
Chamath Palihapitiya I think it's less governments. In fact, I said, I think president Biden has done a really incredible job while Chuck Schumer really Is done a really incredible job because... So just to give you the math on this, right? Like, back to this... Like So 3 percent of everything is of a marketer or z.
Chamath Palihapitiya But when you get past 5 percent, things tend to just go nuclear to 50 60 percent. The way that they wrote this last bill, the cost I'll just use cars as an example. The cost an average car, it's 22 and a half thousand.
Lex Fridman Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya The cost of the cheapest battery car is 30000. And low and behold, there's a 7500 dollar credit, and it's like to think the invisible hand didn't know that that math was right, I think is kind of a little bit. And so the battery E car is gonna be the same price as the thing and it's gonna go to 40 50 percent. So we're already at this tipping point, so we're kinda ready to go. In these other markets, it's a little bit more complicated because there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to get built.
Chamath Palihapitiya So, you know, the the gene editing thing as an example, we have to build a tool chain that looks more like code that you can write to.
Lex Fridman You Facebook because written in, I think Ph p, original Hp. Which is... I'm still a big fan of. Sometimes you have to use the ugly solution. And make it look good versus trying to come up with a good solution, which will be too late.
Lex Fridman Let me ask you you consider a run for Governor of California then decided against it. What went into each of these decisions. And broadly, I have maybe a selfish question about Silicon Valley. Is it over? As a world leader for new tech companies as a this beacon of promise of young minds, stepping in and creating something that changes the world.
Lex Fridman I don't know if there's 2 questions connected.
Chamath Palihapitiya So it's not it's not over but I think it's definitely... We're in a challenging moment because... So back to that analogy of the demographics, if you think about the... Like, if you bucket it, forget like our relative successes. But there's a bunch of us in this mid fifties to mid thirties cohort of people have now been around, you know, for 20 years, 15 years to 25 years that have done stuff.
Chamath Palihapitiya Right? From And to Z, to Jack Do, etcetera. Elon, you know, whatever. Maybe you throw me in the mix, David Sacks, whatever. Okay?
Chamath Palihapitiya None of us have done a really good job, Of becoming a statesman or a states woman, you know? And really showing a broad empathy and awareness for the broader systems. So Silicon Valley is to survive as a system, We need to know that we've transitioned from move fast and break things to get to the right answer and take your time if that's what it means. And so we have to be a participant of the system. And I believe that.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I think that it's important to... Not be a d and not be thumb your face to Washington or not push the boundaries and say, you know, we'll deal with it after the fact, but to work with folks that are trying to do the best... Again, steel man their point of view, You know?
Lex Fridman Work with them. We're run for office. So potentially, like, b, you know, understand the system... It makes system. It makes me sad that there's no tech people or not many tech people in congress and certainly not in the presidential level, not many governors or senators and
Chamath Palihapitiya Well, I think that we also have roughly... You know, our rules will never allow some of the best and brightest folks to run for president because of just the the rules against it. But, you know... If if...
Lex Fridman Oh, you mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the before...
Chamath Palihapitiya I think David Sa would be an incredible presidential candidate. Now I also think he'd be a great governor. No. He was born in south Africa. You know, I think he'd be a great governor.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think he he'd be a great secretary state. I mean, he'd be great at whatever he wanted to do. You know, Freed berg you know, wasn't born here. So there's there's a lot of people that could contribute at different levels. And I hope that By the way, the other thing I like about the pod is like, I also think it helps normalize tech a little bit.
Chamath Palihapitiya Mh. Because you just see, like, normal people dealing with normal situations. And I think that that's good. You know, it is a really norma place. It it's not the car architecture that it's made out to be, but there is a small virulent strain of people that make it care.
Chamath Palihapitiya Car like?
Lex Fridman Well, that's in 1 direction. What do you think about the whole culture of I don't know if better turns but woke activism. So serve of activism, which in some context is a powerful and important thing, but in trading companies.
Chamath Palihapitiya I'll answer this in the context of renee age art. So, like, he says that people tend to copy each other. And then when they're copying each other, they're really what they're fighting... What they're doing is they're fighting or some scarce resource. And then you find a way to organize against, you know, the group of you for Against the person or a thing that you think is the actual cause of all of this conflict and you try to expel them.
Chamath Palihapitiya The thing that Woke doesn't understand. Is that unless that person is truly to blame, the cycle just continues. And, you know, that was a That was a framework that he developed that, you know, he's really conclusive proven to be true and it's observable in humanity in life So these movements I think the extreme left and the extreme right are trying to interpret away, to allow people to compete for some scarce resource. But I also think that in all of that what they don't realize is that they can scape code whoever they want, but it's not gonna work because the the bull work of people in the middle realize that it's just not true.
Lex Fridman Yeah. They they realize, but that they're still because in leadership positions, they're still momentum and they still scape go and they continue. And it seems to hurt the actual
Chamath Palihapitiya above it was more. But In fairness though if you had to graph the effectiveness of that function. It's decaying rapidly. It's the least effective it's ever been. You're absolutely right.
Chamath Palihapitiya Being canceled 5 years ago was a huge deal. Today, I think it was Jordan Peterson on your podcast. He said I've been canceled and it was amazing. He said 38 times or 40... He said some number which was a joint enormous number.
Chamath Palihapitiya A that he kept count of it and b was able to classify it. Yeah. I'm like, what classifier is going on of his mind. Where he's like That's an attempt to cancel me, but this 1 is not, but my point is, well, it's clearly not working. And so the guy is still there and the guy is, you know, putting his view out into the world, And so it's not what not to judge whether what he says is right or wrong.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's just to observe that this mechanism mechanism of action is now weakened. But it's weakened because it's not the thing that people think is really to blame. Yeah. You've been canceled on a small scale
Lex Fridman a few times, so it's not something... Sure it didn't feel small. Actually she wasn't small. I'm trying to minimize. Did that did that psychologically hurt you?
Lex Fridman Yeah. Was tough.
Chamath Palihapitiya I mean. In the moment, you don't know what's going on. But I would like to thank a certain Ceo. Of a certain well known company. Mh.
Chamath Palihapitiya And he sent me basically like a a step by step manual.
Lex Fridman And Doesn't it involve mushrooms. No.
Chamath Palihapitiya No. And and he was right. You know, the storm passed and life went not.
Lex Fridman Is it... I don't know if you can share the the the list of steps. Is the fundamental core
Chamath Palihapitiya ideas that just life goes on? The the core fundamental idea is like, you need to be willing. Able to apologize for what is in your control, but not for other people's mistakes. Your mistakes, yes. And if you feel like there's something, then you should take accountability of that.
Chamath Palihapitiya But to apologize for somebody else, for something that they want to hear isn't gonna solve anything.
Lex Fridman Yeah. There's something about apologies. If you do them, they should be authentic tool you actually want to say versus what somebody else needs to... Wants to hear.
Chamath Palihapitiya Otherwise, it doesn't ring true. And people can see
Lex Fridman through that.
Chamath Palihapitiya And people can see through it. And also, what people see through is not just the fact that, you know, your apology was somewhat hollow. But also that this entire majority people have now walked away. The mob was like, okay. Thanks.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. And then people are like, also you didn't care at all. This is like... And so then it it reflects more probably on them. Yeah.
Lex Fridman I know you said you don't like to give advice. But what advice would you give to a young person, you've lived an incredible life from very humble beginnings, difficult childhood, and you're 1 of the most successful people in the world. So what advice... I mean, a lot of people look to you for inspiration kids in high school or early college are not doing good or are trying to figure out basically, what to do when they have complete doubt in themselves, What advice would you give them?
Chamath Palihapitiya It is really important that if somebody that you respect, and I'm gonna... Just for the purpose of this, put myself in that bucket. And if you're listening to this. I wish somebody had told this to me we are all equal. And you will fight this demon inside you that says you are less than a lot of other people.
Chamath Palihapitiya For reasons that will be hard to see until you're much, much older. And so you have to find either a set of people far far away, like what I did, or 1 or 2 people really, really close to you or maybe it's both that will remind you in key moments of your life that that is true. Otherwise, you will give in to that beast and It's not the end of the world and you'll recover from it. I've made a lot of mistakes, but it requires a lot of energy. And sometimes it's just easier to just stop and give up.
Chamath Palihapitiya So I think that if you're starting out in the world, if you've been lucky to have a wonderful life and you had wonderful parents, man, you should go and give them a huge hug because they did use such a service that most folks don't do to most kids. Unfortunately. And it's not the fault of these parents, but it's just tough. Life is tough. So give him a kiss, and then figure out a way where you can just do work that validates you and where you feel like you're developing some kind of mastery.
Chamath Palihapitiya Who cares what anybody else thinks about it. Just do it because it feels good, do it because you like to get good at something. But if you're not 1 of those lucky people, You can believe in your friends or you can just believe in me. I'm telling you preserve optional. How you do that is by regulating your reactions to things.
Chamath Palihapitiya And your reactions are going to be largely guided in moments where you think that you are not the same as everybody else. And specifically that you are less than those people and you're not. So just save this part of this podcast and just play it on a loop if you need to. But that is my biggest learning is I am equal. I'm the same as all these other people.
Chamath Palihapitiya And you can imagine what that means to me to go out in the world to see people and think, okay. I'm the same as this person. I'm I'm As good as them. And you could imagine what you're probably thinking of what I'm thinking is not that thing. Right?
Chamath Palihapitiya You're probably thinking, man. This guy... Yeah, This guy So much better. No. I am fighting this thing all the time.
Lex Fridman Well, I've also met a bunch of folks. Who I think is a counter reaction to that once they become successful, they start developing a philosophy then they are better. Or even some people better than others, which I understand, you know, there's Lebron James versus other people and so on, but I always really resisted the that thought because I feel like it's a century.
Chamath Palihapitiya They have mastery in a thing, that they fall in love with. Yeah. I'm trying to develop mastery in a thing that I love. You know, I love the I love investing. It's like solving puzzles and I love that.
Chamath Palihapitiya I love trying to develop mastery and poker. I really love that. I'm learning how to be parent to a teenager because I have finally have 1 saw new stuff to, and I'm learning. That's what it's all about...
Lex Fridman Yeah. So you don't wanna think you're lesser than and you don't wanna think you're better than because those both lead you astra.
Chamath Palihapitiya I've never thought I was better than. I manifested better than because I was trying to compensate for feeling less than. My goal is just to feel like everybody else, feels. On the presumption that everybody had like a normal life?
Lex Fridman Given your nickname is the dictator, do you trust yourself with power? Like if I if the world gave you absolute power for a month?
Chamath Palihapitiya No. No. Because I think that, you know, I'm still riddled with bias. I don't I don't deserve that position. I don't...
Chamath Palihapitiya And I would not want that weight on my shoulders. I had a I had a a spot naturally where... It was a very important and big poker game. And it was a spot where I was in the pot, and it was a really large pot was like a million dollar pot. And I had to make a ruling and the ruling was in in my favor.
Chamath Palihapitiya And I was just beside myself. Peter I I don't play... I play for the challenge. I like to get pushed to the limit of my capabilities. I wanna see, can I think at the same level of these folks?
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, because these guys are all experts. They're all pros. And I get enormous joy from that challenge. And I like to win, but I like to win just a small amount. You know what I mean?
Chamath Palihapitiya And then I never wanted to win in that way. But because it was, you know, my game, I had to make this call, on a million dollar pot, and I wanted to just shoot myself. I just was like, this is gross and disgusting and and he was a complete gentleman which made it even worse. I god. So I do not want absolute power.
Lex Fridman Well those are the people you do want to have power is the ones that don't want it. Which is a weird system to have, because then you... In that kind of system don't get the leaders that you should have because the ones that 1 power aren't the ones that should have power. That's a weird weird system. What do you think?
Lex Fridman Let me sneak this question in that what is the meaning of life?
Chamath Palihapitiya I on.
Lex Fridman Why are we here? If a look up with the stars and think about like the big y question.
Chamath Palihapitiya I think that it's a chance to just enjoy the ride. I don't think it really like... I don't believe in this idea of legacy that much. I think it's a real trap.
Lex Fridman So do you think you'll be forgotten
Chamath Palihapitiya by history? I hope so. I really, really hope so. Because if you think about it, there are 2 or 3 people that are remembered for positive things and everybody else is all negative things. And the the likelihood that you'll be remembered for a positive thing is harder and harder and harder.
Chamath Palihapitiya And so the surface area of being remembered is negative. And then the second, what will it matter I'll be gone? I really just want, like, half fun, do my thing, learn, get better. But I want I want to reward myself by feeling like, Oh, that was awesome. Like, I...
Chamath Palihapitiya I've told this story many times, and I have put again my own narrative to fallacy on top of this, but... You know, Steve jobs sister wrote this, you know, obi bit in the New york Times when he died, and she ends by saying his last words were oh wow oh wow. Oh wow. That seems like an awesome way eye. You're surrounded by your friends and family, not the fact that he died obviously.
Chamath Palihapitiya But in a moment where what I read into it? Was your family was there? Maybe you thought about all the cool shit that you were able to do, And then, you know, you just started the simulation all over again. And so... Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya Just on the off chance that that's true. I don't wanna take this thing too seriously. You know what I mean? Just enjoy it.
Lex Fridman So you're not afraid of it
Chamath Palihapitiya the end. No. Get in tomorrow. Good right now.
Lex Fridman So every day you can go and you're happy. You're happy with the things you've done.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. You know, there there are obviously things I want to do that I haven't done. But there are no gaping things. I've really, really, really been in love. Total gift.
Chamath Palihapitiya There had been moments where I've really, really felt like everybody else. There have been moments rather, deep deep deep joy and connection with my children. There are moments where I've had incredible giggling fun with my friends. There's moments where I've been able to enjoy really incredible experiences, wine food, all that stuff. Great.
Chamath Palihapitiya I mean, what more do you want? Like, I I could keep asking for more, but I would just be a really crappy human being at some point. You know what I mean? It's enough. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah. It's enough. It's enough.
Lex Fridman This life this life is pretty beautiful if you allow yourself to see it. Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's really great. And it's better than it's ever been. Yeah. For most of us, actually. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Pretty nice.
Chamath Palihapitiya You know, and all of the, like, you know, millennials and Gen z's, you're about to get a boat load of money from your parents. And you better figure out how to be happy before you get that money. Yeah. Because otherwise, you will be miserable.
Lex Fridman Get a lot of dairy queen. No. That would that only work the first time.
Chamath Palihapitiya It worked 2 times in grade 5 and grade 6. My god that next year flex I work my ass. I'm like, but I could never bring myself to ask her.
Lex Fridman Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then she did it and I was like, man, she's... This woman's of miss B. Mom was a gem.
Lex Fridman Yeah. But the third time it faded. Isn't not the sad thing in my life? It's you know, the finite of it. The scarcity of it.
Lex Fridman Without that, we perhaps wouldn't ice cream wouldn't be so damn delicious. Jam, You're an incredible human. I definitely recommend that people listen to on all all platforms. Just... We're very lucky to be able to to get you wisdom.
Lex Fridman I... I agree with... I've talked a lot about you with the Andre Ka, who somebody I really respect. And he just to loves the shit out of you in the in and how much you how deeply you understand the world. That's a huge honor.
Chamath Palihapitiya He's an incredible human being So that's...
Lex Fridman On a different... Yeah. Speaking of Semi collins. There's some human beings that understand everything at the very low level and at a very high level. And those people are also...
Lex Fridman Very rare. So it's it's a huge honor and also a huge honor that you would be so kind to me, just like in subtle ways offline that you would make me feel like
Chamath Palihapitiya Worthwhile. Can I just say something as just a a Lame and listener What you do just so I could give you my version is that you take things and people so ideas and people that are mostly behind a rope and you d it? And what that does for all of us is it makes me feel like I can be a part of that. And that's a really inspiring thing because it's... You're not giving advice, You're not telling us how to solve the problem, but you're allowing it to be understood, in a way that's really accessible.
Chamath Palihapitiya And then you're intellectually curious in ways that you know, some of us would never expect that we were and then you kind of end up in this rabbit hole. And then you have the courage to go and talk to people that are really all over the map. Like, for example, like, I... When I saw your Jordan Peterson example, like... You went there, like you talked about nazis and I was just like, man, this is a complicated argument these guys are gonna tackle and.
Chamath Palihapitiya It's just it's really really impressive. So I have an enormous amount of respect for what you do. I think it's very hard to do what you do. So consistently. And so I I look at you as somebody I I respect because it's it just shows like somebody who's immersed in something and who's...
Chamath Palihapitiya Very special. So thank you for including me in this.
Lex Fridman I'm gonna play that clip to myself privately over and over. Just include when I feel love look. Low and self critical myself. Thank you so much, brother. Thanks Is Incredible.
Chamath Palihapitiya Thanks, Ben.
Lex Fridman Thank you for listening to this conversation with Cha
Lex Fridman mouth, Paula.
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