Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness
Guests: Chamath Palihapitiya
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–21:57
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.
The following is a conversation with Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and engineer,
founder and CEO of Social Capital, previously an early senior executive at Facebook, and is the
co-host of the All In podcast, a podcast that I highly recommend for the wisdom and the camaraderie
of the four co-hosts, also known as besties. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chamath Palihapitiya.
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?
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 hypervigilant all the time. And so it's actually easier for me to point to moments where
I was happy or I felt compassion or I felt safe. Otherwise, every moment, I'll give you a couple
of examples. I was thinking about this a while ago. There was a tree outside of my apartment
where we lived when I was growing up, and my father 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 hypervigilant child
learns how to basically estimate the strength of these branches. How far can he go before it breaks?
You have to estimate his anger and estimate the effective strength of branches and bring back
something. Because 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, get a different one. Or there was a certain belt that he wore
that had this kind of belt buckle that stuck out. And you just wanted to make sure if that was the
thing that you were going to get hit by, that it wasn't the buckle facing out because that really
hurt. And so you became hyperaware of which part of the buckle was facing out versus facing in in
those moments. And there are hundreds of these little examples, which essentially I would say
the through line is that you're just so on edge. 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 microcosm of
growing up, any moment that's not like that is seared 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 five or six,
I can't remember which it was, in the kindergarten of my school. And I would just go and the teacher
would ask you to clean things up. And at the end of that grade five year, she took me and two other
kids to Dairy Queen. And I'd never gone to a restaurant, literally, because we just didn't
have the money. And I remember the first time I tasted this Dairy Queen meal, it was like a
hamburger, fries, a Coke, and a Blizzard. And I was like, "What is this?" And I felt
so special, because you're getting something that most people would take for granted. Oh,
it's a Sunday or I'm really busy, let me go take my kid to fast food. I think that until I left
high school, I think, and this is not just specific to me, but a lot of other people,
you're in this hypervigilant loop, punctuated with these incredibly visceral moments of compassion
by other people. A different example, we had such a strict budget and we didn't have a car.
And so I was responsible with my mom to always go shopping. And so I learned very early on how to
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 Loblaws. And Loblaws would discount a cheesecake
from 7.99 to 4.99. And my parents would buy that once a year. And we probably did that six or seven
times. And you can't imagine how special we felt, myself, my two sisters. We would sit there,
we would watch the New Year's Eve celebration on TV, we would cut this cheesecake into five pieces.
It felt like everything. So that's sort of how my existence when I was at that age is,
for better or for worse, that's how I remember it.
The hypervigilant loop, is that still with you today? What are the echoes of that still with
you today, the good and the bad? 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. Because if you can step outside of that and you think about any child in
the world, they don't deserve to go through that. And at some point, by the way, I should tell you,
I don't blame my parents anymore. 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 stresses. And so,
I've really, for the most part, forgiven them. >> How did you, sorry to interrupt,
let go of that blame? >> That was a really long process where,
I would say the first 35 years of my life, I compartmentalized and I avoided all of those
memories. And I sought external validation. 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 viscerally, you're worth nothing. And so
then you go out and you seek 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 demonstrate in superficial
ways with the car you drive or the clothes you wear that you deserve people to care about you,
to try to make up for that really deep hole. But at some point, it doesn't get filled in.
And so you have a choice. And so for me, what happened was in the course of a six-month period,
I lost my best friend and I lost my father. And it was really like the dam broke loose,
because the compartmentalization stopped working because the reminder
of why I was compartmentalizing was gone. And so I had to go through this period of disharmony
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 the focus to my mom and
I said, "Well, you were not the victim, actually. You were somewhat complicit 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.
At the end of it, I never justified what they did, but I've been able to forgive what they did.
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 emigrating, by giving up everything,
by staying in Canada and doing whatever it took between the two 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. But it's been a long process of that steel manning so that you
can develop some empathy and compassion and forgive. >> BOWEN Do you think if you talk to
your dad shortly after he died and you went through that process or today, you'll be able to
have the same strength to forgive him? >> SUBRATA 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 would require him to be pretty radically honest
about confirming what I think he went through, because otherwise it just wouldn't work. Otherwise,
I would say, let's keep things where they are, which is I did the work with people that have
helped me, obviously. But it's better for him to just 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,
because I think the immigrant challenge, or not even the immigrant challenge, the
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. And I would put him in that category.
Yeah. And there is self-evaluation, introspection, they have tunnel vision, so they're not
able to often see the damage that did. I mean, I know, like yourself, a few successful people that
had very difficult relationships with their dad. And when 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. And I think that's maybe in part the way of life.
Yeah. And I remember pretty distinctly after I left and in my middle 30s, where
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 whether it was a title or
money or press clippings, he never really cared. He moved on to a different set of goals, which was
more about my character and 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 got to the finish line,
and I thought there was going to be a medal, meaning I can tell you, Lex, 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
going to be something, some gold star, which never appeared. And so that's a hard thing
to confront, because you're like, well, now what is this all about? Was this all just a ruse?
But then I realized, well, hold on a second. There were these moments 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,
and he would interlock the fingers, which I felt that's a really intimate way of holding
somebody's hand, I think. So I remember those things. So these are the things that are just
etched at least in my mind. And at the end of it, I think I've done a decent job in repairing
my relationship with him, even though it was posthumous. >> It does make me wonder in which way
you and I, we might be broken and not see it. It might be hurting others and not see it.
>> Well, I think that when you grow 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 less than many, many other people, when you enter adulthood or semi-adulthood in your
early 20s, 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. But you are going to take all of that disharmony in your childhood, and you're
going to inject that disharmony into 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 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.
>> 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?
>> 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
hundred things on a table, and the table says, "Find happiness here." And there are different
prices. The way that the world works is that many of these experiences are cordoned off a little bit
behind a velvet rope where you think that there's more happiness as the prices of things escalate.
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 admires the person with an island.
Right? Some person drives their car, admires the person who flies, who admires the person who flies
business class, who admires the person who flies first to private. There's all of these escalations
on this table, and most people get to the first five or six. And so they just naturally assume
that items seven through a hundred is really where happiness is found. And just to tell you
the finish line, I've tried a hundred and back, and I've tried two more hundred to 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 maximal link between
money and happiness is around $50 million. And it was just like a social studies kind of thing,
that I think one of the Ivy Leagues put out. 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
more things will solve your problems is not true. More and better is not the solution.
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 interloper,
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 live 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? 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.
Is there negative aspects to money? Like, for example, it becoming harder to find people you
can trust? 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 factually more worthwhile than some other
people that have less money. That's also a lie. But when you're given that kind of attention,
it's very easy for you to become a caricature 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, they're either cheap. They can 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 innate personality.
And that's a really interesting thing to observe, because then you can very quickly bucket sort
where do you want to spend time and who is really additive to your gameplay,
and who is really a negative detractor to your gameplay.
You're an investor, but you're also a kind of philosopher. You analyze the world
in all its different perspectives on all in podcasts, on Twitter, everywhere.
Do you worry that money puts you out of touch from being able to truly empathize with the experience
of the general population, which in part, first of all, on a human level, that could be limiting,
but also as an analyst of human civilization, that could be limiting?
I think it definitely can for a lot of people, because it's an abstraction for you to stop
caring. I also think the other thing is that you can very quickly, especially in today's world,
become the scapegoat. Just to use a Girardian, like Rene Girard, if you think about mimetic
theory in a nutshell, we're all competing for these very scarce resources that we are told
is worthwhile. And if you view the world through that Girardian lens, what are we really doing?
We are all fighting for scarce resources, whether that's Twitter followers, money,
acclaim, notoriety, and we all compete with each other. And in that competition,
Girard writes, "The only way you escape that loop is by scapegoating something or somebody."
And I think we are in that loop right now where just the fact of being successful is a thing that
one should scapegoat to end all of this tension that we have in the world. I think that it's a
little misguided, because I don't think it 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. And so if you become a caricature and you feed yourself into it, I mean, you're not doing
anything to really advance things. >> Your nickname is The Dictator. How'd
you get the nickname? We're talking about the corrupting nature of money.
>> That came from poker. In a poker game, when you sit down, it's chaos, especially like in our
home game. There's a ton of big egos. There's people always watching, rail birding the game,
all kinds of interesting folks. And in that, somebody needs to establish hygiene and rules.
§02Transcript · 22:04–41:43
And I really care about the integrity of the game. And it would just require somebody to just say,
"Okay, enough." And then people were just like, "Okay, stop dictating." And that's where that
nickname came from. >> So who to you,
speaking of which, is the greatest poker player of all time, and why is it Phil Hellmuth?
>> Exactly. You know, Muth probably knew this question was coming. Here's what I'll say. I
think Hellmuth is the antidote to computers, more than any other player playing today.
And when you see him in a heads up situation, so I think he's played nine or 10 heads up
tournaments in a row. And he's played, basically call it 10 of the top 20 people so far.
And he's beaten all but one of them. When you're playing heads up, one V one, that is the most
GTO understandable spot, meaning game theory optimal position. That's where computers can
give you an enormous edge. The minute you add even a third player, the value of computers and the
value of their recommendations basically falls off a cliff. So one way to think about it is Hellmuth
is forced to play against people that are essentially trained like AIs. And so to be
able to beat, you know, eight out of nine of them means that you are playing so orthogonally
to what is considered game theory optimal, and you're overlaying human reasoning.
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 Carlsen so good. You know, sometimes he
takes these weird lines, he'll sacrifice positions, you know, he'll overplay certain positions for
certain, you know, bishops versus knights and all of these spots that are very confusing.
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 six, there is no GTO 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 in 1954, memorized it.
And all of a sudden by six moves in, the computer AI is worthless. So that's what makes Helmuth
great. There is one person that I think is superior. And I think it's what Daniel also
said, and I would echo that because I played Phil as well, but Phil Ivey is the most well-rounded,
cold-blooded, bloodthirsty animal. He's just, and he sees into your soul, Lex, in a way where
you're just like, oh my God, stop looking at me. Have you ever played him? Yeah, yeah, we've played.
We've played and you know, he crushes the games, crushes the games. So what does feeling crushed
mean and feel like in poker? Is it like that you just can't read at all? You're being constantly
pressured. You feel off balance. You try to bluff and the person reads you perfectly,
that kind of stuff. - This is a really, really excellent question because I think this has
parallels to a bunch of other things. Okay, let's just use poker as a microcosm to explain a bunch
of other systems or games. Maybe it's running a company or investing. Okay, so let's use those
three examples, but we use poker to explain it. What does success look like? Well, 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, are going to make a bunch of mistakes.
There's a bunch of it that's going to 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. Basically, your mistakes minus my mistakes is the edge,
right? That's how poker works. If I make fewer mistakes than you make, I will make money and I
will win. 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 being
productive in the world and creating something. But you are going to make mistakes in making that.
Maybe it doesn't completely fit the market. Maybe it's mispriced. 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, et cetera. 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. 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 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. 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 subvert them.
Maybe you plant a spy inside of that other person's company to sabotage them. 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. So taking risks is somehow a way to
minimize the number of mistakes. Let's just say you want to find love. You want to find somebody
you're deeply connected with. Do you do that by not going out on dates? Yes. Sorry. You're the
only person that thinks that's the answer to that question. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. No,
but you know what I mean? You have to date people. You have to open yourself up. You have to be
authentic. You give yourself a chance to get hurt. But you're a good person. So you know what happens
when you get hurt? That is actually their mistake. And if you are inauthentic, that's your mistake.
That's a controllable thing in you. You can tell them the truth, who you are, and say,
here's my pluses and minuses. 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? Is it a cognitive thing? And then you fix it.
So the implied thing there is that there is, in business and investing, in poker, in dating,
in life, is that there's this platonic GTO, game theory, optimal thing out there. And so when you
say mistakes, you're always comparing to that optimal path you could have taken.
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.
Sure, got 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.
Yeah, it's like in neural networks, it's lost.
It's a neural network, it's lost, exactly.
Yeah, right. So you're using the mistake that is most, the word that is most understandable,
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 just being risk averse.
So if you flip it and say, try to maximize the number of successes,
somehow that leads you to take more risk. Mistake scares people.
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 corrosive 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 a, if you look at like getting into an elite school,
society rewards you for being in the Ivy Leagues in a way that, 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.
But that system doesn't really have a counterfactual because it's not as if you both
go to MIT and Ohio State. And then we can see two versions of Lex Friedman so that we can figure out
that the jig is up and there was no difference. And so instead it reinforces this idea that there
is no truth seeking function. 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
or you've failed completely. And so you have to find different unique ways of dismantling this.
This is why part of what I've realized where I got very lucky is I had no friends in high school.
I had a few cohort of acquaintances. But part of being so hypervigilant when I grew up
was I was so ashamed of that world that I had to live in. I didn't want to 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. - It's interesting, but you didn't feel
like your dad didn't put you in a prison of expectation? 'Cause like that's, if you don't
have a friend, so the flip side of that, you don't have any other signals. It's very easy to believe
like when you're in a cult that-- - Well, 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 about-- - You could be somebody great.
He believed that you could be somebody truly special. - I didn't believe him because I
couldn't reconcile then the other half of the day, those behaviors. But what it allowed me to do was
I escaped in my mind and I found these archetypes around me that were saviors to me.
So I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I grew up right at the point where the telecom boom was
happening. Companies like Nortel and Newbridge Networks and Mitel, Bell Northern Research,
these were all built in the suburbs of Ottawa. And so there were these larger than life figures,
entrepreneurs, Terry Matthews, Michael Copeland. And so I thought I'm gonna be like them. I would
read Forbes Magazine. I would read Fortune Magazine. 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.
I didn't have a group of friends that said, well, the goal is just to go to university,
get a simple job and join the public service, have a good life. 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 aspired to it. Now, if I was close to it, I probably would have
aspired to it because my parents in their best year made 32,000 Canadian together.
And if you're trying to raise a family of five people on $32,000, it's a complicated job.
And most of the time they were probably making 20 something thousand. 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. But because I
didn't have an obvious place, it's not like I had a best friend whose house I was going to. And
I saw some normal functional home. If I had had that in this weird way, I would have aspired to
that. >> What was the worst job you had to do?
>> 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 6 PM 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. And that year made all the difference to all
these kids. And so they would go get completely drunk. They would come back. They would come to
the Burger King. You would see all these kids you went to high school with. Can you imagine how
mortifying it is? You're working there in this getup. And they would light that place on fire,
vomit everywhere, puking, pooing, peeing. And when the thing shuts down at one o'clock,
you got to 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. I don't want to.
>> But it's funny that that didn't push you towards the stability and the security of the
middle class like life. >> I 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 two random
rich people that lived in my town who I'd never met, and what I read in magazines about people
like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. >> 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 immeasurable impact on the world?
>> That was an incredible moment in time because everything was so new. To your point,
like even how the standards of Web 2.0 at that time were being defined, we were defining them.
I mean, I think if you search in the patent library, there's a bunch of these patents that
me and Zuck have for random things like cookies or cross-site JavaScript, 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? How do we build in the cloud versus in a data center? How
do we actually have high-performance systems? >> You mentioned data science, the term and the idea.
>> I invented this thing called data scientist because we had a PhD from Google that refused
to join because he got a job offer that says data analyst. And so we said, "Call him a scientist,"
because he was a PhD in particle physics. So he was a scientist. I said, "Great, you're a scientist
here." >> That launched a discipline.
>> That launched a discipline. >> I mean, a term, what's a rose by
any other name? But yeah, sometimes words like this can launch entire fields. And it did in that
case. I mean, I guess at that time you didn't anticipate the impact of machine learning on
the entirety of this whole process because you need machine learning to have both ads and
recommender systems to have the feed for the social networks. >> Exactly right. The first
real scaled version of machine learning, not AI, but machine learning was this thing that Facebook
introduced called PYMK, 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, we do a compare, we make some guesses, and we start to
present to other people that you may actually know that may not be in your address book.
Really simple, a couple of joins of some tables, whatever. And it started to just go crazy. And
the number of people that you were creating this density and entropy inside this social graph
with what was some really simple, basic math. And that was eye opening for us. And what it led us
down this path of is really understanding the power of all this machine learning. And so that
infused itself into News Feed and how the content that you saw could be tailored to who you were
and the type of person that you were. So there was 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 of these countries? - How much of it is just kind of
stumbling into things using your best first principles gut thinking? And how much is it
like five, 10, 15, 20 year vision? How much was thinking about the future of the internet
and the metaverse and the humanity and all that kind of stuff? Because the News Feed,
sounds trivial. - I'll say something.
- But that's like changes everything. - Well, you have to remember, 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 Wayback Machine, you can see this,
people would invent an MP3 player and they would come up with some crazy name. Or they would invent
a software product and come up with a crazy name. And it sounded like the pharma industry,
blow Casimab, tag your best friends. And you think, what is this? This makes no sense.
§03Transcript · 41:50–1:01:20
And this was Zuck's thing. He was like, well, this is a feed of news, so we're going to call it
News Feed. This is where you tag your photos, so we're going to call that photo tagging.
I mean, literally, pretty obvious stuff. So the way that those things came about though,
was very experimentally. And this is where I think it's really important for people
to understand. I think Bezos explains this the best. There is a tendency after things work
to create a narrative fallacy because it feeds your ego. 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 probabilistic
thinkers that tried to learn as quickly as possible, meaning to make as many mistakes as
possible. I mean, if you look at this very famous placard that Facebook had from back in the day,
what did it say? It said, move fast and break things. In societal language, that's saying,
make mistakes as quickly as you can. Because the minute you break something, 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 want to see that there was
a thousand experiments that were run and show me them all from the dumbest to the most impactful.
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. >>COREY: Can I just take a small tangent on
that is that move fast and break things has become like a catchphrase of the thing that
embodies the toxic culture of Silicon Valley in today's discourse, which confuses me. Of course,
words and phrases get sort of captured and so on.
>>COREY: Becomes very reductive. That's a very loaded set of words that together can be,
many years later, people can view very reductive. >>LUIS: Can you steel man each side of that?
So pro move fast and break things and against move fast and break things.
>>COREY: 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. 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 things are breaking in code. Do the root cause analysis, figure out how to make things
better and then rapidly move into the space. And he or she who moves fastest into that space will
win. >>LUIS: It doesn't imply
carelessness, right? It doesn't imply moving fast without also aggressively picking up the lessons
from the mistakes you make. >>COREY: Well, again, that's steel
manning the pro, which is it's a thoughtful movement around velocity and acquisition of
knowledge. Now let's steel man 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 that are not clear upfront. So let's take a different, less controversial
example. If we said Lipitor worked well for all people except South Asians, and there's a specific
immuno response that we can iterate to. And if we move quickly enough, we can run 10,000 experiments
and we think the answer is in that space. Well, the problem is that those 10,000 experiments may
kill 10 million people. So you have to move methodically. When that drug was experimental
and it wasn't being given to 500 million people in the world, moving fast 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. And so now these small iterations have huge impacts that need to be
measured and implemented. Different example is like, if you work at Boeing and you have an
implementation that gives you a 2% efficiency by reshaping the wing or adding winglets,
there needs to be a methodical move slow, be right process because mistakes when they compound,
when it's already implemented and at scale have huge externalities that are impossible to measure
until after the fact. And you see this in the 737 max. So that's how one would steel man the
con case, which is that when an industry becomes critical, you got to slow down.
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 one low hanging fruit and that became your huge success. And now you're
sitting there with that stupid fruit. Completely. Well, so as an example,
if I was running Facebook for a day, the big opportunity in my opinion was really not the
metaverse, but it was actually getting the closest that anybody could get to AGI.
And if I had to steel man that product case, here's how I would have pitched it to the board
and to Zuck. I would have said, "Listen, there are three and a half billion people monthly
using this thing." If we think about human intelligence very reductively,
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 multimodal 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 have been a profound leap forward for humanity.
Can you dig into that a little bit more? So in terms of, now this is a board meeting,
how would that make Facebook money? I think that you have all of these systems over time
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 and your mood and can move you to a body
of music that you would like? What does it look like if your television, instead of having to go
and channel surf 50,000 shows on a horrible UI, instead just has a sense of what you're into
and shows it to you? 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 priori, 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. I think you license that and you make a lot of money.
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. If you look at the companies that are multi-decade
legacy kinds of businesses, the thing that they have done is quietly and surreptitiously move
down the stack. You never move up the stack to survive. You need to move down the stack.
So if you take that OSI reference stack, these layers of 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 1980s,
all the big companies that have been created, all the way from Fairchild Semiconductor and NatSemi
to Intel to Cisco to 3Com, Oracle, Netscape at one point, all the way up to the Googles and
the Facebooks of the world. But if you look at where all the lock-in happened,
it's by companies like Apple, who used to make software saying, "I'm going to get one close.
I'm going to make the bare metal and I'm going to become the platform." Or Google, same thing.
I'm going to create this dominant platform and I'm going to create a substrate that organizes
all this information that's just omnipresent and everywhere. So the key is, if you are lucky
enough to be one 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 usurp you.
Yeah, I 100% agree with you. That's why you're so smart. This is the depersonalization and
the algorithms that enable depersonalization, almost like a operating system layer. So pushing
away from the interface and the actual system that does the personalization. I think the challenges
there, there's obviously technical challenges, but there's also societal challenges that
it's like in a relationship. If you have an intimate algorithmic connection with
individual humans, you can do both good and bad. And so there's risks that you're taking.
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 of guiding people more? Because you can hurt people, you can
piss off people. I mean, there's a cost to forming a more intimate relationship with the users.
In the short term, I think. You said a really, really key thing, which was a really great
emotional, instinctive reaction, which is when I said the AGI 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
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. And you can experiment with this
for years if that's what it takes to find a version one 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 will be spending tens of billions of dollars in OpEx 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 2023, right now, you have the two most important tectonic shifts that have ever
happened in our lifetime in technology. They're not talked about, but these things allow AGI,
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 zero. You're not going to pay for
anything anymore. And we can double click into why that is. And the second is the marginal cost
of compute is zero. And so when you take the multiplication or, if you want to get really
fancy mathematically, the convolution of these two things together, it's going to change everything.
So think about what a billion dollars gets today. And we can use OpenAI as an example.
A billion dollars gets OpenAI a handful of functional models and a pretty fast iterative
loop, right? But imagine what OpenAI had to overcome. They had to overcome a compute challenge.
They had to strip together a whole bunch of GPUs. They had to build all kinds of scaffolding
software. They had to find data center support. That consumes all kinds of money. So that billion
dollars didn't go that far. So it's a testament to how clever that OpenAI team is. But in four
years from now, when energy costs zero and basically GPUs, they're falling off a truck
and you can use them effectively for free, now all of a sudden a billion dollars gives you some
amount of teraflops of compute that is probably the total number of teraflops available today in
the world. Like that's how gargantuan this move is when you take these two variables to zero.
There's like a million things to ask. I almost don't want to get distracted by
the marginal cost of energy going to zero because I have no idea what you're talking about there.
It's fascinating.
Can I give you the 30 seconds?
Sure.
Okay. So if you look inside of the two most progressive states, the three most progressive
states, New York, 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 three states are the
worst they are in the entire country. And energy is compounding at 3% to 4% 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% a month. But the ability to actually generate energy
is now effectively zero. The cost per kilowatt hour to put a solar panel on your roof and a
battery wall inside your garage, it's the cheapest it's ever been. These things are the most efficient
they've ever been. And so to acquire energy from the sun and store it for your use later on
literally is a zero cost proposition.
So how do you explain the gap between the cost going up?
Great question. So this is the other side of regulatory capture, right? We all fight to build
monopolies. While there are monopolies hiding in plain sight, the utilities are a perfect example.
There are 100 million homes in America. There are about 1,700 utilities in America. So they have
captive markets. But in return for that captive market, the law says you 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 $2 trillion proposition. These 1,700 organizations have to
spend, I think it's a quarter of a trillion dollars a year just to change the power lines.
That is why, even though it costs nothing to make energy, you are paying double every seven or eight
years. It's CapEx and OpEx of 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 to write to
AWS. I just want to use GCP. I just want to move on. All that complexity is solved for me." And
some law says, "No, you can't. You got to use it." So that's what consumers are dealing with,
but it's also what industrial and manufacturing organizations, it's what we all deal with.
So how do we get rid ourselves of this old infrastructure that we're paying for?
So 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 100 million homeowners are each going to become
their own little power plant and compete with these 1,700 utilities. And that is a great...
In the United States or globally?
No, just deal with the United States for a second, because I think it's easier to see here.
100 million homes, solar panel on the roof. And by the way, just to make it clear, the sun doesn't
need to shine. 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 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. The cost is going to zero.
How obvious is this to people? You're making this out?
Not obvious.
Okay. So because this is a pretty profound prediction, if the cost is indeed going to zero,
that... I mean, the compute... The cost of compute going to zero, I can...
So the cost of compute going to zero is simpler to see.
I can kind of understand, but the energy seems like a radical prediction of yours.
Well, it's just naturally what's happening, right? Now, let me give you a different way
of explaining this. If you look at any system, there's a really important thing that happens.
It's what Clay Christensen calls crossing the chasm. If you explained it numerically,
here's how I would explain it to you, Lex. If you introduce a disruptive product,
typically what happens is the first 3% to 5% of people are these zealous believers.
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%, if you want a product to get to mass market, you have one of two 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,
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 100 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 100 million homeowners.
They want to manage the power infrastructure, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe's. Just name the company.
So if you do that and you control that relationship, they're going to show you...
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. And it's
just a feature of being a member of Prime, and we'll manage all that energy for you." It makes
§04Transcript · 1:01:25–1:22:26
so much sense, and it is mathematically accretive for Amazon to do that. It's not accretive
for the existing energy industry, because they get blown up. It's extremely accretive 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'd have to find a
reason to fight. Meaning, sorry, there'd be a moral reason to fight, but the last number of wars that
we fought were not as much rooted in morality as they were rooted in... >> Yeah, it feels like
they were very much rooted in conflict over resources, energy specifically.
>> And then, sorry, just the last thing I want to say. I keep interrupting, apologies. But
the chips, what people want to say is that now that we're at two and three nanometer scale
for typical kind of like transistor fab, we're done. And forget about transistor density,
forget about Moore's Law, it's over. And I would just say, "No." Look at teraflops,
and really teraflops is the combination of CPUs, but much and much less important,
and really is the combination of ASICs, so application specific ICs and GPUs.
And so you put the two together. I mean, if I gave you a billion dollars five years from now,
the amount of damage you could do, damage in good way, in terms of 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 enough to do something really powerful. Whereas today, it's not yet
quite enough. >> 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 compute the infrastructure. It probably, if you could explain
that reasoning, means that you believe in this idea of energy going to zero, compute going to
zero. So let people that are optimized in that do the best job. >> And I think that's, you know,
initially in the early 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, if you were big enough scale,
oh, sorry, everybody was building their own stuff. Then between 2010 through 2020,
really the idea was everybody should be on AWS except the biggest of the biggest folks.
I think in the 2020s and 30s, I think the answer is actually everybody should be in these public
clouds. 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 Postgres was like the last big turn of the dial.
Why is that? 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. 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 an experience to a user. And everybody else can
make a lot of money just servicing that. So they work in a really, they play well together in the
sandbox. 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 roll your own data centers, you know, for example,
like Google for a long time had these massive leaps where they had GFS and Bigtable. Those are
really good in the 2000s and 2010s. And this is not just to throw shade at Google. It's very hard
for whatever exists that is the progeny of GFS and Bigtable to be anywhere near as good as a
hundred billion dollar industry's attempt to build that stack. And you're putting your organization
under enormous pressure to be that good. >> 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 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 compute. >> Well, I think that software has a
very powerful property in that there's a lot of things that can happen 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 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.
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 the next 20 years.
>> So let's linger on the social media thing. So you said if you ran Facebook for a day,
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 want to answer a different question,
is if you were Elon Musk, somebody you know, and you were taking over Twitter, what would you fix?
>> I've 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 in a sense of sort of patterns and probabilities.
And if you said to me, "Smath, probabilistically answer where are we going in apps and social
experiences?" What I would say is, "Lex, we spent the first decade building platforms and getting
them to scale." And if you want to think about it again, back to sort of this poker 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, QQ, Tencent, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat,
that whole panoply of apps. And interestingly, they were in many ways an atomized version
of the platforms, 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. Well, there's an interesting phenomenon that's kind of
hiding in plain sight, which is that the next most obvious atomic unit are content creators.
Now, let me give you two examples. Lex Friedman, this random crazy guy, Mr. Beast,
Jimmy Donaldson, just the two of you alone, add it up, okay? And you guys are going to approach
in the next five years a billion people. The only thing that you guys haven't figured out yet is how
to capture trillions of dollars of value. Now, maybe you don't want to, and maybe that's not
your stated mission. >> Right, right. But let's just look at Mr.
Beast alone because he is trying to do exactly that probably.
>> Yeah, and I think Jimmy is going to build an enormous business. But if you take Jimmy and all
of the other content creators, right, you guys are atomizing what the apps have done.
You're providing your own curated news feeds. 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 accruing to you. 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 and content and are
entertained. It's through brands like you, individual people that we can humanize and
understand are the filter. >> But aren't you just arguing against
the point you made earlier, which is what you would recommend is the invest in the AGI,
the depersonalization? >> Because they could still be a
participant. 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 a tax, right? You can participate in everything 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. I suspect all content creators would. And so it's that stack of services
that is like a smart human being. It's like, how do you help produce this information? You would pay
a producer for that. I mean, maybe you would. 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. And I don't think it's
a technical problem. So just to put it out there, I don't think it's one where there are these
nefarious organizations. That happens. Brigading XYZ, that happens. But the real problem is a
psychological one that we're dealing with, which is people 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 of comments on anything, you could have a person that says on Twitter,
I saved this dog from a fiery building. And there would be negative commenters.
And you're like, well, again, put yourself in their shoes. How do I steel man their case? I do
this all the time. I get people throw shade at me. I'm like, OK, let me steel man their point of view.
And the best that I can come up with is I'm working really hard over here. I'm trying. I played by all
the rules that were told to me. I've played well. I've played fairly. And I am not being rewarded
in a system of value that you recognize. And that is making me mad. 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 get 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. 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 virulently spitting into their keyboards,
other people are just going to say, you know what, I'm done with this. It doesn't make me feel good.
So the social network has to have a social cost. You can do it in a couple of ways. One is where
you have real world identity. So then there's a cost to being virulent and there's a cost to being
caustic. A second way is to actually just overlay an economic framework so that there's a more
pertinent economic value that you assign to basically spouting 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. 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'll be some retribution.
So I think there's more free speech over there, but it cannot be costless because in that there's
a level of toxicity that just makes these products unusable. - Third option, and by the way, all these
work together. If we look at this, what you call the corner case, which is hilarious,
what I would call the human condition, which is, you know, that anger is rooted with the challenges
of life. And what about having an algorithm that shows you what you see that's personalized to you
and helps you maximize your personal growth in the longterm 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. - You just described an AGI of a very empathetic, well-rounded friend. - Yes,
exactly. And then you can throw that person, even anonymous, into a pool of discourse. - 100%.
- And they would be better. - I think you're absolutely right.
That is a very, very, very elegant way of stating it. You're absolutely right. - But like you said,
the AGI might be a few years away, so that's a huge investment. My concern, my gut feeling is
this thing we're calling AGI is actually not that difficult to build technically, but it requires a
certain culture and it requires certain risks to be taken. - I think you could reductively boil down
the human intellect into cognition and emotion. And depending on who you are and 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. It's the emotional overlay. It's the empathy. It's the ability to steelman the
opposite person's case and feel why that person, you can forgive them without excusing what they
did, as an example. That is a very difficult thing, I think, to capture in software, but
I think it's a matter of when, not if. - If done crudely, it takes a form of censorship,
just banning people off the platform. Let me ask you some tricky questions. Do you think
Trump should have been removed from Twitter? - No. - What's the pro case? I'm having fun here.
- Do you steelman each side? - Yeah. Let's steelman the get him off the platform.
Here we have a guy who is virulent in all ways. He promotes confrontation. He lacks decorum. He
incites the fervent believers of his cause to act up and push the boundaries bordering on
and potentially even including breaking the law. He does not observe the social norms of a society
that keep us well-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 and 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 on too long. The other side of the argument would be he was a duly elected person
whose views have been run over for way too long. 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. If you really want to prevent class warfare and 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, all of this infrastructure is actually bigger than any partisan
view no matter how bad it is and that people will make their own decisions. 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. When you silence that voice, what you're effectively saying
is this is a rigged game and all of those things that we were told were not true are actually true.
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 experience is 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 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 tweeting or so on. So here you're sitting at Twitter and saying,
"Okay, I know everyone's talking about speech and all that kind of stuff, but I kind of want
to build a platform where the users are happy and they're becoming more and more unhappy. How do I
solve this happiness problem?" Well, let's ban the sources of the unhappiness. Now, we can't just say
you're a source of unhappiness, we'll ban you. Let's wait until that source says something
that we can claim breaks our rules, like incites violence or so on.
That would work if you could measure your construct of happiness properly. The problem is,
I think what Twitter looked at were active commenters and got it confused for overall
system happiness. Because for every piece of content that's created on the internet,
of the 100 people that consume it, maybe one or two people comment on it.
And so by overamplifying that signal and assuming that it was the plurality of people, that's where
they actually made a huge blunder. Because there was no scientific method, I think, to get to the
answer of deplatforming him. 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.
So in general, you lean towards keeping, first of all, presidents on the platform, but also
controversial voices. All the time. I think it's really important to keep them there.
Let me ask you a tricky one in the recent news that's become especially relevant for me. What
do you think about if you've been paying attention to Kanye West, a recent controversial outburst on
social media about Jews, black people, racism in general, slavery, Holocaust, all of these topics
§05Transcript · 1:22:40–1:42:18
that he touched on in different ways on different platforms, including Twitter. What do you do with
that? And what do you do with that from a platform perspective, and what do you do from a humanity
perspective of how to add love to the world? >> Should we take both sides of that?
>> Sure. >> Option one is he is
completely out of line, and option two is he's not. Just to simplify.
>> Sure, right. >> So the path one is he's an incredibly
important tastemaker in the world that defines the belief system for a lot of people.
And there just is no room for any form of racism or 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 decorum that keeps moving the ball forward. The other side would say,
"Life, I think, goes from harmony to disharmony to repair." And anybody who has gone through a
very complicated divorce will tell you that in that moment, your life is extremely disharmonious,
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 excusable, 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.
Can I ask you a human question? And I know it's outside looking in, but there's several questions
I want to ask. So one is about the pain of going through a divorce and having kids and all that
kind of stuff. And two, when you're rich and powerful and famous, I don't know, maybe you can
enlighten me to which is the most corruptive, but how do you know who are the friends to trust?
So a lot of the world is calling Kanye insane, or has mental illness, all that kind of stuff.
And so how do you have friends close to you that say something like that message, but from a place
of love and where they actually care for you, as opposed to trying to get you to shut up?
The reason I ask all those questions, I think, if you care about the guy, how do you help him?
Right. I've been through a divorce. It's gut-wrenching. The most horrible part
is having to tell your kids. I can't even describe to you how proud I am of and how
resilient these three 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 just so protective of them and so proud of them.
It's hard. Now, I don't know that that's what he went through, but it doesn't matter. In that
moment, there's no fame, there's no money, there's nothing. There's just the raw intimacy of a
nuclear family breaking up. And that, there is a death, and it's the death of that idea.
And that is extremely, extremely profound in its impact, especially in your children.
It is really hard, really hard.
Could you have seen yourself in the way you see the world being clouded during,
especially at first, to where you would make poor decisions outside of that nuclear family? So,
like, poor business decisions, poor tweeting decisions, poor writing decisions.
If I had to boil down a lot of those, what I would say is that there are moments in my life,
Lex, 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. And oftentimes, when that loop was unproductive, it's because
those things had really crappy consequences. So, yeah, I went through that as well. So,
I had to go through this disharmonious phase in my life and then to repair it.
I had the benefit of meeting someone and building a relationship block by block
where there was just enormous accountability, where my partner Nat 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 what I may have said or whatever excusable. And that's been really
healthy for me, and it's helped me repair my relationships, be a better parent, be a better
friend to my ex-wife, who's a beautiful woman who I love deeply and will 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 businesswoman. And I'm so thankful that I've had
two incredible women in my life. That's like a blessing.
- But it's hard. So, with Nat, it's hard to find a person that has that. I mean,
a lot of stuff you said is pretty profound, but having that person who has empathy and
accountability. So, basically, that's ultimately what great friendship is, which is people that
love you, have empathy for you, but can also call you out on your bullshit.
- She's a LeBron James-like figure. 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.
- She's the LeBron James of friendship.
- She's a GOAT. Well, what's so funny is we have a dinner around poker,
and it's taken on a life of its own, mostly because of her, because these guys look to her.
And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. She's taken, like... Her registers are already full. She's
thinking of all kinds of crap with me." But it's a very innate skill, and it's paired with...
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. You know,
there's that African proverb, like, "Go fast, go alone. Go far, go together." And,
like, since I was born, I was by myself, and I had to cope, and I didn't have a good toolkit
to use into the world. And in these last five or six years, she's helped me. 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 that's what it feels like, where now
this toolkit is like most average people. And I feel humbled to be average, because I was here,
down here on the ground. 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 I would say just completely unabashedly loves me,
this guy Rob Goldberg. He doesn't hold me accountable that much, which I love. Like,
I could say I killed a homeless person. He's like, "Ah, they probably deserved it."
You know? Whereas Nat would be like, "That was not good, what you just did."
But I have both. I mean, I have Nat every day. You know, Rob, I don't talk to that often. But
to have two people, I had zero. I think most people, unfortunately, have zero.
So I think 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 de-escalate what is going on in your mind. And I suspect what's going on in his mind, again,
to play armchair 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.
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.
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.
The way that my doctor explained it to me is you have to think about your self-worth
like a knot. It's inside of a very complicated set of knots. So it's like some people don't
have these knots. 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 unpredictably. And it takes a long time.
And so while you're doing that, you are going to have moments where when you feel less than,
you're not prepared to look inside and say, "Actually, here's how I feel about myself.
It's pretty cool. I'm happy with where I'm at."
I have to ask on the topic of friendship. You do an amazing podcast called All In Podcast.
People should stop listening to this and go listen to that. You just did your 100th episode.
I mean, it's one of my favorite podcasts. It's incredible. For 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 you. You're clearly—there's a tension, and there's a camaraderie
that's all laid out on the table. So I don't know the two Davids that well, but I have met Jason.
What do you love about him?
I mean, I'll give you a little psychological breakdown of all three of these guys.
Sure.
Just my opinion. And I love you guys.
Would they agree with your psychological breakdown?
I don't know. I think that what I would say about J. Cal is he is unbelievably loyal to no end.
And he's like any of those movies which are about the mafia or whatever, where something bad's going
wrong and you need somebody to show up. That's J. Cal.
So if you killed the said proverbial homeless person, he would be right there to help you.
He'd bury the body.
Yeah.
But he's the one that he'll defend you in every way, shape, or form, even if it doesn't make
sense in that moment. He doesn't see that as an action of whether it'll solve the problem. He sees
that as an act of devotion to you, your friend. And that's an incredible gift that he gives us.
The other side of it is that 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. But he's infinitely more lovable than he understands. You have to see
Lex. He is unbelievably funny. I cannot tell you how funny this guy is. Next level funny.
Yeah, his timing, everything.
Timing, charm, the care he takes. So he is as lovable, but he doesn't believe himself to be
and that manifests itself in areas that drive us all crazy from time to time.
Which makes it for a very pleasant listening experience. Okay, so what about the two Davids,
David Sachs and David Friedberg?
David Sachs is the one 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 four 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. And then Friedberg is this person who I think similar to me,
had a very turbulent 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, "He did it." And so if I didn't do it,
I would be glad that he did it, if it makes any sense. And you can see that he
feels like his entire responsibility is really around his kids. And to give a better counterfactual
and sometimes I think he gets that right and wrong, but he's a very special human being.
On that show, the two of you have a very kind of, like from a geopolitics perspective,
I don't know, there's just a very effective way to think deeply about the world,
the big picture of the world.
He's a very systems level thinker, which I really, really like.
Yeah, very, very.
Absolutely.
Very systems level. So looking at everything.
And he's very rooted in a broad body of knowledge, which I have a tremendous respect for. He brings
all these things in. Sachs is incredible because he has this unbelievable understanding of things,
but it has a core nucleus. So Freeberg can just basically abstract a whole bunch of systems and
talk about it. I tend to be more like that where I try to kind of, I find it to be more of a puzzle.
Sachs is more like anchored in a philosophical and historical context as the answer.
And he starts there, but he gets to these profound understandings of systems as well.
On the podcast, in life, you guys hold to your opinion pretty strong.
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.
I think it's like strong opinions, weakly held.
So I think that's the root.
Wait, is that a haiku or is that, can you explain that please?
Yeah, like look today, you and I, we steel man like the two sides of three different things.
Now you could be confused and think I believe in those things. I believe that it's important to be
able to intellectually traverse there, whether I believe in it or not. And like steel man, not
strong man. That's a really-
But we intro those things by saying, let us steel man this position. Sometimes you guys skip the-
You're right. We edit 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.
So that's how, like as fans, we should listen to that sometimes.
Sometimes.
So sometimes, 'cause you hold a strong opinion sometimes. Like for example, the cost of energy
going to zero, is that, like what's the degree of certainty on that? Is this kind of like you
really taking a prediction of how the world will unroll and if it does, this will benefit a huge
amount of companies and people that will believe that idea. So you really, you spend a few days,
a few weeks with that idea.
I've been spending two 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, I would consider it more of a mosaic.
And at the base or root, however you want to talk about it, is this idea, the incremental cost of
energy goes to zero. How does it manifest? And so I talked about one traversal, 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, so I've tried to think sort of this six, seven, eight hops forward.
And I have some, to use a chess 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
a hundred millions over there. But it's a distribution based on how probabilistic I
think these outcomes are and how downside protected I can be and how much I will learn,
how many mistakes I can make, et cetera. And then very quickly over the next two years,
some of those things will happen or not happen, and I will rapidly re-underwrite.
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-underwrite. So in order for me to get to this tree, maybe you can ask,
how did I get there? It was a 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 McKnight. And he
called me one day and he said, "Hey, I'm doing a deal. Will you anchor it? We're going public.
And it's a rare earth mining company." And I said, "Drew, I'm going to get tarred and feathered in
Silicon Valley for backing a mining company." And he said, "Samath, just talk to the guy and learn."
And the guy, Jim Latinsky, blew me away. He's like, "Here's what it means for energy. And
here's what it means for the supply chain. And here's what it means for the United States versus
China." But Lex, I did that deal. And then I did seven others. And that deal made money.
The seven others did not. But I learned, I made enough mistakes where the net of it was I got to
a thesis that I believed in. I could see it. And I was like, "Okay, I paid the price. I acquired
the learning. I made my mistakes. I know where I am at. And this is step one." And then I learned a
§06Transcript · 1:42:24–2:03:25
little bit more. I made some more investments. And that's how I do the job. The minute that you
try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet either on yourself or a company,
a girlfriend, whatever, it's too late. 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 in the next
10, 20 years? Maybe you can look at the war in Ukraine or relationship with China and other
places through this lens of energy. What's the hopeful, what's the cynical trajectory that the
world might take through with this drive towards zero energy, zero cost energy?
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 of 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. 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-zero
interest rates. And it may interest you to know that the really the last time that we had long
dated wars supported at low interest rates was World War II, where I think the average interest
rates was like 1.07% in the 10 year. And every other war tends to have these very quick opening
closes because these long protracted fights get very difficult to finance when rates are non-zero.
So just as an example, even starting in 2023, so the practical example today in the United States
is President Biden's budget is about 1.5 trillion for next year. That's not including the entitlement
spending, meaning Medicare, Social Security. So the stuff that he wants to spend that he has
discretion over is about 1.582 trillion is the exact number. Next year, our interest payments
are going to be $455 billion. That's 29% of every budget dollar is going to pay interest.
So you have these two worlds coming together, right, Lex? If you have us hurtling forward
to being able to generate our own energy and the economic peril that comes with trying to underwrite
several trillion dollars for war, which we can't afford to pay when rates are at 5%,
means that despite all the bluster, the probabilistic distribution of us engaging
in war with Russia and Ukraine seems relatively low. The override would obviously be a moral
reason to do it. That may or may not come if there is some nuclear proliferation.
But now you have to steel 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. OK, I'm getting calls every other day from my two largest energy buyers, India and China,
telling me, slow my roll. 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 reprehensible thing that's left in
my arsenal that could do all of these things together would be to set off a tactical nuke.
I would be the only person since World War II to have done that.
I mean, 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,
the financial reasons to do it and the natural 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,
which means that if the economy slows down, there's going to 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 zero interest rates. In a world of zero
interest rates, we would be in war. >> So you believe in the financial forces
and pressures overpowering the human ones? >> I believe in the invisible hand. I really
do believe in the invisible hand. >> Even in international war?
>> More so there. I think the invisible hand-- and by the invisible hand for the audience,
I think really what it means is 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 zero interest rates, we would be probably in the middle of it now.
>> See, there's a complexity to this game at the international level where some nations
are authoritarian and there's significant corruption. And so that adds from a game
theoretic optimal perspective, the invisible hand is operating in the mud.
>> Preventing war. The person that is the most important figure in the world right now is Jerome
Powell. He is probably doing more to prevent war than anybody else. He keeps ratcheting rates.
It's just impossible. It's a mathematical impossibility for the United States unless
there is such a cataclysmic moral transgression by Russia. So there is tail risk that it is possible
where we say, "Forget it. All bets are off. We're going back to zero rates. Issue a 100-year bond.
We're going to finance a war machine." There is a small risk of that. But I think the propensity of
the majority of outcomes is more of a negotiated settlement.
>> So what about, I mean, what's the motivation of Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place?
Financial forces are the most powerful forces. Why did it happen? Because it seems like there's
other forces at play of maintaining superpower status on the world stage. It seems like geopolitics
doesn't happen just with the invisible hand in consideration.
>> 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. But it seems like there's an end
game here, and there's not much playability. >> Yeah. I feel like I'm on unsteady ground
because there's been so many experts at every stage of this that have been wrong.
>> Well, there are no experts. >> Well, on this...
>> There are no experts, Lex. >> I understand this. Well,
let's dig into that because we just said Phil Hellmuth is the greatest poker player of all time.
>> He has an opinion. >> Yeah.
>> He doesn't... They would be mistaken... >> Phil, Ivey is an expert at poker.
>> Phil has an opinion. Ivey has an opinion as well on 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 made more mistakes than my opponent.
>> I thought you said there's an optimal. So aren't there people that have a deeper
understanding, a higher likelihood of being able to describe and know the optimal set of actions
here at every layer? >> Well, there may be a theoretically
set of optimal decisions, but you can't play your life against a computer, meaning the minute that
you face an opponent and that person takes you off that optimal path, you have to adjust.
>> Yeah. Like what happens if a tactical nuke... >> 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 incredibly sad moment in human history.
>> But do you wonder what US does? Is there any understanding? Do you think people inside
the United States understand? Not the regular citizens, but people in the military. Do you
think Joe Biden understands? Do you think... >> I think Joe Biden does understand. I think that...
>> You think they have a clear plan? >> I think that there are few reasons to let
the gerontocracy rule, but this is one of the reasons where I think they are better adept than
other people. Folks that were around during the Bay of Pigs, folks that hopefully have studied
that and studied nuclear de-escalation will have a better playbook than I do. My suspicion
is that there is an in an emergency break glass plan. 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.
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,
while the US ships a bunch of LNG over there. I don't know the game theory on all of this, but...
>> Does it make you nervous that... Or we're just being temperamental? It feels like the world hangs
in a balance. 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. And here's a presentation of
what looks like a hot war where multiple parties involved in escalation towards a world war is not
entirely out of the realm of possibility. >> It's not. I would really, really hope that
he is spending time with his two young twins. >> Well, this is part of what...
>> I really hope he's spending time with his kids. >> Agreed, but not kids, not just kids,
but friends. >> I'm not sure that he may not have friends, but it's very hard for anybody
to look at their kids and not think about protecting the future. >>
Well, there's partially because of the pandemic, but partially because of the nature of power,
it feels like you're surrounded by people you can't trust more and more. I do think the pandemic
had an effect on that too, the isolating effect. A lot of people were not their best selves during
the pandemic. From a super heavy topic, let me go back to the space where you're one 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 have a
chance to be impactful like Facebook, Apple? >> I think that's the key word. If your
precondition is to start something successful, you've already failed because now you're playing
somebody else's game. What success means is not clear. You're walking into the woods. It's murky,
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. And there's no short way to shortcut that.
>> Isn't it obvious what success is? Like success is scale, so it's not what are the...
>> No. I think that there's a very brittle basic definition of success that's outside in,
but that's not what it is. I know people that are much, much, much richer than I am,
and they are just so completely broken. And I think to myself, the only difference between you
and me is outsider's perception of your wealth versus mine. But the happiness and the joy that
I have in the simple basic routines of my life give me enormous joy. And so I feel successful,
no matter what anybody says about my success or lack of success. There are people that live normal
lives, that have good jobs, that have good families. I have this idyllic sense. I see it on
TikTok all the time, so I know it exists. These neighborhoods where there's a cul-de-sac and these
beautiful homes and these kids are biking around. And every time I see that, Lex, I immediately
flashback to what I didn't have. And I think that's success. Look at how happy those kids are.
So no, there is no one definition. And so if people are starting out to try to make
a million dollars, a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars, you're going to fail.
There's a definition of personal success, but is there's also some level of,
that's different from person to person, but is 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. >> No. In fact, I think if you focus on
trying to have an impact on the world, I think you're going to end up deeply unhappy.
>> But does that matter? Like why is your own personal happiness 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 zero, that doesn't make you less of a person.
>> No, a hundred percent. But then the other way, is there times when you need to sacrifice your
own personal happiness for a bigger thing that you've created?
>> Yeah. 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. I really love him as a person, because I just see
that it's not that fun. And he has these ways of being human that in his position,
I just think are so dear that I just hope he never loses them. Just a simple example,
two days ago, I don't know why, but I went on Twitter and I saw the perfume thing. So I'm like,
"Ah, fuck it. I'm just going to go buy some perfume." So I bought his perfume, the burnt
hair thing. And I emailed him the receipt and I'm like, "All right, you got me for a bottle."
And he responded in eight seconds and it was just a smiley face or whatever.
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. He's just a normal guy that is just caught in this
ultra mega vortex. >> Why do you think there's so few Elons?
>> It's an extremely lonely set of trade-offs. Because to your point, if you get tested...
So if you think about it again, probabilistically, there's 8 billion 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're not going to be able to
see your family. I'm making this up. You're not going to be able to see your family. You're going
to have to basically move into your factory. You're going to have to sleep on the floor.
But here's the outcome, energy independence and resource abundance and a massive peace dividend.
And then he says to himself, I don't know that he did because I've never had this...
Yeah, you know what, that's worth it. And then you look at your kids and you're like,
I'm making this decision. I don't know how to explain that to you.
>> Yeah. >> You want to be in that position?
There's no amount of money where I would want to be in that position. So that takes an enormous
fortitude and a moral compass that he has. And that's what I think people need to appreciate
about that guy. >> It's also on the first number you said, it's confusing that there's 50 people
or 10 people that are put in the position to have that level of impact. It's unclear that that has
to be that way. It seems like there could be much more. >> There should be. There's definitely people
with the potential. But think about his journey. His mom had to leave a very complicated environment,
move to Canada, move to Toronto, a small apartment just north of Bay and Bloor, 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 from that place and raise these three kids and just have to... So how many
people are going to start with those boundary conditions 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's just a really hard set of boundary conditions where you
can have 50 or 100 of these people. That's why they need to be really appreciated. >> Yeah. Well,
that's true for all humans that follow the thread of their passion and do something beautiful in
this world. That could be on a small scale or a big scale. Appreciation is a gift you give to
the other person, but also a gift to yourself. Somehow it becomes like this contagious thing.
>> I went to this. You are so right. My brain just lit up because yesterday I went to
an investor day of my friend of mine, described Brad Gerstner. And on the one very reductive 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, 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, a little selfishly for me, but mostly for him as well, I was so proud to be in the room.
That's my friend. That guy plays poker with me every Thursday. He is crushing it. It's awesome.
And it's a really amazing feeling. >> I mean, to linger on the trade-offs,
the complicated trade-offs with all of this, what's your take on work-life balance
in a company that's trying to do big things? >> 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. So, if you ask me, "What does my
process look like?" It's monotonous and regimented, but it's all the time, except when it's not.
§07Transcript · 2:03:33–2:24:29
And that's also monotonous and regimented. 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 resentful about the
problem. >> Which part? The monotonous, all-in nature of it? Or when you say hard boundaries,
essentially go all out until you stop, and you don't stop often? >> I'm in a little bit of a
quandary 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, I think I've made some good progress,
but in one very specific way, I'm still very reptilian. And I'm trying to let go,
which was that exactly? If you can-- >> In my business, it really gets reduced to
what is your annual rate of compounding? That's my demarcation. Steph Curry and LeBron James,
Michael Jordan, it's how many points did you average, not just in a season, but over your
career? And in their case, to really be the greatest of all time, it's points, rebounds,
assists, steals. There's all kinds of measures to be in that pantheon of being really, really
good at your craft. And in my business, it's very reductive. 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 at above 30% for a very long time, as have 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 an investing challenge or investing, I think really it's when you first
start out investing, you're a momentum person. You saw it in GameStop, just a bunch of people
aping each other. And then it goes from momentum to you start to think about cash flows, how much
profit is this person going to make, whatever. So that's like the evolution. This is the basic
thing to this is a reasonably sophisticated way. Then a much smaller group of people think about
it in terms of macro geopolitics. But then a very finite few 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 got to let go. So this is the journey that I'm in
as in my professional life. So it is an all consuming thing, but I'm always home for dinner.
We have very prescribed moments where we take vacation, the weekends. I can tell you about my
week if you're curious, but it's like- I would love to know your week. It's since it's regimented
and monotonous. I wake up at 6.45, get the kids, go downstairs. We all have some form of
not super healthy breakfast. I make a latte. I've become in and the latte is like, I have a machine.
I measure the beans. I make sure that the timer is such where I have to pull it for a certain
specific ratio. Just so you know, 20 grams, I got to pull 30 grams with the water and I got to do it
in 30 seconds, et cetera. So you're a coffee snob.
It helps me stay in rhythm. Sure. Before I used to have another machine, I just pushed a button.
But then I would push the button religiously in the exact same way. You know what I mean?
Can I say actually on that topic, the morning with kids can be a pretty stressful thing.
Are you able to find sort of happiness? Is that also that morning is a source of happiness?
It's great. My kids are lovely. They're maniacs.
I just see, and maybe I've never asked Friedberg this, but I'll just put my words. 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, of course. But for kids. So anyway, so we have a breakfast thing.
And then I go upstairs and I change and I work out from eight to nine.
And that's like the first 15 minutes I walk up on a steep incline, 12 to 14%,
three and a half to four miles per hour walk. And then Monday's a push day, Tuesday's front
of the legs, Wednesday's pull, Thursday's back of the legs, eight to nine. Monday I always start,
I talk to my therapist from nine to 10. So as soon as I finished working out, I get on the phone
and I talk to him. And it helps me lock in for the week. And I'm just talking about the past.
And it's just helping me. The recent past?
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.
So I put in that hour of work, respect that hour. Then I'm in the office. And then it's like,
I go until 12, 15, 12, 30, go home, have lunch, like a proper, go home, sit down, have lunch with
Nat, talk, she leaves her work and we talk, how are we doing? Just check in. Our youngest daughter
will be there 'cause she's one and she's making a mess. And then I'll have another coffee. That's
it, my limit for the day. Oh, no more caffeine. That's it. And then I go back to the office and
I'll be there till six, seven 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. So no, try not to do any talking.
No talking. It's like being in silence, being present, thinking about things.
By the way, how do you take notes? Do you have a-
A 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. I don't have a, this is one 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. And then it all spills out and then I have to write.
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 two or three things. And I have a sense of how else I'm thinking about things.
And then Friday at the end of the day, Nat and I talked to a couples therapist
and that's about checking out properly. So it's like, okay, now it's like focusing.
The weekend is family, being present, being aware. And if there's email, obviously,
if I have to do meetings from time to time, no problem, but there's boundaries.
Checking out properly. Oh man, that is so powerful. Just like officially transitioning.
Yeah. So these are really important boundaries so that I can be immersed. And what that means
is like, look, on a Saturday afternoon, on a random day, she'll be like, "Where's Chamath?"
And I'll be up in my room. And I've found a podcast talking about like,
DSIS, which is like ductal cancer in situ, 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 a podcast about DSIS." And she's like, "What's that?" And I'm like,
"Ductal cancer in situ." She's like, "Okay." And so I have time to continue to just constantly
learning, learning, putting stuff in my memory banks to organize into something. And that's a
week. But then in these fixed moments of time, phone down, everything down, we go on vacation,
we go on a boat, we go to whatever, where it's just us and the kids.
Is there a structure when you're at work? Is there a structure to your day in terms of meetings,
in terms of South Side of Wednesday? Because you're...
Have to keep meetings to less than 30 minutes. Have to. And 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 respecting
the collective time of the unit. And so it's like, "You know what, folks? I'm going to assume that
you guys are also tackling really important projects. You also want to 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 meeting didn't need to
be 30 minutes, it could be five. And the rest of the time is yours." And it's weird because when
people join that system at Social Capital, they just... It's like FaceTime and it's like, "Let me
make sure and let me talk a lot." It's like, "I don't say anything." I respect the person that
says nothing for two 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. What have you learned from
your... So after Facebook, you started Social Capital or what is now called Social Capital.
What have you learned from all the successful investing you've done there? About investing
or about life or about running a team? I'm very loath to give advice because I think
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 heterodoxical. I think
there are only three kinds of mistakes. 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 the mistakes that you make are three or the three 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 performant. What do you do with those three things?
And I think successful companies have figured out how to answer those three things because those
are the things that, in my opinion, determine success and failure.
So it's basically hiring and you just identified three failure cases for hiring.
But very different failure cases and very complicated ones, right? Like the highly
performant person who's not that great as a human being, do you keep them around? Well,
a lot of people would err towards keeping that person around. What is the right answer? I don't
know. It's the context of the situation. And the second one is also very tricky. 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 a company. That's what I've learned over 11
and a half years, honestly. Otherwise, the business of investing, I feel that it's a secret.
And if you are willing to just keep chipping away, you'll peel back enough of these layers will come
off and you'll see it. The scales will come off and you'll eventually see it.
I really struggle with, maybe you can be my therapist for a little bit,
with 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 a good human
being. That's a tough one. I'll let you off the hook. 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? Yeah. But would you if he didn't have to? No. Okay, can I play devil's
advocate? Yeah. So those folks, because of their goodness, make it okay to be mediocre.
They create a culture where, well, 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. When I
was at Google, just the good atmosphere, everyone's playing, it's fun. Fun, right? But to me,
when I put on my hat of having a mission and a goal, what I love to see is the superstars that
shine in some way, do something incredible. I want everyone to also admire those superstars,
perhaps not just for the productivity's sake or performing or successful company's sake,
but because that too is an incredible thing that humans are able to accomplish, which is shine.
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 one,
two, and three. Keep, demote, promote, fire. What do you do? This is why it's all about those three
buckets. I personally believe that folks in that bucket one, as long as those folks aren't more
than 50% to 60% of a company, are good. They can be managed as long as they are one to two degrees
away from one of those people that you just mentioned. 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. You need that tactile sense of what excellence looks like
in front of you. A great example is if you just go on YouTube and you search these clips of how
Kobe Bryant's teammates described, not Kobe, but how their own behavior, not performance,
because there was a bunch of average people that Kobe played with his whole career,
but their behavior changed by being somewhat closer to him. 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 two groups of people. I think the
answer is to fire those two groups of people. Because no matter how good you are, that stuff
just injects poison into a living organism, and that living organism will die when exposed to
poison. - 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? - When I first meet people, I never ask to see a resume.
And when I'm meeting a company CEO for the first time, I 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,
I'm doing most of the talking. But if this were the other way around, and you were ever raising
capital, and you said, "Smath, I'd be interested in you looking at this business," I'd probably say
eight to 10 words for hours. - You just listen. - Prod. I throw things out, prod, and I let you
meander. And in you meandering, 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 are the biases that may make you fail. And then we go back to you.
- The thing that Silicon Valley has the benefit of though, is that they don't have to do any of
this stuff if there's momentum. Because then the rule book goes out the window and people
clamor to invest. So one of the things that I do, and this is again, back to this pugilism that I
inflict on myself, is I have these two things that I look at. Thing number one is I have a table
that says how much did we make from all of our best investments? How much did 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 one on billions of dollars. So 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, we cannot violate these rules
around how much money we're willing to commit in an errant personality. The second is I ask myself
of all the other top VCs in Silicon Valley, name them all, what's our correlation? Meaning
when I do a deal, how often does anybody from Sequoia, Excel, Benchmark, Kleiner, you name it,
do it at the same time or after and vice versa. And then I look at the data to see how much they
do it amongst themselves. >> What's a good sign?
>> I'm at zero, as virtually close to zero as possible.
>> And that's a good thing. >> 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, cause I'm trafficking in things that are highly uncorrelated
to the gestalt 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 capital, massive. Because one person all of a sudden
with one blow up in one company, boom, the contagion hits everybody except the person that
was not. And so now those are like more sophisticated elements of risk management,
which is again, this pugilism that I inflict on my, nobody asks me to do that. Nobody actually
at some level when the markets are up really care that when markets are sideways or when markets
are down, I think that that allows me to feel proud of our process. >> But that requires you
to think a lot. >> A lot.
>> Outside of the box, it's lonely because you're taking risks. Also, your public personality. So
you say stuff that if it's wrong, you get yelled at for being, I mean, your mistakes aren't private.
>> No. And that's something that has been a really, really healthy moment of growth.
§08Transcript · 2:24:35–2:44:12
It's like an athlete. If you really want to be a winner, you got 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 bricked it. And over time, hopefully there's a body of work that says you've
generally hit more than you've missed. But if you look at even the best shooters, what are they? 52%.
So these are razor thin margins at the end of the day, which is really, so then what can you
control? I can't control the defense. I can't control what they throw at me. I can just control
my preparation and whether I'm in the best position to launch a reasonable shot. >>
You said that the world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change in the past.
Let's update that. What's today, as we stand here today, what sector will the world's first
trillionaire come from? >> Yeah, I think it's energy transition.
>> So energy, so the things we've been talking about.
>> Yeah. >> Really? So isn't it, okay.
>> Well, I think the way that I think about- >> So this is a single individual,
sorry to interrupt. You see their ability to actually build a company that makes a huge
amount of money as opposed to this distributed idea that you've been talking about.
>> Yeah, I'll give you my philosophy on wealth. 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, blah, irrespective of the boundary conditions of how you were born
or where you were raised, right? So 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 2023 than a 26-year-old in 2023. Because in my case, I have
demographics working for me. For the 26-year-old, he or she has demographics working slightly
against them. >> Can you explain that a little bit?
What are the demographics here? >> In the case of me,
the distribution of population in America looks like a pyramid. In that pyramid, I'm wedged in
between these two massive population cohorts, the boomers and then these Gen Z and millennials.
That's a very advantageous position. It's not dissimilar to the position that Buffett was,
where he was packaged in between boomers beneath him and the silent generation above him.
Being in between two massive 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 likely gets handed it. We have a disproportionate likelihood to be...
We are lucky to be older than younger. That's an advantage. 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. It turned out that in that moment,
it was such a transformational wind of change that was at my back. The wealth that one creates
is a huge part of those variables. Then the last variable is your direct contributions
in that moment. 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. It's just crazy.
That was part number one of what I wanted to say. The second thing is when you look then inside of
these systems where you have all these tailwinds. In tech, I think I benefit from these three big
tailwinds. If you build a company or are part of a company or a part of a movement,
your economic participation tends to be a direct byproduct of the actual value
that that thing creates in the world. 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. There's a reason, I think, why database companies are worth
X, social companies are worth Y, but the military industrial complex is worth as much. I think there
is a reason why that if you, for example, were to go off and build some newfangled source of energy
that's clean and hyperabundant and safe, that what you're really going to displace or reshape
is trillions and trillions of dollars of worldwide GDP. The global GDP is, I call it, 85 trillion.
It's going at 2% to 3% a year. In the next 10 years, we'll be dealing with $100 trillion of GDP.
Somebody who develops clean energy in 2035 will probably shift 10% of that around, $10 trillion.
A company can easily capture 30% of a market, $3 trillion. A human being can typically own
a third of one of these companies, $1 trillion. You can get to this answer where it's like,
"It's going to happen in our lifetime." But you have to, I think, find these systems that are so
gargantuan and they exist today. It's more bounded because price discovery takes longer.
In an existing thing, it's more unbounded because you know what it is. You know the tentacles that
energy reaches. Of that $80 trillion of worldwide GDP, I bet you if you added up all the energy
companies, but then you added up all of manufacturing, if you added up all of transport,
you'd probably get to like 60 of the 80. >> Do you have an idea of which
alternate energy, sustainable energy is the most promising?
>> Well, I think that we have to do a better job of exploring what I call the suburbs of
the periodic table. We're really good in Seattle, the upper Northwest. We're kind of good in Portland,
but we're non-existent in San Diego, and we have zero plan for North Carolina through Florida.
>> Yeah. Is that a fancy way of saying nuclear should be part of the discussion?
>> I think nuclear, I mean room temperature semiconductors. I'm not convinced right now
that the existing set of nuclear solutions will do a good job of scaling beyond bench scale.
I 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 going to be very difficult to overcome in the absence
of some leaps in material science. >> Have you seen any leaps? Is there
promising stuff? You're seeing the cutting edge from a company perspective.
>> Yeah. I would say not yet, but the precursor, yes. I have been spending a fair amount of time,
so talking about a new framework that's in my mind, is around these room temp superconductors.
And so I've been kind of bumbling around in that forest for about a year. I haven't really put
together any meaningful perspectives, but again, talking about trafficking 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. We, I think, are about to unleash in a world of zero energy and
zero compute costs, computational biology will replace wet 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 if you look at the head of the top 400 most recurring rare diseases,
I think half the number, 200, is specific point mutation, is just the mismethylation between C
and T. I mean, that's like, "Whoa, wait, you're telling me in billions of lines of code,
I forgot a semicolon right there? That's causing this whole thing to miscompile? So I just got to
go in there and boop, and it's all done?" That's a crazy idea. That was a C++ C throwback for people
that don't know what I said. - There's two people who are clapping.
- Two people there, everybody else is like, "What? This is not a pipe, what are you talking about?"
- Makes perfect sense. - But, but...
- So that, couldn't that be a truly, a source of a, if you, the computational biology unlocks,
I mean, obviously medicine is begging for... - The thing with energy though is that the
groundwork is well laid. And talking about sort of like the upper bound is well defined,
the upper bound in medicine is not well defined because 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. - Isn't there a special interest that are
resisting moving, making progress on the energy side? So like governments and how do you break
through that? I mean, you have to acknowledge the reality of that, right?
- I think it's less governments. In fact, like I said, I think President Biden has done
a really incredible job. Well, Chuck Schumer really has done a really incredible job because...
So just to give you the math on this, right? Like back to this, so 3% of everything is of a market
or zealots. But when you get past 5%, things tend to just go nuclear to 50, 60%. The way that they
wrote this last bill, the cost, I'll just use the cars as an example. The cost of an average car
is 22 and a half thousand. The cost of the cheapest battery car is 30,000. And lo and behold,
there's a $7,500 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 malarkey. And so the battery EV car is going to be the same
price as the thing, and it's going to go to 40, 50%. So we're already at this tipping point. So
we're kind of 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. So the gene editing thing, as an example,
we have to build a tool chain that looks more like code that you can write to.
Facebook has written in, I think, PHP, originally.
PHP, yeah.
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. 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 just have maybe a selfish question about Silicon Valley.
Is it over as a world leader for new tech companies? As this beacon of promise of
young minds stepping in and creating something that changes the world?
I don't know if those two questions are connected.
So 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 bucketed,
forget like our relative successes, but there's a bunch of us in this mid-50s to mid-30s cohort
of people that have now been around for 20 years, 15 years to 25 years that have done stuff, right?
From Andreessen to Zuck to Jack Dorsey, et cetera, Elon, whatever, maybe you throw me in the mix,
David Sachs, whatever, okay? None of us have done a really good job of becoming a statesman
or a stateswoman, 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. And I think that it's
important to not be a dilettante and not be thumbing your face to Washington or not push
the boundaries and say, we'll deal with it after the fact, but to work with folks that are trying
to do the best, again, steel men their point of view. Work with them, potentially run for office.
So potentially understand the system. Be a part of their 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.
Well, I think that we also have roughly, our rules will never allow some of the best and
brightest folks to run for president because of just the rules against it. But if-
Oh, you mean, yeah.
I mean, look, I think David Sachs 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. I think he'd be a great
secretary of state. I mean, he'd be great at whatever he wanted to do.
Friedberg wasn't born here. So 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 I also think it helps
normalize tech a little bit because you just see normal people dealing with normal situations.
And I think that that's good. You know, it is a really normative place. It's not the caricature
that it's made out to be, but there is a small virulent strain of people that make it caricature
like.
Well, that's in one direction. What do you think about the whole
culture of, I don't know if better terms, but woke activism? So sort of activism,
which in some contexts is a powerful and important thing, but infiltrating companies.
I'll answer this in the context of Rene Girard. 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 over some scarce resource. And then you find a way to
organize against the group of you, against the person or a thing that you think is the actual
cause of all of this conflict and you try to expel them. The thing that wokeism 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 conclusively proven to be true
and it's observable in humanity and life. So these movements, I think the extreme left and the
extreme right are trying to interpret a way 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 scapegoat whoever
they want, but it's not going to work because the bulwark of people in the middle realize that it's
just not true. Yeah, they realize, but they're still because in leadership positions, there's
still momentum and they still scapegoat and they continue and it seems to hurt the actual ability
of those companies to be successful. 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. Being canceled five 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 ginormous number, A, that he kept account of it and B, was able to classify it.
I'm like, "What classifier is going on in his mind?" where he's like, "Ah, that's an attempt
to cancel me, but this one is not." But my point is, well, it's clearly not working.
So the guy is still there and the guy is putting his view out into the world.
And so it's not to judge whether what he says is right or wrong. It's just to observe that this
mechanism of action is now weakened, but it's weakened because it's not the thing that people
think is really to blame. >>COREY: Yeah. You've been canceled on a small scale a few times.
So that's not some, I'm sure it didn't feel small. Actually, it wasn't small. I'm trying to minimize.
Did that psychologically hurt you? >>COREY: Yeah.
>>BF: It was tough? >>COREY: Yeah. 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. And he sent me basically like a step-by-step manual.
>>BF: Does it involve mushrooms? No. >>COREY: No. And he was right.
The storm passed and life went on. >>BF: I don't know if you can share
the list of steps, but is the fundamental core ideas that just life goes on?
>>COREY: The core fundamental idea is like, you need to be willing and 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. But to apologize for somebody else, for something that they want to hear,
isn't going to solve anything. >>BF: Yeah. There's something about
apologies. If you do them, they should be authentic to what you actually want to say
versus what somebody else wants to hear. >>COREY: Otherwise it doesn't ring true.
>>BF: Yeah. And people can see through that. >>COREY: And people can see through it. And also,
what people see through is not just the fact that your apology was somewhat hollow,
but also that this entire majority of people now walked away. The mob was like, "Okay, thanks."
And then people are like, "Oh, so you didn't care at all?"
And so then it reflects more probably on them. >>BF: Yeah. 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 one 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 that 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? >>COREY:
It is really important that if somebody that you respect, and I'm going to just for the purpose of
§09Transcript · 2:44:18–2:57:18
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 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 one or two 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. 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 you 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 them 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.
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 one of those lucky people,
you can believe in your friends or you can just believe in me.
I'm telling you, preserve optionality. How you do that is by regulating your reactions to things.
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. 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 as good as them." And you could imagine what you're probably thinking of what
I'm thinking is not that thing. You're probably thinking, "Man, this guy, yeah,
this guy, I'm so much better." No, I am fighting this thing all the time.
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 that they are better or even some people are
better than others, which I understand. There's LeBron James versus other people and so on.
But I always really resisted that thought because I feel like it's a slippery slope.
They're not better. They have mastery in a thing that they've fallen in love with.
Yeah.
I'm trying to develop mastery in a thing that I love. I love investing. It's like solving puzzles.
And I love that. I love trying to develop mastery in poker. I really love that. I'm learning how
to be a parent to a teenager because I finally have one. It's all new stuff to me and I'm learning.
That's what it's all about.
Yeah. So you don't want to think you're lesser than and you don't want to think you're better
than because those both lead you astray.
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 a normal life.
Given your nickname is the dictator, do you trust yourself with power?
If the world gave you absolute power for a month...
No. No, because I think that I'm still riddled with bias. I don't deserve that position. And
I would not want that weight on my shoulders. I had a spot actually 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. It was like a million dollar pot. And I had to make a ruling and the ruling was in my favor.
And I was just beside myself. I play for the challenge. I like to get pushed to the limit
of my capabilities. I want to see can I think at the same level of these folks 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? And then I never
wanted to win in that way. But because it was 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
he was a complete gentleman, which made it even worse. So I do not want absolute power.
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 want power aren't the ones that should have power.
That's a weird, weird system. What do you think? Let me sneak this question in there.
What do you think is the meaning of life?
I don't...
Why are we here? Give a look up at the stars and think about the big "why" question.
I think that it's a chance to just enjoy the ride. I don't think it really... I don't believe
in this idea of legacy that much. I think it's a real trap.
So do you think you'll be forgotten by history?
I hope so. I really, really hope so. Because if you think about it, there are two or three people
that are remembered for positive things, and everybody else, it's all negative things. And
the likelihood that you'll be remembered for a positive thing is harder and harder and harder.
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 to have fun, do my thing, learn, get better. But I want
to reward myself by feeling like, "Wow, that was awesome." I've told this story many times, and
I have put, again, my own narrative fallacy on top of this. But Steve Jobs's sister wrote this
obit in the New York Times when he died, and she ends it by saying his last words were, "Oh, wow,
oh, wow, oh, wow." That seems like an awesome way to die. You're surrounded by your friends and
family, not the fact that he died, obviously, 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 just started the simulation all over again.
And so just on the off chance that that's true, I don't want to take this thing too seriously.
You know what I mean? Just enjoy it.
So you're not afraid of it, the end?
No. Could end tomorrow. Could end right now.
So every day you can go and you're happy. You're happy with the things you've done.
Yeah. 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. There have been moments where I've really, really felt like everybody else.
There have been moments where I had 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. I mean, what more do you want? 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.
It's enough. It's enough.
This life is pretty beautiful if you allow yourself to see it.
It's really great and it's better than it's ever been for most of us, actually.
Yeah. It's pretty nice.
And all of the millennials and Gen Zs, you're about to get a boatload of money from your parents.
And you better figure out how to be happy before you get that money,
because otherwise you will be miserable.
Get a lot of Dairy Queen. No, that only worked the first time.
It worked two times in grade five and grade six. My God, that next year.
Oh, repeat.
Flex, I worked my ass off. I'm like, but I could never bring myself to ask her.
Yeah.
And then she did it. And I was like, man, this woman's a Miss Bruni. This woman's a gem.
Yeah. But the third time it faded. Isn't that the sad thing about life?
You know, the finiteness of it, the scarcity of it.
Without that, ice cream wouldn't be so damn delicious.
Chamath, you're an incredible human. I definitely recommend that people listen to you on all
platforms. We're very lucky to be able to get your wisdom.
I've talked a lot about you with Andrej Karpathy, who's somebody I really respect.
And he just loves the shit out of you in how much you, how deeply you understand the world.
It's a huge honor.
He's an incredible human being.
On a different, yeah, speaking of semicolons, there's some human beings that understand
everything at the very low level and at the very high level. And those people are also
very rare. So 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 I'm worthwhile.
Well, can I just say something as just a layman 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 demystify 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 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.
And then you're intellectually curious in ways that some of us would never expect that we were,
and then you 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. For example, when I saw your Jordan Peterson example, you went there,
you talked about Nazism, and I was just like, "Man, this is a complicated argument these guys
are going to tackle." It's 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 look at you as somebody I
respect because it just shows somebody who's immersed in something and who's very special.
So thank you for including me in this. I'm going to play that clip to myself
privately over and over, just when I feel low and self-critical about myself. Thank you so much,
brother. This is incredible. Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to this conversation with
Chamath Palihapitiya. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Jonathan Swift.
"A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart."
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
[END]
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