Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness

00:00:00.000 | In terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them because we will judge you and

00:00:06.160 | we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually, no,

00:00:11.200 | it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success. Because your error rate will diminish

00:00:18.400 | the more mistakes that you make. You observe them, you figure out where it's coming from.

00:00:23.120 | Is it a psychological thing? Is it a, you know, cognitive thing? And then you fix it.

00:00:27.440 | The following is a conversation with Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and engineer,

00:00:35.680 | founder and CEO of Social Capital, previously an early senior executive at Facebook, and is the

00:00:43.520 | co-host of the All In podcast, a podcast that I highly recommend for the wisdom and the camaraderie

00:00:50.960 | of the four co-hosts, also known as besties. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,

00:00:58.400 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chamath Palihapitiya.

00:01:04.560 | You grew up in a dysfunctional household on welfare. You've talked about this before.

00:01:11.280 | What were, for you personally, psychologically, some difficult moments in your childhood?

00:01:16.480 | I'll answer that question in a slightly different way, which is that I think when you grow up

00:01:21.440 | in a household that's defined by physical abuse and psychological abuse,

00:01:28.480 | you're hypervigilant all the time. And so it's actually easier for me to point to moments where

00:01:35.760 | I was happy or I felt compassion or I felt safe. Otherwise, every moment, I'll give you a couple

00:01:43.840 | of examples. I was thinking about this a while ago. There was a tree outside of my apartment

00:01:51.840 | where we lived when I was growing up, and my father sometimes would make me go outside

00:01:58.160 | to take the tree branch that he would hit me with. And so you can imagine if you're a 10,

00:02:04.560 | 11-year-old kid and you have to deal with that, what do you do? Well, a hypervigilant child

00:02:09.920 | learns how to basically estimate the strength of these branches. How far can he go before it breaks?

00:02:19.680 | You have to estimate his anger and estimate the effective strength of branches and bring back

00:02:27.120 | something. Because I remember these moments where if it was, he would look at it and then he would

00:02:31.760 | make me go out again and get it, get a different one. Or there was a certain belt that he wore

00:02:39.600 | that had this kind of belt buckle that stuck out. And you just wanted to make sure if that was the

00:02:47.440 | thing that you were going to get hit by, that it wasn't the buckle facing out because that really

00:02:52.960 | hurt. And so you became hyperaware of which part of the buckle was facing out versus facing in in

00:02:59.840 | those moments. And there are hundreds of these little examples, which essentially I would say

00:03:06.080 | the through line is that you're just so on edge. And you walk into this house and you're just

00:03:12.080 | basically trying to get to the point where you leave the house. And so in that microcosm of

00:03:19.520 | growing up, any moment that's not like that is seared in my memory in a way that I just can't

00:03:26.400 | describe to a person. I'll give you an example. I volunteered when I was in grade five or six,

00:03:33.920 | I can't remember which it was, in the kindergarten of my school. And I would just go and the teacher

00:03:40.000 | would ask you to clean things up. And at the end of that grade five year, she took me and two other

00:03:47.920 | kids to Dairy Queen. And I'd never gone to a restaurant, literally, because we just didn't

00:03:56.720 | have the money. And I remember the first time I tasted this Dairy Queen meal, it was like a

00:04:02.160 | hamburger, fries, a Coke, and a Blizzard. And I was like, "What is this?" And I felt

00:04:09.040 | so special, because you're getting something that most people would take for granted. Oh,

00:04:15.280 | it's a Sunday or I'm really busy, let me go take my kid to fast food. I think that until I left

00:04:22.560 | high school, I think, and this is not just specific to me, but a lot of other people,

00:04:30.000 | you're in this hypervigilant loop, punctuated with these incredibly visceral moments of compassion

00:04:37.120 | by other people. A different example, we had such a strict budget and we didn't have a car.

00:04:45.680 | And so I was responsible with my mom to always go shopping. And so I learned very early on how to

00:04:54.320 | look for coupons, how to buy things that were on sale or special. And we had a very basic diet,

00:05:00.240 | because you have to budget this thing really precisely. But the end of every year where I

00:05:07.920 | lived, there was a large grocery chain called Loblaws. And Loblaws would discount a cheesecake

00:05:16.800 | from 7.99 to 4.99. And my parents would buy that once a year. And we probably did that six or seven

00:05:26.480 | times. And you can't imagine how special we felt, myself, my two sisters. We would sit there,

00:05:33.760 | we would watch the New Year's Eve celebration on TV, we would cut this cheesecake into five pieces.

00:05:41.360 | It felt like everything. So that's sort of how my existence when I was at that age is,

00:05:50.720 | for better or for worse, that's how I remember it.

00:05:53.520 | The hypervigilant loop, is that still with you today? What are the echoes of that still with

00:05:59.920 | you today, the good and the bad? If you put yourself

00:06:05.840 | in the mind of a young child, the thing that that does to you is at a very core basic level,

00:06:18.000 | it says you're worthless. Because if you can step outside of that and you think about any child in

00:06:25.200 | the world, they don't deserve to go through that. And at some point, by the way, I should tell you,

00:06:32.080 | I don't blame my parents anymore. It was a process to get there, but I feel like they did the best

00:06:37.440 | they could. And they suffered their own issues and enormous pressures and stresses. And so,

00:06:45.120 | I've really, for the most part, forgiven them. >> How did you, sorry to interrupt,

00:06:50.960 | let go of that blame? >> That was a really long process where,

00:06:56.800 | I would say the first 35 years of my life, I compartmentalized and I avoided all of those

00:07:03.360 | memories. And I sought external validation. Going back to this self-worth idea, if you're taught as

00:07:12.320 | a child that you're worthless, because why would somebody do these things to you? It's not because

00:07:16.640 | you're worth something, you think to yourself, very viscerally, you're worth nothing. And so

00:07:22.800 | then you go out and you seek external validation. Maybe you try to go and get into a great college,

00:07:27.600 | you try to get a good job, you try to make a lot of money, you try to demonstrate in superficial

00:07:34.800 | ways with the car you drive or the clothes you wear that you deserve people to care about you,

00:07:40.320 | to try to make up for that really deep hole. But at some point, it doesn't get filled in.

00:07:47.360 | And so you have a choice. And so for me, what happened was in the course of a six-month period,

00:07:52.880 | I lost my best friend and I lost my father. And it was really like the dam broke loose,

00:07:59.040 | because the compartmentalization stopped working because the reminder

00:08:04.160 | of why I was compartmentalizing was gone. And so I had to go through this period of disharmony

00:08:12.640 | to really understand and steel man his perspective. And can you imagine trying to do that,

00:08:22.400 | to go through all of the things where you have to now look at it from his perspective

00:08:27.520 | and find compassion and empathy for what he went through? And then I shift the focus to my mom and

00:08:36.000 | I said, "Well, you were not the victim, actually. You were somewhat complicit as well, because

00:08:41.920 | you were of sound mind and body and you were in the room when it happened."

00:08:45.200 | So then I had to go through that process with her and steel man her perspective.

00:08:50.240 | At the end of it, I never justified what they did, but I've been able to forgive what they did.

00:08:56.720 | I think they did the best they could. And at the end of the day, they did the most important thing,

00:09:03.920 | which is they gave me and my sisters a shot by emigrating, by giving up everything,

00:09:10.160 | by staying in Canada and doing whatever it took between the two of them

00:09:14.240 | to sort of claw and scrape together enough money to live so that my sisters and I could have a

00:09:21.120 | shot. And I'm very thankful for them. Could they have done better? Obviously. But I'm okay with

00:09:26.400 | what has taken place. But it's been a long process of that steel manning so that you

00:09:31.840 | can develop some empathy and compassion and forgive. >> BOWEN Do you think if you talk to

00:09:36.720 | your dad shortly after he died and you went through that process or today, you'll be able to

00:09:43.680 | have the same strength to forgive him? >> SUBRATA I think it would be a very

00:09:53.360 | complicated journey. I think I've learned to be incredibly open about what has happened.

00:10:01.920 | And all of the mistakes I've made, I think it would require him to be pretty radically honest

00:10:11.440 | about confirming what I think he went through, because otherwise it just wouldn't work. Otherwise,

00:10:18.960 | I would say, let's keep things where they are, which is I did the work with people that have

00:10:24.800 | helped me, obviously. But it's better for him to just kind of hopefully he's looking

00:10:30.960 | from some place and he's thinking it was worth it. I think he deserves to think that all of this,

00:10:36.800 | because I think the immigrant challenge, or not even the immigrant challenge, the

00:10:42.000 | lower middle class challenge, anybody who really wants better for their kids and doesn't have a

00:10:46.560 | good toolkit to give it to them, some of them just they choke up on the bat. They just get so

00:10:54.160 | agitated about this idea that all this sacrifice will not be worth it,

00:10:58.880 | that it spills out in really unproductive ways. And I would put him in that category.

00:11:04.080 | Yeah. And there is self-evaluation, introspection, they have tunnel vision, so they're not

00:11:10.960 | able to often see the damage that did. I mean, I know, like yourself, a few successful people that

00:11:19.440 | had very difficult relationships with their dad. And when you take the perspective of the dad,

00:11:27.040 | they're completely in denial about any of it. So if you actually have a conversation,

00:11:31.840 | there would not be a deep honesty there. And I think that's maybe in part the way of life.

00:11:38.160 | Yeah. And I remember pretty distinctly after I left and in my middle 30s, where

00:11:46.720 | by all measure, I had roughly become reasonably successful. And my dad didn't particularly care

00:11:54.560 | about that, which was so odd, because I had to confront the fact that whether it was a title or

00:12:01.520 | money or press clippings, he never really cared. He moved on to a different set of goals, which was

00:12:07.520 | more about my character and being a good person to my family and really preparing me to lead our

00:12:16.000 | family when he wasn't there. And that bothered me, because I thought I got to the finish line,

00:12:22.080 | and I thought there was going to be a medal, meaning I can tell you, Lex, he never told me

00:12:27.840 | that he loved me. I'm not sure if that's normal or not. It was my normality. And I thought there's

00:12:33.840 | going to be something, some gold star, which never appeared. And so that's a hard thing

00:12:40.000 | to confront, because you're like, well, now what is this all about? Was this all just a ruse?

00:12:49.200 | But then I realized, well, hold on a second. There were these moments where in his way, again,

00:12:54.960 | putting yourself in his shoes, I think he was trying to say he was sorry. He would hold my hand,

00:13:01.200 | and he would interlock the fingers, which I felt that's a really intimate way of holding

00:13:06.000 | somebody's hand, I think. So I remember those things. So these are the things that are just

00:13:11.920 | etched at least in my mind. And at the end of it, I think I've done a decent job in repairing

00:13:20.240 | my relationship with him, even though it was posthumous. >> It does make me wonder in which way

00:13:26.720 | you and I, we might be broken and not see it. It might be hurting others and not see it.

00:13:33.200 | >> Well, I think that when you grow up in those kinds of environments, and they're all different

00:13:38.400 | kinds of this kind of dysfunction, but if what you get from that is that you're not worthwhile,

00:13:45.200 | you're less than many, many other people, when you enter adulthood or semi-adulthood in your

00:13:53.920 | early 20s, you will be in a cycle where you are hurting other people. You may not know it.

00:14:00.640 | Hopefully, you find somebody who holds you accountable and tells you and loves you enough

00:14:05.920 | through that. But you are going to take all of that disharmony in your childhood, and you're

00:14:11.920 | going to inject that disharmony into whether it's your professional relationships or your

00:14:16.640 | personal relationships or both until you get to some form of rock bottom and you start to repair.

00:14:23.280 | And I think there's a lot of people that resonate with that because they have each suffered their

00:14:29.760 | own things that at some point in their lives have told them that they're less than. And then they go

00:14:37.120 | and cope. And when you cope, eventually those coping mechanisms escalate, and at some point,

00:14:44.560 | it'll be unhealthy either for you, but oftentimes it's for the people around you.

00:14:48.800 | >> Well, from those humble beginnings, you are now a billionaire. How has money changed your life,

00:14:57.920 | or maybe the landscape of experience in your life? Does it buy happiness?

00:15:04.560 | >> It doesn't buy happiness, but it buys you a level of comfort for you to really amplify what

00:15:12.240 | happiness is. I kind of think about it in the following way. Let's just say that there's a

00:15:18.320 | hundred things on a table, and the table says, "Find happiness here." And there are different

00:15:25.120 | prices. The way that the world works is that many of these experiences are cordoned off a little bit

00:15:33.520 | behind a velvet rope where you think that there's more happiness as the prices of things escalate.

00:15:41.760 | If you live in an apartment, you admire the person with the house. If you live in a house,

00:15:47.360 | you admire the person with the bigger house. That person admires the person with an island.

00:15:55.120 | Right? Some person drives their car, admires the person who flies, who admires the person who flies

00:16:01.440 | business class, who admires the person who flies first to private. There's all of these escalations

00:16:07.680 | on this table, and most people get to the first five or six. And so they just naturally assume

00:16:14.720 | that items seven through a hundred is really where happiness is found. And just to tell you

00:16:24.240 | the finish line, I've tried a hundred and back, and I've tried two more hundred to it,

00:16:29.120 | and happiness isn't there. But it does give you a level of comfort. I read a study,

00:16:36.720 | and I don't know if it's true or not, but it said that the absolute maximal link between

00:16:45.840 | money and happiness is around $50 million. And it was just like a social studies kind of thing,

00:16:54.240 | that I think one of the Ivy Leagues put out. And underneath it, the way that they explained it was

00:16:58.560 | because you could have a home, you could have all kinds of the creature comforts, you could take

00:17:03.120 | care of your family, and then you were left to ponder what it is that you really want.

00:17:08.960 | I think the challenge for most people is to realize that this escalating arms race of

00:17:16.640 | more things will solve your problems is not true. More and better is not the solution.

00:17:24.880 | It's this idea that you are on a very precise journey that's unique to yourself. You are

00:17:33.920 | playing a game of which only you are the player. Everybody else is an interloper,

00:17:41.840 | and you have a responsibility to design the gameplay. And I think a lot of people don't

00:17:47.440 | realize that, because if they did, I think they would make a lot of different decisions about how

00:17:51.840 | they live their life. And I still do the same thing. I mean revert to basically running around

00:17:59.120 | asking other people, "What will make you like me more? What will make me more popular in your eyes?"

00:18:06.080 | And I try to do it, and it never works. It is just a complete dead end.

00:18:12.880 | Is there negative aspects to money? Like, for example, it becoming harder to find people you

00:18:19.280 | can trust? I think the most negative aspect is that it amplifies a 360-degree view of your

00:18:26.240 | personality, because there are a lot of people, and society tells you that more money is actually

00:18:34.480 | better. You are a better person somehow, and you're factually more worthwhile than some other

00:18:39.760 | people that have less money. That's also a lie. But when you're given that kind of attention,

00:18:46.160 | it's very easy for you to become a caricature of yourself. That's probably the single worst thing

00:18:52.240 | that happens to you. But I say it in the opposite way. I think all I've ever seen in Silicon Valley,

00:18:57.360 | as an example, is that when somebody gets a hold of a lot of money, it tends to cause them to become

00:19:04.960 | exactly who they were meant to be. They're either a kind person, they're either a curious person,

00:19:10.800 | they're either a jerk, they're either cheap. They can use all kinds of masks, but now that there's

00:19:16.800 | no expectations and society gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card, you start to behave

00:19:21.120 | the way that's most comfortable to you. So you see somebody's innate personality.

00:19:25.680 | And that's a really interesting thing to observe, because then you can very quickly bucket sort

00:19:29.680 | where do you want to spend time and who is really additive to your gameplay,

00:19:34.560 | and who is really a negative detractor to your gameplay.

00:19:38.640 | You're an investor, but you're also a kind of philosopher. You analyze the world

00:19:45.360 | in all its different perspectives on all in podcasts, on Twitter, everywhere.

00:19:52.320 | Do you worry that money puts you out of touch from being able to truly empathize with the experience

00:20:02.480 | of the general population, which in part, first of all, on a human level, that could be limiting,

00:20:08.320 | but also as an analyst of human civilization, that could be limiting?

00:20:12.080 | I think it definitely can for a lot of people, because it's an abstraction for you to stop

00:20:18.640 | caring. I also think the other thing is that you can very quickly, especially in today's world,

00:20:27.520 | become the scapegoat. Just to use a Girardian, like Rene Girard, if you think about mimetic

00:20:33.440 | theory in a nutshell, we're all competing for these very scarce resources that we are told

00:20:40.880 | is worthwhile. And if you view the world through that Girardian lens, what are we really doing?

00:20:47.920 | We are all fighting for scarce resources, whether that's Twitter followers, money,

00:20:53.760 | acclaim, notoriety, and we all compete with each other. And in that competition,

00:20:58.960 | Girard writes, "The only way you escape that loop is by scapegoating something or somebody."

00:21:06.640 | And I think we are in that loop right now where just the fact of being successful is a thing that

00:21:13.200 | one should scapegoat to end all of this tension that we have in the world. I think that it's a

00:21:20.480 | little misguided, because I don't think it solves the fundamental problem. And we can talk about

00:21:25.920 | what the solution to some of these problems are, but that's, I think, the loop that we're all

00:21:31.040 | living. And so if you become a caricature and you feed yourself into it, I mean, you're not doing

00:21:37.040 | anything to really advance things. >> Your nickname is The Dictator. How'd

00:21:41.840 | you get the nickname? We're talking about the corrupting nature of money.

00:21:45.440 | >> That came from poker. In a poker game, when you sit down, it's chaos, especially like in our

00:21:51.840 | home game. There's a ton of big egos. There's people always watching, rail birding the game,

00:21:57.840 | all kinds of interesting folks. And in that, somebody needs to establish hygiene and rules.

00:22:04.640 | And I really care about the integrity of the game. And it would just require somebody to just say,

00:22:10.000 | "Okay, enough." And then people were just like, "Okay, stop dictating." And that's where that

00:22:16.000 | nickname came from. >> So who to you,

00:22:17.920 | speaking of which, is the greatest poker player of all time, and why is it Phil Hellmuth?

00:22:22.800 | >> Exactly. You know, Muth probably knew this question was coming. Here's what I'll say. I

00:22:28.000 | think Hellmuth is the antidote to computers, more than any other player playing today.

00:22:35.120 | And when you see him in a heads up situation, so I think he's played nine or 10 heads up

00:22:42.160 | tournaments in a row. And he's played, basically call it 10 of the top 20 people so far.

00:22:47.440 | And he's beaten all but one of them. When you're playing heads up, one V one, that is the most

00:22:58.960 | GTO understandable spot, meaning game theory optimal position. That's where computers can

00:23:05.680 | give you an enormous edge. The minute you add even a third player, the value of computers and the

00:23:11.440 | value of their recommendations basically falls off a cliff. So one way to think about it is Hellmuth

00:23:18.720 | is forced to play against people that are essentially trained like AIs. And so to be

00:23:24.240 | able to beat, you know, eight out of nine of them means that you are playing so orthogonally

00:23:29.840 | to what is considered game theory optimal, and you're overlaying human reasoning.

00:23:35.360 | The judgment to say, well, in this spot, I should do x, but I'm going to do y. It's not

00:23:40.560 | dissimilar in chess, like what makes, you know, Magnus Carlsen so good. You know, sometimes he

00:23:45.280 | takes these weird lines, he'll sacrifice positions, you know, he'll overplay certain positions for

00:23:50.560 | certain, you know, bishops versus knights and all of these spots that are very confusing.

00:23:54.800 | And what it does is it throws people off their game. I think he just won a recent

00:23:59.360 | online tournament and it's like by move six, there is no GTO move for his opponent to make,

00:24:07.280 | because it's like out of the rule book. Maybe he read some game. You know, I read the quote,

00:24:11.280 | it was like he probably read some game in some bar in Russia in 1954, memorized it.

00:24:16.560 | And all of a sudden by six moves in, the computer AI is worthless. So that's what makes Helmuth

00:24:21.440 | great. There is one person that I think is superior. And I think it's what Daniel also

00:24:31.520 | said, and I would echo that because I played Phil as well, but Phil Ivey is the most well-rounded,

00:24:41.280 | cold-blooded, bloodthirsty animal. He's just, and he sees into your soul, Lex, in a way where

00:24:49.920 | you're just like, oh my God, stop looking at me. Have you ever played him? Yeah, yeah, we've played.

00:24:55.520 | We've played and you know, he crushes the games, crushes the games. So what does feeling crushed

00:25:01.440 | mean and feel like in poker? Is it like that you just can't read at all? You're being constantly

00:25:07.440 | pressured. You feel off balance. You try to bluff and the person reads you perfectly,

00:25:13.040 | that kind of stuff. - This is a really, really excellent question because I think this has

00:25:17.600 | parallels to a bunch of other things. Okay, let's just use poker as a microcosm to explain a bunch

00:25:23.280 | of other systems or games. Maybe it's running a company or investing. Okay, so let's use those

00:25:31.520 | three examples, but we use poker to explain it. What does success look like? Well, success looks

00:25:36.880 | like you have positive expected value, right? In poker, the simple way to summarize that is

00:25:42.320 | your opponent, let's just say you and I are playing, are going to make a bunch of mistakes.

00:25:48.560 | There's a bunch of it that's going to be absolutely perfect. And then there's a few

00:25:52.400 | spots where you make mistakes. And then there's a bunch of places in the poker game where I play

00:25:57.840 | perfectly and I make a few mistakes. Basically, your mistakes minus my mistakes is the edge,

00:26:07.440 | right? That's how poker works. If I make fewer mistakes than you make, I will make money and I

00:26:14.880 | will win. That is the objective of the game. Translate that into business. You're running a

00:26:20.240 | company. You have a team of employees. You have a pool of human capital that's capable of being

00:26:26.160 | productive in the world and creating something. But you are going to make mistakes in making that.

00:26:33.280 | Maybe it doesn't completely fit the market. Maybe it's mispriced. Maybe it actually doesn't require

00:26:40.160 | all of the people that you need, so the margins are wrong. And then there's the competitive set

00:26:45.040 | of all the other alternatives that customer has. Their mistakes minus your mistakes is the expected

00:26:52.880 | value of Google, Facebook, Apple, et cetera. Now take investing. Every time you buy something,

00:27:00.640 | somebody else on the other side is selling it to you.

00:27:03.440 | Is that their mistake? We don't know yet. But their mistakes minus your mistakes is how you

00:27:12.480 | make a lot of money over long periods of time as an investor. Somebody sold you Google at $40 a

00:27:18.080 | share. You bought it and you kept it. Huge mistake on their part, minimum mistakes on your part.

00:27:24.000 | The difference of that is the money that you made. So life can be summarized in many ways in that

00:27:30.480 | way. So the question is, what can you do about other people's mistakes? And the answer is nothing.

00:27:35.520 | That is somebody else's game. You can try to influence them. You could try to subvert them.

00:27:41.760 | Maybe you plant a spy inside of that other person's company to sabotage them. I guess

00:27:46.720 | there are things at the edges that you can do. But my firm belief is that life success really

00:27:52.720 | boils down to how do you control your mistakes? Now this is a bit counterintuitive. The way you

00:28:00.240 | control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes. So taking risks is somehow a way to

00:28:08.800 | minimize the number of mistakes. Let's just say you want to find love. You want to find somebody

00:28:13.760 | you're deeply connected with. Do you do that by not going out on dates? Yes. Sorry. You're the

00:28:24.080 | only person that thinks that's the answer to that question. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. No,

00:28:27.120 | but you know what I mean? You have to date people. You have to open yourself up. You have to be

00:28:31.280 | authentic. You give yourself a chance to get hurt. But you're a good person. So you know what happens

00:28:38.560 | when you get hurt? That is actually their mistake. And if you are inauthentic, that's your mistake.

00:28:44.800 | That's a controllable thing in you. You can tell them the truth, who you are, and say,

00:28:50.320 | here's my pluses and minuses. My point is there are very few things in life

00:28:55.360 | that you can't break down, I think, into that very simple idea.

00:28:59.520 | And in terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them because we will judge you,

00:29:07.840 | and we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually,

00:29:12.800 | no, it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success. Because your error rate will diminish

00:29:20.320 | the more mistakes that you make. You observe them. You figure out where it's coming from.

00:29:25.040 | Is it a psychological thing? Is it a cognitive thing? And then you fix it.

00:29:30.000 | So the implied thing there is that there is, in business and investing, in poker, in dating,

00:29:38.000 | in life, is that there's this platonic GTO, game theory, optimal thing out there. And so when you

00:29:44.640 | say mistakes, you're always comparing to that optimal path you could have taken.

00:29:49.520 | I think slightly different, I would say, mistake is maybe a bad proxy, but it's the best proxy I

00:29:55.040 | have for learning. But I'm using the language of what society tells you.

00:29:59.760 | Sure, got it.

00:30:01.440 | Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn't work, it's a mistake. So I just

00:30:07.360 | use that word because it's the word that resonates most with most people.

00:30:10.800 | Got it.

00:30:11.120 | The real thing that it is is learning.

00:30:14.000 | Yeah, it's like in neural networks, it's lost.

00:30:16.080 | It's a neural network, it's lost, exactly.

00:30:17.760 | Yeah, right. So you're using the mistake that is most, the word that is most understandable,

00:30:23.680 | especially by the way people experience it. I guess most of life is a sequence of mistakes.

00:30:29.520 | The problem is when you use the word mistake and you think about mistakes, it actually has a

00:30:34.320 | counterproductive effect of you becoming conservative in just being risk averse.

00:30:40.800 | So if you flip it and say, try to maximize the number of successes,

00:30:47.760 | somehow that leads you to take more risk. Mistake scares people.

00:30:54.400 | I think mistakes scare people because society likes these very simplified boundaries of who

00:31:04.000 | is winning and who is losing. And they want to reward people who make traditional choices

00:31:12.400 | and succeed. But the thing is, what's so corrosive about that is that they're actually not even

00:31:23.280 | being put in a position to actually make a quote unquote mistake and fail.

00:31:27.680 | So I'll give you a, if you look at like getting into an elite school,

00:31:31.200 | society rewards you for being in the Ivy Leagues in a way that, in my opinion, incorrectly,

00:31:38.800 | doesn't reward you for being in a non Ivy League school. There's a certain level of status

00:31:43.680 | and presumption of intellect and capability that comes with being there.

00:31:47.520 | But that system doesn't really have a counterfactual because it's not as if you both

00:31:54.480 | go to MIT and Ohio State. And then we can see two versions of Lex Friedman so that we can figure out

00:32:00.960 | that the jig is up and there was no difference. And so instead it reinforces this idea that there

00:32:08.080 | is no truth seeking function. There is no way to actually make this thing whole. And so it tells

00:32:15.040 | you, you have to get in here. And if you don't, your life is over. You've made a huge mistake

00:32:19.360 | or you've failed completely. And so you have to find different unique ways of dismantling this.

00:32:26.720 | This is why part of what I've realized where I got very lucky is I had no friends in high school.

00:32:35.200 | I had a few cohort of acquaintances. But part of being so hypervigilant when I grew up

00:32:41.040 | was I was so ashamed of that world that I had to live in. I didn't want to bring anyone into it.

00:32:48.640 | I could not see myself that anybody would accept me. But the thing with that is that I had no

00:32:56.320 | definition of what expectations should be. So they were not guided by the people around me.

00:33:02.960 | And so I would escape to define my expectations. - It's interesting, but you didn't feel

00:33:07.520 | like your dad didn't put you in a prison of expectation? 'Cause like that's, if you don't

00:33:16.400 | have a friend, so the flip side of that, you don't have any other signals. It's very easy to believe

00:33:21.440 | like when you're in a cult that-- - Well, he was angry. He pushed me.

00:33:29.280 | He used me as a mechanism to alleviate his own frustration. And this may sound very crazy,

00:33:34.960 | but he also believed in me. And so that's what created this weird duality where you were just,

00:33:41.280 | I was always confused about-- - You could be somebody great.

00:33:44.400 | He believed that you could be somebody truly special. - I didn't believe him because I

00:33:50.160 | couldn't reconcile then the other half of the day, those behaviors. But what it allowed me to do was

00:33:57.760 | I escaped in my mind and I found these archetypes around me that were saviors to me.

00:34:06.320 | So I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I grew up right at the point where the telecom boom was

00:34:14.160 | happening. Companies like Nortel and Newbridge Networks and Mitel, Bell Northern Research,

00:34:19.680 | these were all built in the suburbs of Ottawa. And so there were these larger than life figures,

00:34:26.080 | entrepreneurs, Terry Matthews, Michael Copeland. And so I thought I'm gonna be like them. I would

00:34:32.720 | read Forbes Magazine. I would read Fortune Magazine. I would look at the rich people on

00:34:36.640 | that list and say, I would be like them. Not knowing that maybe that's not who you wanted to

00:34:43.040 | be, but it was a lifeline. And it kept my mind relatively whole because I could direct my

00:34:50.480 | ambition in a direction. And so why that's so important, just circling back to this is

00:34:57.040 | I didn't have a group of friends who were like, I'm gonna go to community college.

00:35:00.160 | I didn't have a group of friends that said, well, the goal is just to go to university,

00:35:05.200 | get a simple job and join the public service, have a good life. And so because I had no

00:35:11.440 | expectations and I was so afraid to venture out of my own house, I never saw what middle-class

00:35:16.480 | life was like. And so I never aspired to it. Now, if I was close to it, I probably would have

00:35:21.440 | aspired to it because my parents in their best year made 32,000 Canadian together.

00:35:27.280 | And if you're trying to raise a family of five people on $32,000, it's a complicated job.

00:35:32.960 | And most of the time they were probably making 20 something thousand. And I was working since I was

00:35:37.600 | 14. So I knew that our station in life was not the destination. We had to get out. But because I

00:35:46.000 | didn't have an obvious place, it's not like I had a best friend whose house I was going to. And

00:35:50.000 | I saw some normal functional home. If I had had that in this weird way, I would have aspired to

00:35:56.560 | that. >> What was the worst job you had to do?

00:35:59.520 | >> The best job, but the worst job was I worked at Burger King when I was 14 years old and I would

00:36:07.600 | do the closing shift. And that was from like 6 PM till about 2 in the morning. And in Ontario,

00:36:15.520 | where I lived, Ottawa borders Quebec. In Ontario, the drinking age is 19. You can see where I'm

00:36:20.880 | going with this. The drinking age in Quebec is 18. And that year made all the difference to all

00:36:26.320 | these kids. And so they would go get completely drunk. They would come back. They would come to

00:36:31.840 | the Burger King. You would see all these kids you went to high school with. Can you imagine how

00:36:35.520 | mortifying it is? You're working there in this getup. And they would light that place on fire,

00:36:43.280 | vomit everywhere, puking, pooing, peeing. And when the thing shuts down at one o'clock,

00:36:49.360 | you got to clean that all up, all of it, changing the garbage, taking it out. It was a grind.

00:36:59.600 | And it really teaches you, okay, I do not want this job. I don't want to.

00:37:07.600 | >> But it's funny that that didn't push you towards the stability and the security of the

00:37:11.280 | middle class like life. >> I didn't have any good examples of that.

00:37:15.760 | I didn't have those around me. I was so ashamed. I could have never built a relationship where I

00:37:21.600 | could have seen those interactions to want that. And so my desires were framed by these two random

00:37:26.960 | rich people that lived in my town who I'd never met, and what I read in magazines about people

00:37:31.520 | like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. >> You were an early senior executive

00:37:38.240 | at Facebook during a period of a lot of scaling in the company history. I mean,

00:37:43.120 | it's actually a fascinating period of human history in terms of technology.

00:37:46.400 | Well, in terms of human civilization, honestly. What did you learn from that

00:37:53.440 | time about what it takes to build and scale a successful tech company,

00:37:58.880 | a company that has almost immeasurable impact on the world?

00:38:05.320 | >> That was an incredible moment in time because everything was so new. To your point,

00:38:11.160 | like even how the standards of Web 2.0 at that time were being defined, we were defining them.

00:38:16.200 | I mean, I think if you search in the patent library, there's a bunch of these patents that

00:38:24.600 | me and Zuck have for random things like cookies or cross-site JavaScript, all these crazy things

00:38:31.560 | that are just like these duh kind of ideas in 2023. We had to invent our way around how do

00:38:38.920 | websites communicate with each other? How do we build in the cloud versus in a data center? How

00:38:43.640 | do we actually have high-performance systems? >> You mentioned data science, the term and the idea.

00:38:49.000 | >> I invented this thing called data scientist because we had a PhD from Google that refused

00:38:54.440 | to join because he got a job offer that says data analyst. And so we said, "Call him a scientist,"

00:39:01.000 | because he was a PhD in particle physics. So he was a scientist. I said, "Great, you're a scientist

00:39:05.480 | here." >> That launched a discipline.

00:39:07.320 | >> That launched a discipline. >> I mean, a term, what's a rose by

00:39:11.560 | any other name? But yeah, sometimes words like this can launch entire fields. And it did in that

00:39:18.760 | case. I mean, I guess at that time you didn't anticipate the impact of machine learning on

00:39:24.760 | the entirety of this whole process because you need machine learning to have both ads and

00:39:30.040 | recommender systems to have the feed for the social networks. >> Exactly right. The first

00:39:35.000 | real scaled version of machine learning, not AI, but machine learning was this thing that Facebook

00:39:40.120 | introduced called PYMK, which is people you may know. And the simple idea was that can we initiate

00:39:45.960 | a viral mechanic inside the application where you log in, we grab your credentials, we go to your

00:39:52.920 | email inbox, we harvest your address book, we do a compare, we make some guesses, and we start to

00:40:00.440 | present to other people that you may actually know that may not be in your address book.

00:40:04.120 | Really simple, a couple of joins of some tables, whatever. And it started to just go crazy. And

00:40:09.800 | the number of people that you were creating this density and entropy inside this social graph

00:40:16.280 | with what was some really simple, basic math. And that was eye opening for us. And what it led us

00:40:23.480 | down this path of is really understanding the power of all this machine learning. And so that

00:40:28.200 | infused itself into News Feed and how the content that you saw could be tailored to who you were

00:40:34.040 | and the type of person that you were. So there was a moment in time that all of this stuff was so new.

00:40:39.880 | How did you translate the app to multiple languages? How do you launch the company in

00:40:44.600 | all of these countries? - How much of it is just kind of

00:40:49.000 | stumbling into things using your best first principles gut thinking? And how much is it

00:40:54.440 | like five, 10, 15, 20 year vision? How much was thinking about the future of the internet

00:41:02.280 | and the metaverse and the humanity and all that kind of stuff? Because the News Feed,

00:41:07.560 | sounds trivial. - I'll say something.

00:41:09.160 | - But that's like changes everything. - Well, you have to remember, News Feed,

00:41:14.760 | was named and we had this thing where we would just name things what they were. And at the time,

00:41:23.720 | all of these other companies, and if you go back into the Wayback Machine, you can see this,

00:41:28.600 | people would invent an MP3 player and they would come up with some crazy name. Or they would invent

00:41:37.160 | a software product and come up with a crazy name. And it sounded like the pharma industry,

00:41:43.880 | blow Casimab, tag your best friends. And you think, what is this? This makes no sense.

00:41:50.200 | And this was Zuck's thing. He was like, well, this is a feed of news, so we're going to call it

00:41:54.440 | News Feed. This is where you tag your photos, so we're going to call that photo tagging.

00:41:59.160 | I mean, literally, pretty obvious stuff. So the way that those things came about though,

00:42:07.480 | was very experimentally. And this is where I think it's really important for people

00:42:11.400 | to understand. I think Bezos explains this the best. There is a tendency after things work

00:42:18.280 | to create a narrative fallacy because it feeds your ego. And you want to have been the person

00:42:25.640 | that saw it coming. And I think it's much more honest to say, we were very good probabilistic

00:42:35.480 | thinkers that tried to learn as quickly as possible, meaning to make as many mistakes as

00:42:42.040 | possible. I mean, if you look at this very famous placard that Facebook had from back in the day,

00:42:47.000 | what did it say? It said, move fast and break things. In societal language, that's saying,

00:42:53.400 | make mistakes as quickly as you can. Because the minute you break something, you don't do that by

00:42:58.120 | design. It's not a feature. Theoretically, it's a bug. But he understood that, and we embraced that

00:43:04.440 | idea. I used to run this meeting once a week where the whole goal was, I want to see that there was

00:43:10.040 | a thousand experiments that were run and show me them all from the dumbest to the most impactful.

00:43:15.880 | And we would go through that loop and what did it train people? Not that you got celebrated

00:43:21.400 | for the right answer, but you got celebrated for trying. I ran 12 experiments, 12 failed,

00:43:28.680 | and we'd be like, you're the best. >>COREY: Can I just take a small tangent on

00:43:33.080 | that is that move fast and break things has become like a catchphrase of the thing that

00:43:41.480 | embodies the toxic culture of Silicon Valley in today's discourse, which confuses me. Of course,

00:43:49.720 | words and phrases get sort of captured and so on.

00:43:52.760 | >>COREY: Becomes very reductive. That's a very loaded set of words that together can be,

00:43:56.680 | many years later, people can view very reductive. >>LUIS: Can you steel man each side of that?

00:44:02.680 | So pro move fast and break things and against move fast and break things.

00:44:08.760 | >>COREY: So I think the pro of move fast and break things is saying the following.

00:44:12.840 | There's a space of things we know and a massive space of things we don't know.

00:44:18.600 | And there's a rate of growth of the things we know, but the rate of growth of the things we

00:44:25.640 | don't know is actually, we have to assume growing faster. So the most important thing is to move

00:44:32.520 | into the space of the things we don't know as quickly as possible. And so in order to acquire

00:44:38.920 | knowledge, we're going to assume that the failure mode is the nominal state.

00:44:44.120 | And so we just need to move as quickly as we can, break as many things as possible,

00:44:50.120 | which means things are breaking in code. Do the root cause analysis, figure out how to make things

00:44:57.080 | better and then rapidly move into the space. And he or she who moves fastest into that space will

00:45:03.320 | win. >>LUIS: It doesn't imply

00:45:05.080 | carelessness, right? It doesn't imply moving fast without also aggressively picking up the lessons

00:45:15.160 | from the mistakes you make. >>COREY: Well, again, that's steel

00:45:18.040 | manning the pro, which is it's a thoughtful movement around velocity and acquisition of

00:45:27.400 | knowledge. Now let's steel man the con case. When these systems become big enough,

00:45:34.840 | there is no more room to experiment in an open-ended way because the implications have

00:45:42.680 | broad societal impacts that are not clear upfront. So let's take a different, less controversial

00:45:49.880 | example. If we said Lipitor worked well for all people except South Asians, and there's a specific

00:45:59.320 | immuno response that we can iterate to. And if we move quickly enough, we can run 10,000 experiments

00:46:05.560 | and we think the answer is in that space. Well, the problem is that those 10,000 experiments may

00:46:11.800 | kill 10 million people. So you have to move methodically. When that drug was experimental

00:46:18.440 | and it wasn't being given to 500 million people in the world, moving fast made sense because you

00:46:25.160 | could have a pig model, a mouse model, a monkey model. You could figure out toxicity, but we

00:46:30.120 | picked all that low hanging fruit. And so now these small iterations have huge impacts that need to be

00:46:37.640 | measured and implemented. Different example is like, if you work at Boeing and you have an

00:46:44.360 | implementation that gives you a 2% efficiency by reshaping the wing or adding winglets,

00:46:49.080 | there needs to be a methodical move slow, be right process because mistakes when they compound,

00:46:57.960 | when it's already implemented and at scale have huge externalities that are impossible to measure

00:47:03.560 | until after the fact. And you see this in the 737 max. So that's how one would steel man the

00:47:09.720 | con case, which is that when an industry becomes critical, you got to slow down.

00:47:14.200 | This makes me sad because some industries like Twitter and Facebook are a good example.

00:47:21.880 | They achieve scale very quickly before really exploring the big area of things to learn.

00:47:31.720 | So you basically pick one low hanging fruit and that became your huge success. And now you're

00:47:38.920 | sitting there with that stupid fruit. Completely. Well, so as an example,

00:47:43.080 | if I was running Facebook for a day, the big opportunity in my opinion was really not the

00:47:53.240 | metaverse, but it was actually getting the closest that anybody could get to AGI.

00:48:01.320 | And if I had to steel man that product case, here's how I would have pitched it to the board

00:48:06.200 | and to Zuck. I would have said, "Listen, there are three and a half billion people monthly

00:48:10.840 | using this thing." If we think about human intelligence very reductively,

00:48:15.000 | we would say that there's a large portion of it, which is cognitive. And then there's a large

00:48:20.600 | portion of it, which is emotional. We have the best ability to build a multimodal model

00:48:26.840 | that basically takes all of these massive inputs together to try to intuit how a system would react

00:48:33.000 | to all kinds of stimuli. That to me would have been a profound leap forward for humanity.

00:48:39.880 | Can you dig into that a little bit more? So in terms of, now this is a board meeting,

00:48:45.880 | how would that make Facebook money? I think that you have all of these systems over time

00:48:54.280 | that we don't know could benefit from some layer of reasoning to make it better.

00:49:02.280 | What does Spotify look like when instead of just a very simple recommendation engine,

00:49:10.760 | it actually understands sort of your emotional context and your mood and can move you to a body

00:49:16.840 | of music that you would like? What does it look like if your television, instead of having to go

00:49:23.480 | and channel surf 50,000 shows on a horrible UI, instead just has a sense of what you're into

00:49:31.240 | and shows it to you? What does it mean when you get in your car and it actually drives you to a

00:49:38.920 | place because you should actually eat there even though you don't know it? These are all random

00:49:43.720 | things that make no sense a priori, but it starts to make the person or the provider of that service

00:49:52.360 | the critical reasoning layer for all these everyday products that today would look very

00:49:57.240 | flat without that reasoning. I think you license that and you make a lot of money.

00:50:01.640 | In many ways, instead of becoming more of the pixels that you see, you become more of the

00:50:07.240 | bare metal that actually creates that experience. If you look at the companies that are multi-decade

00:50:14.600 | legacy kinds of businesses, the thing that they have done is quietly and surreptitiously move

00:50:20.760 | down the stack. You never move up the stack to survive. You need to move down the stack.

00:50:25.720 | So if you take that OSI reference stack, these layers of how you build an app from the physical

00:50:30.600 | layer to the transport layer, all the way up to the app layer, you can map from the 1980s,

00:50:36.600 | all the big companies that have been created, all the way from Fairchild Semiconductor and NatSemi

00:50:41.800 | to Intel to Cisco to 3Com, Oracle, Netscape at one point, all the way up to the Googles and

00:50:50.120 | the Facebooks of the world. But if you look at where all the lock-in happened,

00:50:54.120 | it's by companies like Apple, who used to make software saying, "I'm going to get one close.

00:50:59.640 | I'm going to make the bare metal and I'm going to become the platform." Or Google, same thing.

00:51:04.520 | I'm going to create this dominant platform and I'm going to create a substrate that organizes

00:51:09.160 | all this information that's just omnipresent and everywhere. So the key is, if you are lucky

00:51:15.320 | enough to be one of these apps that are in front of people, you better start digging quickly

00:51:21.880 | and moving your way down and get out of the way and disappear. But by disappearing,

00:51:28.040 | you will become much, much bigger and it's impossible to usurp you.

00:51:33.400 | Yeah, I 100% agree with you. That's why you're so smart. This is the depersonalization and

00:51:42.520 | the algorithms that enable depersonalization, almost like a operating system layer. So pushing

00:51:48.360 | away from the interface and the actual system that does the personalization. I think the challenges

00:51:53.800 | there, there's obviously technical challenges, but there's also societal challenges that

00:51:59.320 | it's like in a relationship. If you have an intimate algorithmic connection with

00:52:06.200 | individual humans, you can do both good and bad. And so there's risks that you're taking.

00:52:12.440 | So if you're making a lot of money now as Twitter and Facebook with ads, surface layer ads,

00:52:19.080 | what is the incentive to take the risk of guiding people more? Because you can hurt people, you can

00:52:27.880 | piss off people. I mean, there's a cost to forming a more intimate relationship with the users.

00:52:36.040 | In the short term, I think. You said a really, really key thing, which was a really great

00:52:41.880 | emotional, instinctive reaction, which is when I said the AGI thing, you said, well,

00:52:47.160 | how would you ever make money from that? That is the key. The presumption is that this thing would

00:52:52.600 | not be an important thing at the beginning. And I think what that allows you to do if you were

00:52:57.160 | Twitter or Google or Apple or Facebook, anybody, Microsoft, embarking on building something like

00:53:02.600 | this, is that you can actually have it off the critical path. And you can experiment with this

00:53:09.720 | for years if that's what it takes to find a version one that is special enough where it's

00:53:15.640 | worth showcasing. And so in many ways, you get the free option. You're going to be spending,

00:53:21.320 | any of these companies will be spending tens of billions of dollars in OpEx and CapEx every year

00:53:26.840 | and all kinds of stuff. It is not a thing that money actually makes more likely to succeed.

00:53:34.440 | In fact, you actually don't need to give these kinds of things a lot of money at all, because

00:53:40.520 | starting in 2023, right now, you have the two most important tectonic shifts that have ever

00:53:47.480 | happened in our lifetime in technology. They're not talked about, but these things allow AGI,

00:53:53.320 | I think, to emerge over the next 10 or 15 years where it wasn't possible for.

00:53:56.840 | The first thing is that the marginal cost of energy is zero. You're not going to pay for

00:54:01.800 | anything anymore. And we can double click into why that is. And the second is the marginal cost

00:54:06.760 | of compute is zero. And so when you take the multiplication or, if you want to get really

00:54:12.680 | fancy mathematically, the convolution of these two things together, it's going to change everything.

00:54:19.640 | So think about what a billion dollars gets today. And we can use OpenAI as an example.

00:54:25.480 | A billion dollars gets OpenAI a handful of functional models and a pretty fast iterative

00:54:32.040 | loop, right? But imagine what OpenAI had to overcome. They had to overcome a compute challenge.

00:54:41.000 | They had to strip together a whole bunch of GPUs. They had to build all kinds of scaffolding

00:54:45.320 | software. They had to find data center support. That consumes all kinds of money. So that billion

00:54:50.360 | dollars didn't go that far. So it's a testament to how clever that OpenAI team is. But in four

00:54:57.160 | years from now, when energy costs zero and basically GPUs, they're falling off a truck

00:55:02.360 | and you can use them effectively for free, now all of a sudden a billion dollars gives you some

00:55:08.840 | amount of teraflops of compute that is probably the total number of teraflops available today in

00:55:14.920 | the world. Like that's how gargantuan this move is when you take these two variables to zero.

00:55:21.080 | There's like a million things to ask. I almost don't want to get distracted by

00:55:25.480 | the marginal cost of energy going to zero because I have no idea what you're talking about there.

00:55:30.360 | It's fascinating.

00:55:30.840 | Can I give you the 30 seconds?

00:55:31.720 | Sure.

00:55:32.120 | Okay. So if you look inside of the two most progressive states, the three most progressive

00:55:37.160 | states, New York, California, and Massachusetts, a lot of left-leaning folks, a lot of people who

00:55:42.120 | believe in climate science and climate change, the energy costs in those three states are the

00:55:46.600 | worst they are in the entire country. And energy is compounding at 3% to 4% per annum. So every

00:55:53.240 | decade to 15 years, energy costs in these states double. In some cases and in some months, our

00:55:59.640 | energy costs are increasing by 11% a month. But the ability to actually generate energy

00:56:09.480 | is now effectively zero. The cost per kilowatt hour to put a solar panel on your roof and a

00:56:15.000 | battery wall inside your garage, it's the cheapest it's ever been. These things are the most efficient

00:56:20.840 | they've ever been. And so to acquire energy from the sun and store it for your use later on

00:56:26.840 | literally is a zero cost proposition.

00:56:28.840 | So how do you explain the gap between the cost going up?

00:56:31.480 | Great question. So this is the other side of regulatory capture, right? We all fight to build

00:56:37.800 | monopolies. While there are monopolies hiding in plain sight, the utilities are a perfect example.

00:56:43.240 | There are 100 million homes in America. There are about 1,700 utilities in America. So they have

00:56:49.960 | captive markets. But in return for that captive market, the law says you need to invest a certain

00:56:56.920 | amount per year in upgrading that power line, in changing out that turbine, in making sure you

00:57:02.520 | transition from coal to wind or whatever. Just as an example, upgrading power lines in the United

00:57:10.120 | States over the next decade is a $2 trillion proposition. These 1,700 organizations have to

00:57:16.440 | spend, I think it's a quarter of a trillion dollars a year just to change the power lines.

00:57:23.800 | That is why, even though it costs nothing to make energy, you are paying double every seven or eight

00:57:29.960 | years. It's CapEx and OpEx of a very brittle old infrastructure. It's like you trying to build an

00:57:36.440 | app and being forced to build your own data center. And you say, "But wait, I just want to write to

00:57:40.600 | AWS. I just want to use GCP. I just want to move on. All that complexity is solved for me." And

00:57:47.320 | some law says, "No, you can't. You got to use it." So that's what consumers are dealing with,

00:57:51.320 | but it's also what industrial and manufacturing organizations, it's what we all deal with.

00:57:56.680 | So how do we get rid ourselves of this old infrastructure that we're paying for?

00:58:00.920 | So the thing that's happening today, which I think is... This is why I think it's the most

00:58:06.520 | important trend right now in the world, is that 100 million homeowners are each going to become

00:58:13.800 | their own little power plant and compete with these 1,700 utilities. And that is a great...

00:58:19.880 | In the United States or globally?

00:58:21.160 | No, just deal with the United States for a second, because I think it's easier to see here.

00:58:25.480 | 100 million homes, solar panel on the roof. And by the way, just to make it clear, the sun doesn't

00:58:30.520 | need to shine. These panels now work where you have these UV bands that can actually extrapolate

00:58:36.040 | beyond the visible spectrum. So they're usable in all weather conditions. And a simple system can

00:58:42.520 | support you collecting enough power to not just run your functional day-to-day life,

00:58:48.040 | but then to contribute what's left over back into the grid for Google's data center or Facebook's

00:58:54.600 | data center, where you get a small check. The cost is going to zero.

00:59:00.360 | How obvious is this to people? You're making this out?

00:59:03.320 | Not obvious.

00:59:03.400 | Okay. So because this is a pretty profound prediction, if the cost is indeed going to zero,

00:59:09.320 | that... I mean, the compute... The cost of compute going to zero, I can...

00:59:13.880 | So the cost of compute going to zero is simpler to see.

00:59:16.040 | I can kind of understand, but the energy seems like a radical prediction of yours.

00:59:20.440 | Well, it's just naturally what's happening, right? Now, let me give you a different way

00:59:25.320 | of explaining this. If you look at any system, there's a really important thing that happens.

00:59:31.400 | It's what Clay Christensen calls crossing the chasm. If you explained it numerically,

00:59:36.120 | here's how I would explain it to you, Lex. If you introduce a disruptive product,

00:59:39.880 | typically what happens is the first 3% to 5% of people are these zealous believers.

00:59:47.480 | And they ignore all the logical reasons why this product doesn't make any sense,

00:59:52.520 | because they believe in the proposition of the future and they buy it.

00:59:56.040 | The problem is at 5%, if you want a product to get to mass market, you have one of two choices,

01:00:03.400 | which is you either bring the cost down low enough, or the feature set becomes so compelling

01:00:09.960 | that even at a high price point. An example of the latter is the iPhone. The iPhone today,

01:00:15.880 | the 14 iPhone, costs more than the original iPhone. It's probably doubled in price over

01:00:19.880 | the last 14 or 15 years, but we view it as an essential element of what we need in our daily

01:00:25.240 | lives. It turns out that battery EVs and solar panels are an example of the former,

01:00:31.320 | because people like President Biden, with all of these subsidies, have now introduced so much

01:00:39.320 | money for people to just do this, where it is a money-making proposition for 100 million homes.

01:00:46.360 | And what you're seeing as a result are all of these companies who want to get in front of that

01:00:53.000 | trend. Why? Because they want to own the relationship with 100 million homeowners.

01:00:57.160 | They want to manage the power infrastructure, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe's. Just name the company.

01:01:05.000 | So if you do that and you control that relationship, they're going to show you...

01:01:10.440 | For example, Amazon will probably say, "If you're a member of Prime,

01:01:13.480 | we'll stick the panels on your house for free. We'll do all the work for you for free. And it's

01:01:20.600 | just a feature of being a member of Prime, and we'll manage all that energy for you." It makes

01:01:25.240 | so much sense, and it is mathematically accretive for Amazon to do that. It's not accretive

01:01:32.440 | for the existing energy industry, because they get blown up. It's extremely accretive for peace

01:01:38.200 | and prosperity. If you think the number of wars we fight over natural resources, take them all

01:01:43.640 | off the table if we don't need energy from abroad. There's no reason to fight. You'd have to find a

01:01:50.280 | reason to fight. Meaning, sorry, there'd be a moral reason to fight, but the last number of wars that

01:01:55.720 | we fought were not as much rooted in morality as they were rooted in... >> Yeah, it feels like

01:02:01.000 | they were very much rooted in conflict over resources, energy specifically.

01:02:06.920 | >> And then, sorry, just the last thing I want to say. I keep interrupting, apologies. But

01:02:09.720 | the chips, what people want to say is that now that we're at two and three nanometer scale

01:02:17.480 | for typical kind of like transistor fab, we're done. And forget about transistor density,

01:02:23.720 | forget about Moore's Law, it's over. And I would just say, "No." Look at teraflops,

01:02:27.800 | and really teraflops is the combination of CPUs, but much and much less important,

01:02:33.160 | and really is the combination of ASICs, so application specific ICs and GPUs.

01:02:37.800 | And so you put the two together. I mean, if I gave you a billion dollars five years from now,

01:02:43.640 | the amount of damage you could do, damage in good way, in terms of building racks and racks of GPUs,

01:02:50.840 | the kind of models that you could build, the training sets and the data that you could consume

01:02:54.680 | to solve a problem, it's enough to do something really powerful. Whereas today, it's not yet

01:03:00.840 | quite enough. >> So there's this really

01:03:02.920 | interesting idea that you talk about in terms of Facebook and Twitter that's connected to this,

01:03:08.680 | that if you were running sort of Twitter or Facebook, that you would move them all to like AWS.

01:03:15.080 | So you would have somebody else to compute the infrastructure. It probably, if you could explain

01:03:23.000 | that reasoning, means that you believe in this idea of energy going to zero, compute going to

01:03:28.680 | zero. So let people that are optimized in that do the best job. >> And I think that's, you know,

01:03:35.640 | initially in the early 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, if you were big enough scale,

01:03:43.320 | oh, sorry, everybody was building their own stuff. Then between 2010 through 2020,

01:03:49.800 | really the idea was everybody should be on AWS except the biggest of the biggest folks.

01:03:54.680 | I think in the 2020s and 30s, I think the answer is actually everybody should be in these public

01:04:02.600 | clouds. And the reason is the engineering velocity of the guts. So, you know, take a simple example,

01:04:10.200 | which is, you know, we have not seen a massive iteration in database design until Snowflake,

01:04:15.880 | right? I think maybe Postgres was like the last big turn of the dial.

01:04:18.920 | Why is that? I don't exactly know, except that everybody that's on AWS and everybody that's on

01:04:26.600 | GCP and Azure gets to now benefit from a hundred plus billion dollars of aggregate market cap,

01:04:34.600 | rapidly iterating, making mistakes, fixing, solving, learning. And that is a best in class

01:04:43.400 | industry now, right? Then there's going to be all these AI layers around analytics so that app

01:04:51.160 | companies can make better decisions. All of these things will allow you to build more nimble

01:04:56.920 | organizations because you'll have this federated model of development. I'll take these things off

01:05:02.680 | the shelf. Maybe I'll roll my own stitching over here because the thing that where you make money

01:05:09.080 | is still for most people and how the apps provision an experience to a user. And everybody else can

01:05:15.640 | make a lot of money just servicing that. So they work in a really, they play well together in the

01:05:21.720 | sandbox. So in the future, everybody just should be there. It doesn't make sense for anybody,

01:05:27.880 | I don't think, because, you know, if you were to roll your own data centers, you know, for example,

01:05:32.120 | like Google for a long time had these massive leaps where they had GFS and Bigtable. Those are

01:05:37.400 | really good in the 2000s and 2010s. And this is not just to throw shade at Google. It's very hard

01:05:44.280 | for whatever exists that is the progeny of GFS and Bigtable to be anywhere near as good as a

01:05:49.880 | hundred billion dollar industry's attempt to build that stack. And you're putting your organization

01:05:56.200 | under enormous pressure to be that good. >> I guess the implied risk taken there is that you

01:06:01.640 | could become the next AWS, like Tesla doing some of the compute in-house. I guess the bet there is

01:06:10.520 | that you can become the next AWS for the new wave of computation if that level, if that kind of

01:06:20.120 | computation is different. So if it's machine learning, I don't know if anyone's won that

01:06:25.080 | battle yet, which is machine learning centric compute. >> Well, I think that software has a

01:06:30.200 | very powerful property in that there's a lot of things that can happen asynchronously so that

01:06:37.240 | real-time inference can be actually really lightweight code deployment. And that's why

01:06:42.600 | I think you can have a very federated ecosystem inside of all of these places. Tesla is very

01:06:48.840 | different because in order to build the best car, it's kind of like trying to build the best iPhone,

01:06:55.080 | which is that you need to control it all the way down to the bare metal in order to do it well.

01:06:59.240 | And that's just not possible if you're trying to be a systems integrator, which is what everybody

01:07:05.320 | other than this modern generation of car companies have been. And they've done a very good job of

01:07:11.320 | that, but it won't be the experience that allows you to win in the next 20 years.

01:07:16.040 | >> So let's linger on the social media thing. So you said if you ran Facebook for a day,

01:07:24.520 | let's extend that. If you were to build a new social network today, how would you fix

01:07:32.280 | Twitter? How would you fix social media? If you want to answer a different question,

01:07:38.760 | is if you were Elon Musk, somebody you know, and you were taking over Twitter, what would you fix?

01:07:44.600 | >> I've thought about this a little bit. First of all, let me give you a backdrop. I wouldn't

01:07:51.000 | actually build a social media company at all. And the answer is the reasoning is the following.

01:07:56.920 | I really tend to believe, as you probably got in a sense of sort of patterns and probabilities.

01:08:03.400 | And if you said to me, "Smath, probabilistically answer where are we going in apps and social

01:08:11.640 | experiences?" What I would say is, "Lex, we spent the first decade building platforms and getting

01:08:18.120 | them to scale." And if you want to think about it again, back to sort of this poker analogy,

01:08:23.320 | others' mistakes minus your mistakes is the value. Well, the value that was captured

01:08:28.920 | was trillions of dollars, essentially to Apple and to Google. And they did that by basically

01:08:35.800 | attracting billions of monthly active users to their platform.

01:08:42.840 | Then this next wave were the apps, Facebook, QQ, Tencent, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat,

01:08:50.280 | that whole panoply of apps. And interestingly, they were in many ways an atomized version

01:08:58.120 | of the platforms, right? They sat on top of them. They were an ecosystem participant.

01:09:03.480 | But the value they created was the same. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value,

01:09:10.680 | billions of monthly active users. Well, there's an interesting phenomenon that's kind of

01:09:16.360 | hiding in plain sight, which is that the next most obvious atomic unit are content creators.

01:09:24.040 | Now, let me give you two examples. Lex Friedman, this random crazy guy, Mr. Beast,

01:09:30.280 | Jimmy Donaldson, just the two of you alone, add it up, okay? And you guys are going to approach

01:09:37.240 | in the next five years a billion people. The only thing that you guys haven't figured out yet is how

01:09:41.800 | to capture trillions of dollars of value. Now, maybe you don't want to, and maybe that's not

01:09:45.160 | your stated mission. >> Right, right. But let's just look at Mr.

01:09:47.800 | Beast alone because he is trying to do exactly that probably.

01:09:50.680 | >> Yeah, and I think Jimmy is going to build an enormous business. But if you take Jimmy and all

01:09:54.680 | of the other content creators, right, you guys are atomizing what the apps have done.

01:10:01.960 | You're providing your own curated news feeds. You're providing your own curated communities.

01:10:07.640 | You're allowed, you let people move in and out of these things in a very lightweight way,

01:10:12.520 | and value is accruing to you. So the honest answer to your question is I would focus on

01:10:16.920 | the content creator side of things because I believe that's where the puck is going.

01:10:21.080 | That's a much more important shift in how we all consume information and content and are

01:10:27.480 | entertained. It's through brands like you, individual people that we can humanize and

01:10:31.720 | understand are the filter. >> But aren't you just arguing against

01:10:37.400 | the point you made earlier, which is what you would recommend is the invest in the AGI,

01:10:41.320 | the depersonalization? >> Because they could still be a

01:10:46.280 | participant. In that end state, if that happens, you have the option value of being an enabler of

01:10:51.800 | that, right? You can help improve what they do. Again, you can be this bare metal service provider

01:10:57.960 | where you can be a tax, right? You can participate in everything that you do,

01:11:04.040 | every question that's asked, every comment that's curated. If you could have more intelligence as

01:11:09.240 | you provide a service to your fans and your audience, you would probably pay a small

01:11:13.400 | percentage of that revenue. I suspect all content creators would. And so it's that stack of services

01:11:20.200 | that is like a smart human being. It's like, how do you help produce this information? You would pay

01:11:24.440 | a producer for that. I mean, maybe you would. But so back to your question. So what would I do?

01:11:28.680 | I think that you have to move into that world pretty aggressively. I think that right now you

01:11:35.880 | first have to solve what is broken inside of these social networks. And I don't think it's

01:11:41.320 | a technical problem. So just to put it out there, I don't think it's one where there are these

01:11:47.960 | nefarious organizations. That happens. Brigading XYZ, that happens. But the real problem is a

01:11:55.560 | psychological one that we're dealing with, which is people through a whole set of situations

01:12:03.720 | have lost belief in themselves. And I think that that

01:12:15.640 | comes up as this very virulent form of rejection that they tried to put into these social networks.

01:12:20.840 | So if you look inside of comments on anything, you could have a person that says on Twitter,

01:12:25.800 | I saved this dog from a fiery building. And there would be negative commenters.

01:12:32.040 | And you're like, well, again, put yourself in their shoes. How do I steel man their case? I do

01:12:38.920 | this all the time. I get people throw shade at me. I'm like, OK, let me steel man their point of view.

01:12:44.440 | And the best that I can come up with is I'm working really hard over here. I'm trying. I played by all

01:12:50.440 | the rules that were told to me. I've played well. I've played fairly. And I am not being rewarded

01:12:56.680 | in a system of value that you recognize. And that is making me mad. And now I need to cope and I

01:13:03.880 | need to vent. So back in the day, my dad used to drink. He would make me go get things to hit me

01:13:09.640 | with. Today, you go to Twitter, you spot off, you try to deal with the latent anger that you feel.

01:13:15.480 | So a social network has to be designed, in my opinion, to solve that psychological corner case,

01:13:21.960 | because it is what makes a network unusable. To get real density, you have to find a way

01:13:28.360 | of moving away from that toxicity because it ruins a product experience. You could have the

01:13:33.800 | best pixels in the world. But if people are virulently spitting into their keyboards,

01:13:39.160 | other people are just going to say, you know what, I'm done with this. It doesn't make me feel good.

01:13:44.200 | So the social network has to have a social cost. You can do it in a couple of ways. One is where

01:13:51.480 | you have real world identity. So then there's a cost to being virulent and there's a cost to being

01:13:57.080 | caustic. A second way is to actually just overlay an economic framework so that there's a more

01:14:04.760 | pertinent economic value that you assign to basically spouting off. And the more you want

01:14:09.960 | to spend, the more you can say. And I think both have a lot of value. I don't know what the right

01:14:15.640 | answer is. I tend to like the latter. I think real world identity shuts down a lot of debate

01:14:21.960 | because there's still too much, you know, there's a sensation that there'll be some retribution.

01:14:27.800 | So I think there's more free speech over there, but it cannot be costless because in that there's

01:14:34.680 | a level of toxicity that just makes these products unusable. - Third option, and by the way, all these

01:14:41.240 | work together. If we look at this, what you call the corner case, which is hilarious,

01:14:47.000 | what I would call the human condition, which is, you know, that anger is rooted with the challenges

01:14:57.880 | of life. And what about having an algorithm that shows you what you see that's personalized to you

01:15:10.600 | and helps you maximize your personal growth in the longterm such that you're challenging yourself,

01:15:18.600 | you're improving, you're learning. There's just enough of criticism to keep you on your toes,

01:15:26.600 | but just enough of like the dopamine rush to keep you entertained and finding that balance for each

01:15:32.520 | individual person. - You just described an AGI of a very empathetic, well-rounded friend. - Yes,

01:15:38.440 | exactly. And then you can throw that person, even anonymous, into a pool of discourse. - 100%.

01:15:45.240 | - And they would be better. - I think you're absolutely right.

01:15:47.800 | That is a very, very, very elegant way of stating it. You're absolutely right. - But like you said,

01:15:51.720 | the AGI might be a few years away, so that's a huge investment. My concern, my gut feeling is

01:15:59.000 | this thing we're calling AGI is actually not that difficult to build technically, but it requires a

01:16:06.120 | certain culture and it requires certain risks to be taken. - I think you could reductively boil down

01:16:13.320 | the human intellect into cognition and emotion. And depending on who you are and depending on the

01:16:23.720 | moment, they're weighted very differently, obviously. Cognition is so easily done by computers

01:16:31.160 | that we should assume that that's a solved problem. So our differentiation is the reasoning

01:16:36.440 | part. It's the emotional overlay. It's the empathy. It's the ability to steelman the

01:16:40.840 | opposite person's case and feel why that person, you can forgive them without excusing what they

01:16:47.240 | did, as an example. That is a very difficult thing, I think, to capture in software, but

01:16:54.840 | I think it's a matter of when, not if. - If done crudely, it takes a form of censorship,

01:17:03.160 | just banning people off the platform. Let me ask you some tricky questions. Do you think

01:17:11.480 | Trump should have been removed from Twitter? - No. - What's the pro case? I'm having fun here.

01:17:18.440 | - Do you steelman each side? - Yeah. Let's steelman the get him off the platform.

01:17:25.400 | Here we have a guy who is virulent in all ways. He promotes confrontation. He lacks decorum. He

01:17:40.120 | incites the fervent believers of his cause to act up and push the boundaries bordering on

01:17:48.120 | and potentially even including breaking the law. He does not observe the social norms of a society

01:17:56.200 | that keep us well-functioning, including an orderly transition of power. If he is left in

01:18:01.560 | a moment where he feels trapped and cornered, he could behave in ways that will confuse the people

01:18:08.440 | that believe in him to act in ways that they so regret that it could bring our democracy to an end

01:18:17.720 | or create so much damage or create a wound that's so deep it will take years of conflict and years

01:18:24.360 | of confrontation to heal it. We need to remove him and we need to do it now. It's been too long.

01:18:31.320 | We've let it go on too long. The other side of the argument would be he was a duly elected person

01:18:39.240 | whose views have been run over for way too long. He uses the ability to say extreme things in order

01:18:49.560 | to showcase how corrupt these systems have become and how insular these organizations are in

01:18:57.880 | protecting their own class. If you really want to prevent class warfare and if you really want to

01:19:03.720 | keep the American dream alive for everybody, we need to show that the First Amendment, the

01:19:09.240 | Constitution, the Second Amendment, all of this infrastructure is actually bigger than any partisan

01:19:15.720 | view no matter how bad it is and that people will make their own decisions. There are a lot of people

01:19:24.280 | that can see past the words he uses and focus on the substance of what he's trying to get across

01:19:32.120 | and more generally agree than disagree. When you silence that voice, what you're effectively saying

01:19:38.840 | is this is a rigged game and all of those things that we were told were not true are actually true.

01:19:45.080 | If you were to look at the crude algorithms of Twitter, of course, I don't have any insider

01:19:50.920 | knowledge, but I could imagine that they saw the... Let's say there's a metric that measures

01:19:59.560 | how negative the experience is of the platform and they probably saw in several ways. You could

01:20:06.920 | look at this, but the presence of Donald Trump on the platform was consistently increasing how

01:20:13.640 | shitty people are feeling short-term and long-term because they're probably yelling at each other,

01:20:19.240 | having worse and worse and worse experience. If you even do a survey of how do you feel about

01:20:23.240 | using this platform over the last week, they would say horrible relative to maybe a year ago when

01:20:30.120 | Donald Trump was not actively tweeting or so on. So here you're sitting at Twitter and saying,

01:20:35.320 | "Okay, I know everyone's talking about speech and all that kind of stuff, but I kind of want

01:20:41.400 | to build a platform where the users are happy and they're becoming more and more unhappy. How do I

01:20:47.400 | solve this happiness problem?" Well, let's ban the sources of the unhappiness. Now, we can't just say

01:20:58.200 | you're a source of unhappiness, we'll ban you. Let's wait until that source says something

01:21:03.720 | that we can claim breaks our rules, like incites violence or so on.

01:21:09.800 | That would work if you could measure your construct of happiness properly. The problem is,

01:21:15.240 | I think what Twitter looked at were active commenters and got it confused for overall

01:21:19.160 | system happiness. Because for every piece of content that's created on the internet,

01:21:23.000 | of the 100 people that consume it, maybe one or two people comment on it.

01:21:27.480 | And so by overamplifying that signal and assuming that it was the plurality of people, that's where

01:21:34.840 | they actually made a huge blunder. Because there was no scientific method, I think, to get to the

01:21:40.280 | answer of deplatforming him. And it did expose this idea that it's a bit of a rigged game,

01:21:46.600 | and that there are these deep biases that some of these organizations have

01:21:52.920 | to opinions that are counter to theirs and to their orthodox view of the world.

01:21:57.160 | So in general, you lean towards keeping, first of all, presidents on the platform, but also

01:22:08.520 | controversial voices. All the time. I think it's really important to keep them there.

01:22:13.720 | Let me ask you a tricky one in the recent news that's become especially relevant for me. What

01:22:20.200 | do you think about if you've been paying attention to Kanye West, a recent controversial outburst on

01:22:26.760 | social media about Jews, black people, racism in general, slavery, Holocaust, all of these topics

01:22:40.600 | that he touched on in different ways on different platforms, including Twitter. What do you do with

01:22:48.200 | that? And what do you do with that from a platform perspective, and what do you do from a humanity

01:22:54.760 | perspective of how to add love to the world? >> Should we take both sides of that?

01:23:01.480 | >> Sure. >> Option one is he is

01:23:04.280 | completely out of line, and option two is he's not. Just to simplify.

01:23:09.240 | >> Sure, right. >> So the path one is he's an incredibly

01:23:17.800 | important tastemaker in the world that defines the belief system for a lot of people.

01:23:24.120 | And there just is no room for any form of racism or bias or antisemitism in today's day and age,

01:23:33.000 | particularly by people whose words and comments will be amplified around the world. We've already

01:23:39.800 | paid a large price for that. And then the expectation of success is some amount of

01:23:46.600 | societal decorum that keeps moving the ball forward. The other side would say,

01:23:52.200 | "Life, I think, goes from harmony to disharmony to repair." And anybody who has gone through a

01:24:02.440 | very complicated divorce will tell you that in that moment, your life is extremely disharmonious,

01:24:11.240 | and you are struggling to cope. And because he is famous, we are seeing a person really

01:24:21.160 | struggling in a moment that may need help. And we owe it to him, not for what he said,

01:24:28.760 | because that stuff isn't excusable, but we owe it to him to help him in a way,

01:24:35.080 | and particularly his friends. And if he has real friends, hopefully what they see is that.

01:24:41.320 | What I see on the outside looking in is a person that is clearly struggling.

01:24:47.560 | Can I ask you a human question? And I know it's outside looking in, but there's several questions

01:24:55.480 | I want to ask. So one is about the pain of going through a divorce and having kids and all that

01:25:01.560 | kind of stuff. And two, when you're rich and powerful and famous, I don't know, maybe you can

01:25:08.360 | enlighten me to which is the most corruptive, but how do you know who are the friends to trust?

01:25:16.840 | So a lot of the world is calling Kanye insane, or has mental illness, all that kind of stuff.

01:25:26.440 | And so how do you have friends close to you that say something like that message, but from a place

01:25:33.560 | of love and where they actually care for you, as opposed to trying to get you to shut up?

01:25:40.520 | The reason I ask all those questions, I think, if you care about the guy, how do you help him?

01:25:47.160 | Right. I've been through a divorce. It's gut-wrenching. The most horrible part

01:25:54.600 | is having to tell your kids. I can't even describe to you how proud I am of and how

01:26:01.960 | resilient these three beautiful little creatures were when my ex-wife and I had to sit them down

01:26:06.520 | and talk through it. And for that thing, I'll be just so protective of them and so proud of them.

01:26:18.360 | It's hard. Now, I don't know that that's what he went through, but it doesn't matter. In that

01:26:24.440 | moment, there's no fame, there's no money, there's nothing. There's just the raw intimacy of a

01:26:28.040 | nuclear family breaking up. And that, there is a death, and it's the death of that idea.

01:26:34.120 | And that is extremely, extremely profound in its impact, especially in your children.

01:26:41.400 | It is really hard, really hard.

01:26:46.040 | Could you have seen yourself in the way you see the world being clouded during,

01:26:51.160 | especially at first, to where you would make poor decisions outside of that nuclear family? So,

01:26:58.840 | like, poor business decisions, poor tweeting decisions, poor writing decisions.

01:27:05.320 | If I had to boil down a lot of those, what I would say is that there are moments in my life,

01:27:11.640 | Lex, where I have felt meaningfully less than. And in those moments, the loop that I would fall

01:27:19.240 | into is I would look to cope and be seen by other people. So, I would throw away all of the work I

01:27:26.040 | was doing around my own internal validation, and I would try to say something or do something that

01:27:32.440 | would get the attention of others. And oftentimes, when that loop was unproductive, it's because

01:27:39.960 | those things had really crappy consequences. So, yeah, I went through that as well. So,

01:27:48.280 | I had to go through this disharmonious phase in my life and then to repair it.

01:27:53.320 | I had the benefit of meeting someone and building a relationship block by block

01:28:02.840 | where there was just enormous accountability, where my partner Nat has just incredible empathy

01:28:12.840 | but accountability. And so, she can put herself in my shoes sometimes when I'm a really tough

01:28:20.680 | person to be around, but then she doesn't let me off the hook. She can forgive me,

01:28:25.640 | but it doesn't make what I may have said or whatever excusable. And that's been really

01:28:32.280 | healthy for me, and it's helped me repair my relationships, be a better parent, be a better

01:28:38.840 | friend to my ex-wife, who's a beautiful woman who I love deeply and will always love her.

01:28:44.920 | And it took me a few years to see that, that it was just a chapter that had come to an end,

01:28:49.640 | but she's an incredible mother and an incredible businesswoman. And I'm so thankful that I've had

01:28:55.080 | two incredible women in my life. That's like a blessing.

01:28:58.200 | - But it's hard. So, with Nat, it's hard to find a person that has that. I mean,

01:29:03.960 | a lot of stuff you said is pretty profound, but having that person who has empathy and

01:29:08.120 | accountability. So, basically, that's ultimately what great friendship is, which is people that

01:29:15.880 | love you, have empathy for you, but can also call you out on your bullshit.

01:29:18.760 | - She's a LeBron James-like figure. And the reason I say that is I've seen and met so many people.

01:29:25.240 | I've seen the distribution on the scale of friendship and empathy.

01:29:29.800 | - She's the LeBron James of friendship.

01:29:32.360 | - She's a GOAT. Well, what's so funny is we have a dinner around poker,

01:29:37.160 | and it's taken on a life of its own, mostly because of her, because these guys look to her.

01:29:44.200 | And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. She's taken, like... Her registers are already full. She's

01:29:51.000 | thinking of all kinds of crap with me." But it's a very innate skill, and it's paired with...

01:29:59.400 | But it's not just an emotional thing, meaning she's the person that I make all my decisions with.

01:30:06.280 | These decisions we're making together as a team, I've never understood that. You know,

01:30:10.760 | there's that African proverb, like, "Go fast, go alone. Go far, go together." And,

01:30:18.040 | like, since I was born, I was by myself, and I had to cope, and I didn't have a good toolkit

01:30:23.400 | to use into the world. And in these last five or six years, she's helped me. And at first,

01:30:28.520 | my toolkit was literally like sticks, you know? And then I found a way to... You know,

01:30:34.440 | she helped me sharpen a little rock, and that became a little knife, but even that was crap.

01:30:38.840 | And then she showed me fire, and then I forged a knife. And that's what it feels like, where now

01:30:43.960 | this toolkit is like most average people. And I feel humbled to be average, because I was here,

01:30:52.360 | down here on the ground. So it's made all these things more reasonable. So I see what comes from

01:31:00.680 | having deep, profound friendships and love to help you through these critical moments.

01:31:05.880 | I have another friend who I would say just completely unabashedly loves me,

01:31:12.120 | this guy Rob Goldberg. He doesn't hold me accountable that much, which I love. Like,

01:31:16.440 | I could say I killed a homeless person. He's like, "Ah, they probably deserved it."

01:31:19.400 | You know? Whereas Nat would be like, "That was not good, what you just did."

01:31:23.640 | But I have both. I mean, I have Nat every day. You know, Rob, I don't talk to that often. But

01:31:29.720 | to have two people, I had zero. I think most people, unfortunately, have zero.

01:31:37.320 | So I think what he needs is somebody to just listen. You don't have to put a label on these

01:31:45.720 | things. And you just have to try to guide in these very unique moments where you can just

01:31:51.080 | like de-escalate what is going on in your mind. And I suspect what's going on in his mind, again,

01:31:58.680 | to play armchair quarterback, I don't know, is that he is in a moment where he just feels lower

01:32:04.280 | than low. And we all do it. We've all had these moments where we don't know how to get attention.

01:32:11.640 | And if you didn't grow up in a healthy environment, you may go through a negative

01:32:16.680 | way to get attention. And it's not to excuse it, but it's to understand it.

01:32:22.600 | That's so profound, the feeling less than and at those low points going externally to find it.

01:32:33.640 | And maybe creating conflict and scandal to get that attention.

01:32:40.760 | The way that my doctor explained it to me is you have to think about your self-worth

01:32:47.160 | like a knot. It's inside of a very complicated set of knots. So it's like some people don't

01:32:54.520 | have these knots. It's just presented to you on a platter. But for some of us,

01:32:58.680 | because of the way we grow up, it's covered in all these knots. So the whole goal is to

01:33:05.320 | loosen those knots. And it happens slowly. It happens unpredictably. And it takes a long time.

01:33:11.960 | And so while you're doing that, you are going to have moments where when you feel less than,

01:33:16.680 | you're not prepared to look inside and say, "Actually, here's how I feel about myself.

01:33:21.000 | It's pretty cool. I'm happy with where I'm at."

01:33:26.120 | I have to ask on the topic of friendship. You do an amazing podcast called All In Podcast.

01:33:32.840 | People should stop listening to this and go listen to that. You just did your 100th episode.

01:33:37.560 | I mean, it's one of my favorite podcasts. It's incredible. For the technical and the human

01:33:46.920 | psychological wisdom that you guys constantly give in the way you analyze the world, but also

01:33:53.160 | just the chemistry between you. You're clearly—there's a tension, and there's a camaraderie

01:34:01.400 | that's all laid out on the table. So I don't know the two Davids that well, but I have met Jason.

01:34:08.920 | What do you love about him?

01:34:10.200 | I mean, I'll give you a little psychological breakdown of all three of these guys.

01:34:13.880 | Sure.

01:34:14.120 | Just my opinion. And I love you guys.

01:34:18.360 | Would they agree with your psychological breakdown?

01:34:22.520 | I don't know. I think that what I would say about J. Cal is he is unbelievably loyal to no end.

01:34:33.000 | And he's like any of those movies which are about the mafia or whatever, where something bad's going

01:34:43.160 | wrong and you need somebody to show up. That's J. Cal.

01:34:46.840 | So if you killed the said proverbial homeless person, he would be right there to help you.

01:34:51.080 | He'd bury the body.

01:34:51.960 | Yeah.

01:34:52.440 | But he's the one that he'll defend you in every way, shape, or form, even if it doesn't make

01:34:57.320 | sense in that moment. He doesn't see that as an action of whether it'll solve the problem. He sees

01:35:03.480 | that as an act of devotion to you, your friend. And that's an incredible gift that he gives us.

01:35:08.200 | The other side of it is that J. Cal needs to learn how to trust that other people love him

01:35:16.760 | back as much as he loves us. And that's where he makes mistakes, because he assumes that he's not

01:35:23.000 | as lovable as the rest of us. But he's infinitely more lovable than he understands. You have to see

01:35:29.640 | Lex. He is unbelievably funny. I cannot tell you how funny this guy is. Next level funny.

01:35:37.640 | Yeah, his timing, everything.

01:35:38.840 | Timing, charm, the care he takes. So he is as lovable, but he doesn't believe himself to be

01:35:46.520 | and that manifests itself in areas that drive us all crazy from time to time.

01:35:50.600 | Which makes it for a very pleasant listening experience. Okay, so what about the two Davids,

01:35:55.800 | David Sachs and David Friedberg?

01:35:57.560 | David Sachs is the one that I would say I have the most emotional connection with.

01:36:01.320 | He and I can go a year without talking, and then we'll talk for four hours straight.

01:36:07.080 | And then we know where we are, and we have this ability to pick up and have a level of intimacy

01:36:12.680 | with each other. And I think that's just because I've known David for so long now.

01:36:16.760 | That I find really comforting. And then Friedberg is this person who I think similar to me,

01:36:24.040 | had a very turbulent upbringing, has fought through it to build an incredible life for himself.

01:36:30.200 | And I have this enormous respect for his journey. I don't particularly care about his outcomes,

01:36:36.040 | 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,

01:36:43.160 | I would be glad that he did it, if it makes any sense. And you can see that he

01:36:52.600 | feels like his entire responsibility is really around his kids. And to give a better counterfactual

01:37:05.240 | and sometimes I think he gets that right and wrong, but he's a very special human being.

01:37:11.640 | On that show, the two of you have a very kind of, like from a geopolitics perspective,

01:37:18.680 | I don't know, there's just a very effective way to think deeply about the world,

01:37:25.160 | the big picture of the world.

01:37:27.080 | He's a very systems level thinker, which I really, really like.

01:37:30.200 | Yeah, very, very.

01:37:31.800 | Absolutely.

01:37:32.360 | Very systems level. So looking at everything.

01:37:34.360 | And he's very rooted in a broad body of knowledge, which I have a tremendous respect for. He brings

01:37:42.120 | all these things in. Sachs is incredible because he has this unbelievable understanding of things,

01:37:48.920 | but it has a core nucleus. So Freeberg can just basically abstract a whole bunch of systems and

01:37:54.040 | 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.

01:37:59.880 | Sachs is more like anchored in a philosophical and historical context as the answer.

01:38:05.160 | And he starts there, but he gets to these profound understandings of systems as well.

01:38:10.360 | On the podcast, in life, you guys hold to your opinion pretty strong.

01:38:15.480 | What's the secret to being able to argue passionately with friends?

01:38:21.480 | So hold your position, but also not murder each other, which you guys seem to come close to.

01:38:28.120 | I think it's like strong opinions, weakly held.

01:38:31.720 | So I think that's the root.

01:38:34.840 | Wait, is that a haiku or is that, can you explain that please?

01:38:39.880 | Yeah, like look today, you and I, we steel man like the two sides of three different things.

01:38:46.360 | Now you could be confused and think I believe in those things. I believe that it's important to be

01:38:54.040 | able to intellectually traverse there, whether I believe in it or not. And like steel man, not

01:38:58.040 | strong man. That's a really-

01:38:59.800 | But we intro those things by saying, let us steel man this position. Sometimes you guys skip the-

01:39:05.160 | You're right. We edit those things out and sometimes we'll sit on either sides and we'll

01:39:09.800 | just kind of bat things back and forth just to see what the other person thinks.

01:39:14.680 | So that's how, like as fans, we should listen to that sometimes.

01:39:19.000 | Sometimes.

01:39:19.400 | So sometimes, 'cause you hold a strong opinion sometimes. Like for example, the cost of energy

01:39:25.560 | going to zero, is that, like what's the degree of certainty on that? Is this kind of like you

01:39:33.240 | really taking a prediction of how the world will unroll and if it does, this will benefit a huge

01:39:42.360 | amount of companies and people that will believe that idea. So you really, you spend a few days,

01:39:49.640 | a few weeks with that idea.

01:39:51.160 | I've been spending two years with that idea. And that idea has manifested into

01:39:56.600 | many pages and pages of more and more branches of a tree. But it started with that idea. So if

01:40:06.600 | you think about this tree, this logical tree that I built, I would consider it more of a mosaic.

01:40:11.080 | And at the base or root, however you want to talk about it, is this idea, the incremental cost of

01:40:16.520 | energy goes to zero. How does it manifest? And so I talked about one traversal, which is the

01:40:22.280 | competition of households versus utilities. But if even some of that comes to pass, we're going

01:40:29.320 | to see a bunch of other implications from a regulatory and technology perspective. If some

01:40:33.800 | of those come to pass, so I've tried to think sort of this six, seven, eight hops forward.

01:40:41.480 | And I have some, to use a chess analogy, I have a bunch of short lines, which I think can work.

01:40:47.560 | And I've started to test those by making investments, tens of millions over here to

01:40:53.880 | a hundred millions over there. But it's a distribution based on how probabilistic I

01:40:59.240 | think these outcomes are and how downside protected I can be and how much I will learn,

01:41:04.440 | how many mistakes I can make, et cetera. And then very quickly over the next two years,

01:41:09.960 | some of those things will happen or not happen, and I will rapidly re-underwrite.

01:41:13.400 | And I'll rewrite that tree. And then I'll get some more data. I'll make some more investments.

01:41:19.480 | And I'll rapidly re-underwrite. So in order for me to get to this tree, maybe you can ask,

01:41:25.560 | how did I get there? It was a complete accident. The way that it happened was I have a friend of

01:41:31.240 | mine who works at a great organization called Fortress. His name is Drew McKnight. And he

01:41:34.840 | called me one day and he said, "Hey, I'm doing a deal. Will you anchor it? We're going public.

01:41:38.120 | And it's a rare earth mining company." And I said, "Drew, I'm going to get tarred and feathered in

01:41:45.080 | Silicon Valley for backing a mining company." And he said, "Samath, just talk to the guy and learn."

01:41:49.640 | And the guy, Jim Latinsky, blew me away. He's like, "Here's what it means for energy. And

01:41:55.000 | here's what it means for the supply chain. And here's what it means for the United States versus

01:41:58.040 | China." But Lex, I did that deal. And then I did seven others. And that deal made money.

01:42:05.080 | The seven others did not. But I learned, I made enough mistakes where the net of it was I got to

01:42:12.840 | a thesis that I believed in. I could see it. And I was like, "Okay, I paid the price. I acquired

01:42:18.440 | the learning. I made my mistakes. I know where I am at. And this is step one." And then I learned a

01:42:24.440 | little bit more. I made some more investments. And that's how I do the job. The minute that you

01:42:30.200 | try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet either on yourself or a company,

01:42:35.400 | a girlfriend, whatever, it's too late. So if we just linger on that tree,

01:42:41.320 | it seems like a lot of geopolitics, a lot of international military even conflict is around

01:42:48.520 | energy. So how does your thinking about energy connect to what you see happening in the next

01:42:55.560 | 10, 20 years? Maybe you can look at the war in Ukraine or relationship with China and other

01:43:03.240 | places through this lens of energy. What's the hopeful, what's the cynical trajectory that the

01:43:09.560 | world might take through with this drive towards zero energy, zero cost energy?

01:43:14.760 | So the United States was in a period of energy surplus until the last few years, some number of

01:43:20.440 | years in Trump and I think some number of now the current administration with President Biden.

01:43:24.280 | But we know what it means to basically have more than enough energy to fund our own domestic

01:43:33.400 | manufacturing and living standards. And I think that by being able to generate this energy from

01:43:40.280 | the sun that is very capex efficient, that is very climate efficient, gives us a huge tailwind.

01:43:47.320 | The second thing is that we are now in a world, in a regime for many years to come of non-zero

01:43:54.760 | interest rates. And it may interest you to know that the really the last time that we had long

01:44:04.840 | dated wars supported at low interest rates was World War II, where I think the average interest

01:44:10.600 | rates was like 1.07% in the 10 year. And every other war tends to have these very quick opening

01:44:17.400 | closes because these long protracted fights get very difficult to finance when rates are non-zero.

01:44:24.360 | So just as an example, even starting in 2023, so the practical example today in the United States

01:44:30.360 | is President Biden's budget is about 1.5 trillion for next year. That's not including the entitlement

01:44:37.560 | spending, meaning Medicare, Social Security. So the stuff that he wants to spend that he has

01:44:43.000 | discretion over is about 1.582 trillion is the exact number. Next year, our interest payments

01:44:49.720 | are going to be $455 billion. That's 29% of every budget dollar is going to pay interest.

01:44:57.240 | So you have these two worlds coming together, right, Lex? If you have us hurtling forward

01:45:05.080 | to being able to generate our own energy and the economic peril that comes with trying to underwrite

01:45:11.640 | several trillion dollars for war, which we can't afford to pay when rates are at 5%,

01:45:16.920 | means that despite all the bluster, the probabilistic distribution of us engaging

01:45:23.480 | in war with Russia and Ukraine seems relatively low. The override would obviously be a moral

01:45:31.880 | reason to do it. That may or may not come if there is some nuclear proliferation.

01:45:38.840 | But now you have to steel man the other side of the equation, which is, well, what were to happen

01:45:44.200 | if you were sitting there and you were Putin? Let's steel man setting off a tactical nuke

01:45:48.920 | someplace. OK, I'm getting calls every other day from my two largest energy buyers, India and China,

01:45:57.720 | telling me, slow my roll. I have the entire world looking to find the final excuse to turn me off

01:46:07.080 | and unplug me from the entire world economy. The only morally reprehensible thing that's left in

01:46:13.640 | my arsenal that could do all of these things together would be to set off a tactical nuke.

01:46:18.280 | I would be the only person since World War II to have done that.

01:46:21.640 | I mean, it seems like it's a really, really, really big step to take. And so I think that

01:46:33.000 | X of the clamoring for war that the military industrial complex wants us to buy into,

01:46:39.080 | the financial reasons to do it and the natural resources needs to do it are making it very

01:46:47.480 | unlikely. That is not just true for us. I think it's also true for Europe. I think the European

01:46:54.440 | economy is going to roll over. I think it's going-- I see a very hard landing for them,

01:47:00.760 | which means that if the economy slows down, there's going to be less need for energy.

01:47:05.160 | And so it starts to become a thing where a negotiated settlement is actually the win-win

01:47:12.280 | for everybody. But none of this would be possible without zero interest rates. In a world of zero

01:47:19.480 | interest rates, we would be in war. >> So you believe in the financial forces

01:47:26.360 | and pressures overpowering the human ones? >> I believe in the invisible hand. I really

01:47:31.320 | do believe in the invisible hand. >> Even in international war?

01:47:34.200 | >> More so there. I think the invisible hand-- and by the invisible hand for the audience,

01:47:39.320 | I think really what it means is the financial complex and really the central bank complex and

01:47:46.120 | the interplay between fiscal and monetary policy is a very convoluted and complicated set of things.

01:47:53.240 | But if we had zero interest rates, we would be probably in the middle of it now.

01:48:01.000 | >> See, there's a complexity to this game at the international level where some nations

01:48:09.000 | are authoritarian and there's significant corruption. And so that adds from a game

01:48:17.720 | theoretic optimal perspective, the invisible hand is operating in the mud.

01:48:23.720 | >> Preventing war. The person that is the most important figure in the world right now is Jerome

01:48:30.280 | Powell. He is probably doing more to prevent war than anybody else. He keeps ratcheting rates.

01:48:35.400 | It's just impossible. It's a mathematical impossibility for the United States unless

01:48:39.640 | there is such a cataclysmic moral transgression by Russia. So there is tail risk that it is possible

01:48:44.840 | where we say, "Forget it. All bets are off. We're going back to zero rates. Issue a 100-year bond.

01:48:50.920 | We're going to finance a war machine." There is a small risk of that. But I think the propensity of

01:48:56.120 | the majority of outcomes is more of a negotiated settlement.

01:48:58.680 | >> So what about, I mean, what's the motivation of Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place?

01:49:04.760 | Financial forces are the most powerful forces. Why did it happen? Because it seems like there's

01:49:15.720 | other forces at play of maintaining superpower status on the world stage. It seems like geopolitics

01:49:25.080 | doesn't happen just with the invisible hand in consideration.

01:49:29.560 | >> I agree with that. I can't beg to know, to be honest. I don't know. But he did it.

01:49:35.560 | And I think it's easier for me to guess the outcome from here. It would have been impossible

01:49:42.760 | for me to really understand. It is what got him to this place. But it seems like there's an end

01:49:49.000 | game here, and there's not much playability. >> Yeah. I feel like I'm on unsteady ground

01:49:57.000 | because there's been so many experts at every stage of this that have been wrong.

01:50:01.720 | >> Well, there are no experts. >> Well, on this...

01:50:04.440 | >> There are no experts, Lex. >> I understand this. Well,

01:50:10.440 | let's dig into that because we just said Phil Hellmuth is the greatest poker player of all time.

01:50:17.080 | >> He has an opinion. >> Yeah.

01:50:18.760 | >> He doesn't... They would be mistaken... >> Phil, Ivey is an expert at poker.

01:50:22.840 | >> Phil has an opinion. Ivey has an opinion as well on how to play all these games,

01:50:26.600 | meaning an opinion means here's the lines I take, here are the decisions I make. I live and die by

01:50:32.200 | those, and if I'm right, I win. If I'm wrong, I lose. I've made more mistakes than my opponent.

01:50:37.400 | >> I thought you said there's an optimal. So aren't there people that have a deeper

01:50:43.640 | understanding, a higher likelihood of being able to describe and know the optimal set of actions

01:50:50.520 | here at every layer? >> Well, there may be a theoretically

01:50:55.800 | set of optimal decisions, but you can't play your life against a computer, meaning the minute that

01:51:04.200 | you face an opponent and that person takes you off that optimal path, you have to adjust.

01:51:08.840 | >> Yeah. Like what happens if a tactical nuke... >> It would be really bad.

01:51:17.400 | I think the world is resilient enough. I think the Ukrainians are resilient enough to overcome it.

01:51:22.120 | It would be really bad. It's just an incredibly sad moment in human history.

01:51:26.040 | >> But do you wonder what US does? Is there any understanding? Do you think people inside

01:51:31.400 | the United States understand? Not the regular citizens, but people in the military. Do you

01:51:37.880 | think Joe Biden understands? Do you think... >> I think Joe Biden does understand. I think that...

01:51:41.800 | >> You think they have a clear plan? >> I think that there are few reasons to let

01:51:47.960 | the gerontocracy rule, but this is one of the reasons where I think they are better adept than

01:51:52.280 | other people. Folks that were around during the Bay of Pigs, folks that hopefully have studied

01:51:58.680 | that and studied nuclear de-escalation will have a better playbook than I do. My suspicion

01:52:07.640 | is that there is an in an emergency break glass plan. I think before military intervention or

01:52:15.960 | anything else, I think that there are an enormous number of financial sanctions

01:52:23.240 | that you can do to just completely cripple Russia that they haven't undertaken yet.

01:52:29.640 | If you couple that with an economic system in Europe that is less and less in need of energy,

01:52:37.400 | because it is going into a recession, it makes it easier for them to be able to walk away,

01:52:44.280 | while the US ships a bunch of LNG over there. I don't know the game theory on all of this, but...

01:52:50.680 | >> Does it make you nervous that... Or we're just being temperamental? It feels like the world hangs

01:52:58.760 | in a balance. It feels like, at least from my naive perspective, I thought we were getting to

01:53:09.160 | a place where surely human civilization can't destroy itself. And here's a presentation of

01:53:13.960 | what looks like a hot war where multiple parties involved in escalation towards a world war is not

01:53:21.320 | entirely out of the realm of possibility. >> It's not. I would really, really hope that

01:53:28.120 | he is spending time with his two young twins. >> Well, this is part of what...

01:53:37.880 | >> I really hope he's spending time with his kids. >> Agreed, but not kids, not just kids,

01:53:44.680 | but friends. >> I'm not sure that he may not have friends, but it's very hard for anybody

01:53:51.000 | to look at their kids and not think about protecting the future. >>

01:53:55.120 | Well, there's partially because of the pandemic, but partially because of the nature of power,

01:54:02.600 | it feels like you're surrounded by people you can't trust more and more. I do think the pandemic

01:54:07.880 | had an effect on that too, the isolating effect. A lot of people were not their best selves during

01:54:13.880 | the pandemic. From a super heavy topic, let me go back to the space where you're one of the most

01:54:19.880 | successful people in the world. How to build companies, how to find good companies, what it

01:54:26.280 | takes to find good companies, what it takes to build good companies, what advice do you have

01:54:31.560 | for someone who wants to build the next super successful startup in the tech space and have a

01:54:37.880 | chance to be impactful like Facebook, Apple? >> I think that's the key word. If your

01:54:44.280 | precondition is to start something successful, you've already failed because now you're playing

01:54:48.760 | somebody else's game. What success means is not clear. You're walking into the woods. It's murky,

01:54:55.080 | it's dark, it's wet, it's raining. There's all these animals about. There's no comfort there.

01:55:01.480 | So you better really like hiking. And there's no short way to shortcut that.

01:55:09.000 | >> Isn't it obvious what success is? Like success is scale, so it's not what are the...

01:55:15.240 | >> No. I think that there's a very brittle basic definition of success that's outside in,

01:55:21.400 | but that's not what it is. I know people that are much, much, much richer than I am,

01:55:32.360 | and they are just so completely broken. And I think to myself, the only difference between you

01:55:42.680 | and me is outsider's perception of your wealth versus mine. But the happiness and the joy that

01:55:50.840 | I have in the simple basic routines of my life give me enormous joy. And so I feel successful,

01:56:00.200 | no matter what anybody says about my success or lack of success. There are people that live normal

01:56:07.720 | lives, that have good jobs, that have good families. I have this idyllic sense. I see it on

01:56:15.400 | TikTok all the time, so I know it exists. These neighborhoods where there's a cul-de-sac and these

01:56:20.600 | beautiful homes and these kids are biking around. And every time I see that, Lex, I immediately

01:56:26.600 | flashback to what I didn't have. And I think that's success. Look at how happy those kids are.

01:56:34.360 | So no, there is no one definition. And so if people are starting out to try to make

01:56:39.320 | a million dollars, a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars, you're going to fail.

01:56:43.000 | There's a definition of personal success, but is there's also some level of,

01:56:49.000 | that's different from person to person, but is there's also some level of

01:56:54.120 | the responsibility you have if there's a mission to have a positive impact on the world.

01:57:01.400 | So I'm not sure that Elon is happy. >> No. In fact, I think if you focus on

01:57:06.600 | trying to have an impact on the world, I think you're going to end up deeply unhappy.

01:57:09.800 | >> But does that matter? Like why is your own personal happiness matter?

01:57:14.440 | >> It may happen as a byproduct, but I think that you should strive to find your own personal

01:57:20.280 | happiness and then measure how that manifests as it relates to society and to other people.

01:57:26.760 | But if the answer to those questions is zero, that doesn't make you less of a person.

01:57:31.560 | >> No, a hundred percent. But then the other way, is there times when you need to sacrifice your

01:57:36.360 | own personal happiness for a bigger thing that you've created?

01:57:41.640 | >> Yeah. If you're in a position to do it, I think some folks are tested. Elon is probably

01:57:46.920 | the best example. And it must be really, really hard to be him. Really hard. I have

01:57:57.160 | enormous levels of empathy and care for him. I really love him as a person, because I just see

01:58:07.320 | that it's not that fun. And he has these ways of being human that in his position,

01:58:16.040 | I just think are so dear that I just hope he never loses them. Just a simple example,

01:58:21.800 | two days ago, I don't know why, but I went on Twitter and I saw the perfume thing. So I'm like,

01:58:29.000 | "Ah, fuck it. I'm just going to go buy some perfume." So I bought his perfume, the burnt

01:58:32.760 | hair thing. And I emailed him the receipt and I'm like, "All right, you got me for a bottle."

01:58:37.640 | And he responded in eight seconds and it was just a smiley face or whatever.

01:58:43.160 | Just deeply normal things that you do amongst people that are just... So nobody sees that.

01:58:48.600 | You know what I mean? But it would be... He deserves for that stuff to be seen because

01:58:53.960 | the rest of his life is so brutally hard. He's just a normal guy that is just caught in this

01:58:59.880 | ultra mega vortex. >> Why do you think there's so few Elons?

01:59:06.280 | >> It's an extremely lonely set of trade-offs. Because to your point, if you get tested...

01:59:15.000 | So if you think about it again, probabilistically, there's 8 billion people in the world,

01:59:20.680 | maybe 50 of them get put in a position where they are building something of such

01:59:25.160 | colossal importance that they even have this choice. And then of that 50, maybe 10 of them

01:59:32.120 | are put in a moment where they actually have to make a trade-off. You're not going to be able to

01:59:37.480 | see your family. I'm making this up. You're not going to be able to see your family. You're going

01:59:41.160 | to have to basically move into your factory. You're going to have to sleep on the floor.

01:59:44.520 | But here's the outcome, energy independence and resource abundance and a massive peace dividend.

01:59:51.880 | And then he says to himself, I don't know that he did because I've never had this...

01:59:57.160 | Yeah, you know what, that's worth it. And then you look at your kids and you're like,

02:00:01.720 | I'm making this decision. I don't know how to explain that to you.

02:00:05.240 | >> Yeah. >> You want to be in that position?

02:00:07.880 | There's no amount of money where I would want to be in that position. So that takes an enormous

02:00:12.200 | fortitude and a moral compass that he has. And that's what I think people need to appreciate

02:00:18.040 | about that guy. >> It's also on the first number you said, it's confusing that there's 50 people

02:00:23.560 | or 10 people that are put in the position to have that level of impact. It's unclear that that has

02:00:30.200 | to be that way. It seems like there could be much more. >> There should be. There's definitely people

02:00:35.160 | with the potential. But think about his journey. His mom had to leave a very complicated environment,

02:00:43.480 | move to Canada, move to Toronto, a small apartment just north of Bay and Bloor, if you've ever been

02:00:50.440 | to Toronto. I remember talking to her about this apartment. It's so crazy because I used to live

02:00:54.760 | like around the corner from that place and raise these three kids and just have to... So how many

02:01:00.600 | people are going to start with those boundary conditions and really grind it out? It's just

02:01:07.880 | very few people in the end that will have the resiliency to stick it through where you don't

02:01:15.480 | give into the self-doubt. And so it's just a really hard set of boundary conditions where you

02:01:23.160 | can have 50 or 100 of these people. That's why they need to be really appreciated. >> Yeah. Well,

02:01:29.320 | that's true for all humans that follow the thread of their passion and do something beautiful in

02:01:38.360 | this world. That could be on a small scale or a big scale. Appreciation is a gift you give to

02:01:45.160 | the other person, but also a gift to yourself. Somehow it becomes like this contagious thing.

02:01:49.800 | >> I went to this. You are so right. My brain just lit up because yesterday I went to

02:01:56.200 | an investor day of my friend of mine, described Brad Gerstner. And on the one very reductive world,

02:02:05.640 | Brad and I are theoretically competitors, but we're not. He makes his own set of decisions.

02:02:10.680 | I make my own set of decisions. We're both trying to do our own view of what is good work in the

02:02:15.240 | world, but he's been profoundly successful. And it was really the first moment of my adult life

02:02:23.800 | where I could sit in a moment like that and really be appreciative of his success and not feel less

02:02:29.240 | than. And so, a little selfishly for me, but mostly for him as well, I was so proud to be in the room.

02:02:36.920 | That's my friend. That guy plays poker with me every Thursday. He is crushing it. It's awesome.

02:02:41.880 | And it's a really amazing feeling. >> I mean, to linger on the trade-offs,

02:02:51.480 | the complicated trade-offs with all of this, what's your take on work-life balance

02:02:55.880 | in a company that's trying to do big things? >> I think that you have to have

02:03:06.360 | some very, very strict boundaries, but otherwise I think balance is kind of dumb.

02:03:13.320 | It will make you limited. I think you need to immerse yourself in the problem,

02:03:18.760 | but you need to define that immersion with boundaries. So, if you ask me, "What does my

02:03:25.240 | process look like?" It's monotonous and regimented, but it's all the time, except when it's not.

02:03:33.400 | And that's also monotonous and regimented. And I think that makes me very good at my craft

02:03:41.000 | because it gives me what I need to stay connected to the problem without feeling resentful about the

02:03:49.320 | problem. >> Which part? The monotonous, all-in nature of it? Or when you say hard boundaries,

02:03:57.640 | essentially go all out until you stop, and you don't stop often? >> I'm in a little bit of a

02:04:05.240 | quandary right now because I'm trying to redefine my goals. And you're catching me in a moment where

02:04:12.440 | I have, even in these last few years of evolution, I think I've made some good progress,

02:04:19.800 | but in one very specific way, I'm still very reptilian. And I'm trying to let go,

02:04:27.240 | which was that exactly? If you can-- >> In my business, it really gets reduced to

02:04:32.600 | what is your annual rate of compounding? That's my demarcation. Steph Curry and LeBron James,

02:04:38.280 | Michael Jordan, it's how many points did you average, not just in a season, but over your

02:04:44.040 | career? And in their case, to really be the greatest of all time, it's points, rebounds,

02:04:50.520 | assists, steals. There's all kinds of measures to be in that pantheon of being really, really

02:04:58.280 | good at your craft. And in my business, it's very reductive. It's how well have you compounded?

02:05:05.560 | And if you look at all the heroes that I have put on a pedestal in my mind,

02:05:15.640 | they've compounded at above 30% for a very long time, as have I.

02:05:22.760 | But now I feel like I really need to let go because I think I know how to do the basics of my job.

02:05:31.000 | And if I had to summarize an investing challenge or investing, I think really it's when you first

02:05:38.280 | start out investing, you're a momentum person. You saw it in GameStop, just a bunch of people

02:05:43.400 | aping each other. And then it goes from momentum to you start to think about cash flows, how much

02:05:51.080 | profit is this person going to make, whatever. So that's like the evolution. This is the basic

02:05:56.840 | thing to this is a reasonably sophisticated way. Then a much smaller group of people think about

02:06:03.240 | it in terms of macro geopolitics. But then a very finite few crack this special code,

02:06:09.400 | which is there's a philosophy and it's the philosophy that creates the system.

02:06:13.560 | And I'm scratching at that furiously, but I cannot break through and I haven't broken through.

02:06:20.520 | And I know that in order to break through, I got to let go. So this is the journey that I'm in

02:06:25.880 | as in my professional life. So it is an all consuming thing, but I'm always home for dinner.

02:06:34.200 | We have very prescribed moments where we take vacation, the weekends. I can tell you about my

02:06:39.640 | week if you're curious, but it's like- I would love to know your week. It's since it's regimented

02:06:44.120 | and monotonous. I wake up at 6.45, get the kids, go downstairs. We all have some form of

02:06:57.720 | not super healthy breakfast. I make a latte. I've become in and the latte is like, I have a machine.

02:07:04.200 | I measure the beans. I make sure that the timer is such where I have to pull it for a certain

02:07:09.640 | specific ratio. Just so you know, 20 grams, I got to pull 30 grams with the water and I got to do it

02:07:15.480 | in 30 seconds, et cetera. So you're a coffee snob.

02:07:19.240 | It helps me stay in rhythm. Sure. Before I used to have another machine, I just pushed a button.

02:07:25.640 | But then I would push the button religiously in the exact same way. You know what I mean?

02:07:29.320 | Can I say actually on that topic, the morning with kids can be a pretty stressful thing.

02:07:38.040 | Are you able to find sort of happiness? Is that also that morning is a source of happiness?

02:07:44.040 | It's great. My kids are lovely. They're maniacs.

02:07:51.640 | I just see, and maybe I've never asked Friedberg this, but I'll just put my words. I see all of

02:07:59.080 | the things in moments where there was no compassion given to me. And so I just give him a ton of

02:08:08.440 | love and compassion. I have an infinite patience for my children, not for other kids.

02:08:13.640 | Yes, of course. But for kids. So anyway, so we have a breakfast thing.

02:08:20.520 | And then I go upstairs and I change and I work out from eight to nine.

02:08:26.520 | And that's like the first 15 minutes I walk up on a steep incline, 12 to 14%,

02:08:34.360 | three and a half to four miles per hour walk. And then Monday's a push day, Tuesday's front

02:08:44.120 | of the legs, Wednesday's pull, Thursday's back of the legs, eight to nine. Monday I always start,

02:08:52.360 | I talk to my therapist from nine to 10. So as soon as I finished working out, I get on the phone

02:08:56.920 | and I talk to him. And it helps me lock in for the week. And I'm just talking about the past.

02:09:06.440 | And it's just helping me. The recent past?

02:09:10.520 | Usually, sometimes the recent past, but usually it's about the past past. Something that I

02:09:16.280 | remember when I was a kid. Because that's the work about just loosening those knots.

02:09:21.400 | So I put in that hour of work, respect that hour. Then I'm in the office. And then it's like,

02:09:30.280 | I go until 12, 15, 12, 30, go home, have lunch, like a proper, go home, sit down, have lunch with

02:09:39.640 | Nat, talk, she leaves her work and we talk, how are we doing? Just check in. Our youngest daughter

02:09:45.960 | will be there 'cause she's one and she's making a mess. And then I'll have another coffee. That's

02:09:53.240 | it, my limit for the day. Oh, no more caffeine. That's it. And then I go back to the office and

02:09:59.320 | I'll be there till six, seven sometimes. And I do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

02:10:04.920 | Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm allowed to have meetings. Wednesday, nothing, it's all

02:10:09.880 | reading, must be, unless it's a complete emergency. It has to be kind of a full reading. And reading

02:10:16.520 | is a bunch of blogs, YouTube videos. So no, try not to do any talking.

02:10:22.520 | No talking. It's like being in silence, being present, thinking about things.

02:10:27.400 | By the way, how do you take notes? Do you have a-

02:10:29.720 | A sketch, I have a pad and I write stuff down. Sometimes I go to my phone. I'm a little all

02:10:35.160 | over the place. Sometimes I do Google Docs. I don't have a, this is one thing I need to

02:10:40.040 | get better at actually. But typically what happens is I actually do a lot of thinking in my mind

02:10:45.880 | and I'm sort of filing a lot of stuff away. And then it all spills out and then I have to write.

02:10:51.880 | And then that gives me a body of work that I can evaluate and think about. And then I usually put

02:10:57.560 | it away. And a lot of the time it goes nowhere, but every now and then I come back to it and it

02:11:03.560 | just unlocks two or three things. And I have a sense of how else I'm thinking about things.

02:11:07.240 | And then Friday at the end of the day, Nat and I talked to a couples therapist

02:11:11.800 | and that's about checking out properly. So it's like, okay, now it's like focusing.

02:11:19.400 | The weekend is family, being present, being aware. And if there's email, obviously,

02:11:27.560 | if I have to do meetings from time to time, no problem, but there's boundaries.

02:11:32.600 | Checking out properly. Oh man, that is so powerful. Just like officially transitioning.

02:11:40.680 | Yeah. So these are really important boundaries so that I can be immersed. And what that means

02:11:49.080 | is like, look, on a Saturday afternoon, on a random day, she'll be like, "Where's Chamath?"

02:11:53.960 | And I'll be up in my room. And I've found a podcast talking about like,

02:11:59.000 | DSIS, which is like ductal cancer in situ, because I've been fascinated about breast cancer

02:12:04.760 | surgeries for a while and learning about that. And she's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like,

02:12:09.400 | "Listening to a podcast about DSIS." And she's like, "What's that?" And I'm like,

02:12:13.720 | "Ductal cancer in situ." She's like, "Okay." And so I have time to continue to just constantly

02:12:21.320 | learning, learning, putting stuff in my memory banks to organize into something. And that's a

02:12:28.040 | week. But then in these fixed moments of time, phone down, everything down, we go on vacation,

02:12:34.520 | we go on a boat, we go to whatever, where it's just us and the kids.

02:12:39.960 | Is there a structure when you're at work? Is there a structure to your day in terms of meetings,

02:12:44.360 | in terms of South Side of Wednesday? Because you're...

02:12:47.880 | Have to keep meetings to less than 30 minutes. Have to. And oftentimes meetings can be as short

02:12:54.680 | as like 10 or 15 minutes, because then I'm just like, "Okay." Because I'm trying to reinforce

02:12:59.800 | that it's very rare that we all have something really important to say. And so the ritual that

02:13:08.040 | becomes really valuable to get scale is not the ritual of meetings, but the ritual of respecting

02:13:13.880 | the collective time of the unit. And so it's like, "You know what, folks? I'm going to assume that

02:13:19.640 | you guys are also tackling really important projects. You also want to have good boundaries

02:13:24.200 | in this immersion. Go back to your kids and have dinner with them every night. It's not just for

02:13:28.440 | me, it's for you. So how about this? Why don't you go and do your work? This meeting didn't need to

02:13:32.520 | be 30 minutes, it could be five. And the rest of the time is yours." And it's weird because when

02:13:38.120 | people join that system at Social Capital, they just... It's like FaceTime and it's like, "Let me

02:13:43.800 | make sure and let me talk a lot." It's like, "I don't say anything." I respect the person that

02:13:48.760 | says nothing for two years and the first thing that they say is not obvious. That person is

02:13:53.000 | immensely more valuable than the person that tries to talk all the time. What have you learned from

02:13:57.320 | your... So after Facebook, you started Social Capital or what is now called Social Capital.

02:14:02.280 | What have you learned from all the successful investing you've done there? About investing

02:14:10.280 | or about life or about running a team? I'm very loath to give advice because I think

02:14:16.520 | so much of it is situational. But my observation is that starting a business is really hard,

02:14:21.960 | any kind of business. And most people don't know what they're doing. And as a result, we make

02:14:28.360 | enormous mistakes. But I would summarize this and this may be a little heterodoxical. I think

02:14:35.000 | there are only three kinds of mistakes. Because if we go back to what we said before, in the business,

02:14:39.240 | it's just learning. You're exploring the dark space to get to the answer faster than other people.

02:14:45.960 | And the mistakes that you make are three or the three kinds of decisions, let's say.

02:14:52.200 | You'll hire somebody and they're really, really, really average, but they're a really good person.

02:15:01.720 | Oh, yeah. You'll hire somebody and they really weren't candid with who they are.

02:15:09.480 | And their real personality and their morality and their ethics only expose them

02:15:15.640 | over a long period of time. And then you hire somebody and they're not that good

02:15:24.120 | morally, but they're highly performant. What do you do with those three things?

02:15:31.480 | And I think successful companies have figured out how to answer those three things because those

02:15:41.080 | are the things that, in my opinion, determine success and failure.

02:15:45.880 | So it's basically hiring and you just identified three failure cases for hiring.

02:15:50.760 | But very different failure cases and very complicated ones, right? Like the highly

02:15:54.280 | performant person who's not that great as a human being, do you keep them around? Well,

02:16:00.840 | a lot of people would err towards keeping that person around. What is the right answer? I don't

02:16:04.680 | know. It's the context of the situation. And the second one is also very tricky. What about if they

02:16:11.480 | really turned out that they were just not candid with who they are and it took you a long time to

02:16:14.840 | figure out who you were? These are all mistakes of the senior person that's running this organization.

02:16:18.920 | I think if you can learn to manage those situations well, those are the real edge

02:16:26.520 | cases where you can make mistakes that are fatal to a company. That's what I've learned over 11

02:16:31.800 | and a half years, honestly. Otherwise, the business of investing, I feel that it's a secret.

02:16:39.720 | And if you are willing to just keep chipping away, you'll peel back enough of these layers will come

02:16:47.960 | off and you'll see it. The scales will come off and you'll eventually see it.

02:16:51.560 | I really struggle with, maybe you can be my therapist for a little bit,

02:16:55.480 | with that first case which you originally mentioned. Because I love people, I see the

02:17:00.040 | good in people. I really struggle with just a mediocre performing person who's a good human

02:17:07.240 | being. That's a tough one. I'll let you off the hook. I think that those are incredibly

02:17:13.800 | important and useful people. I think that if a company is like a body, they are like cartilage.

02:17:20.520 | Can you replace cartilage? Yeah. But would you if he didn't have to? No. Okay, can I play devil's

02:17:27.880 | advocate? Yeah. So those folks, because of their goodness, make it okay to be mediocre.

02:17:36.760 | They create a culture where, well, what's important in life, which is something I agree in my personal

02:17:45.880 | life, is to be good to each other, to be friendly, to be good vibes, all that kind of stuff. When I

02:17:51.960 | was at Google, just the good atmosphere, everyone's playing, it's fun. Fun, right? But to me,

02:18:00.520 | when I put on my hat of having a mission and a goal, what I love to see is the superstars that

02:18:10.840 | shine in some way, do something incredible. I want everyone to also admire those superstars,

02:18:22.840 | perhaps not just for the productivity's sake or performing or successful company's sake,

02:18:28.040 | but because that too is an incredible thing that humans are able to accomplish, which is shine.

02:18:34.440 | I hear you, but that's not a decision you make, meaning you get lucky when you have those people

02:18:39.320 | in your company. That's not the hard part for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with one,

02:18:44.840 | two, and three. Keep, demote, promote, fire. What do you do? This is why it's all about those three

02:18:52.040 | buckets. I personally believe that folks in that bucket one, as long as those folks aren't more

02:18:57.960 | than 50% to 60% of a company, are good. They can be managed as long as they are one to two degrees

02:19:05.400 | away from one of those people that you just mentioned. Because it's easy then to drag the

02:19:11.000 | entire company down if they're too far away from the LeBron James, because you don't know what

02:19:16.280 | LeBron James looks and feels and smells. You need that tactile sense of what excellence looks like

02:19:22.920 | in front of you. A great example is if you just go on YouTube and you search these clips of how

02:19:27.960 | Kobe Bryant's teammates described, not Kobe, but how their own behavior, not performance,

02:19:36.520 | because there was a bunch of average people that Kobe played with his whole career,

02:19:39.400 | but their behavior changed by being somewhat closer to him. I think that's an important

02:19:47.400 | psychological thing to note for how you can do reasonably good team construction. If you're

02:19:53.240 | lucky enough to find those generational talents, you have to find a composition of a team that

02:19:58.360 | keeps them roughly close to enough of the org. That way, that group of people can continue to

02:20:06.520 | add value, and then you'll have courage to fire these next two groups of people. I think the

02:20:11.800 | answer is to fire those two groups of people. Because no matter how good you are, that stuff

02:20:16.440 | just injects poison into a living organism, and that living organism will die when exposed to

02:20:22.520 | poison. - So you invest in a lot of companies, you've looked at a lot of companies. What do you

02:20:28.040 | think makes for a good leader? So we talked about building a team, but a good leader for a company,

02:20:34.040 | what are the qualities? - When I first meet people, I never ask to see a resume.

02:20:41.320 | And when I'm meeting a company CEO for the first time, I couldn't care less about the business,

02:20:49.240 | in fact. And I try to take the time to let them reveal themselves. Now in this environment,

02:20:57.560 | I'm doing most of the talking. But if this were the other way around, and you were ever raising

02:21:01.560 | capital, and you said, "Smath, I'd be interested in you looking at this business," I'd probably say

02:21:05.800 | eight to 10 words for hours. - You just listen. - Prod. I throw things out, prod, and I let you

02:21:12.600 | meander. And in you meandering, I'm trying to build a sense of who this person is. Once I have

02:21:19.560 | a rough sense of that, which is not necessarily right, but it's a starting point, then I can go

02:21:26.680 | and understand why this idea makes sense in this moment. And what I'm really trying to do is just

02:21:33.560 | kind of like unpack where are the biases that may make you fail. And then we go back to you.

02:21:41.320 | - The thing that Silicon Valley has the benefit of though, is that they don't have to do any of

02:21:47.240 | this stuff if there's momentum. Because then the rule book goes out the window and people

02:21:53.320 | clamor to invest. So one of the things that I do, and this is again, back to this pugilism that I

02:22:00.120 | inflict on myself, is I have these two things that I look at. Thing number one is I have a table

02:22:07.480 | that says how much did we make from all of our best investments? How much did we lose from all

02:22:13.160 | of our worst investments? What is the ratio of winners to losers over 11 years? And in our case,

02:22:19.560 | it's 23 to one on billions of dollars. So you can kind of like, you can see a lot of signal.

02:22:26.200 | But what that allows me to do is really like say, wait a minute, we cannot violate these rules

02:22:36.520 | around how much money we're willing to commit in an errant personality. The second is I ask myself

02:22:43.960 | of all the other top VCs in Silicon Valley, name them all, what's our correlation? Meaning

02:22:50.760 | when I do a deal, how often does anybody from Sequoia, Excel, Benchmark, Kleiner, you name it,

02:22:57.000 | do it at the same time or after and vice versa. And then I look at the data to see how much they

02:23:04.680 | do it amongst themselves. >> What's a good sign?

02:23:07.800 | >> I'm at zero, as virtually close to zero as possible.

02:23:11.000 | >> And that's a good thing. >> Well, it's not a good thing when

02:23:14.680 | the markets are way, way up because it creates an enormous amount of momentum. So I have to make

02:23:21.800 | money the hard way. I have to, you know, cause I'm trafficking in things that are highly uncorrelated

02:23:26.680 | to the gestalt of Silicon Valley, which can be a lonely business,

02:23:33.240 | but it's really valuable in moments where markets get crushed because correlation is the first thing

02:23:38.680 | that causes massive destruction of capital, massive. Because one person all of a sudden

02:23:44.760 | with one blow up in one company, boom, the contagion hits everybody except the person that

02:23:50.360 | was not. And so now those are like more sophisticated elements of risk management,

02:23:56.600 | which is again, this pugilism that I inflict on my, nobody asks me to do that. Nobody actually

02:24:01.880 | at some level when the markets are up really care that when markets are sideways or when markets

02:24:06.200 | are down, I think that that allows me to feel proud of our process. >> But that requires you

02:24:12.440 | to think a lot. >> A lot.

02:24:14.760 | >> Outside of the box, it's lonely because you're taking risks. Also, your public personality. So

02:24:20.520 | you say stuff that if it's wrong, you get yelled at for being, I mean, your mistakes aren't private.

02:24:29.000 | >> No. And that's something that has been a really, really healthy moment of growth.

02:24:35.800 | It's like an athlete. If you really want to be a winner, you got to hit the shot

02:24:42.360 | in front of the fans. And if you miss it, you have to be willing to take the responsibility

02:24:49.400 | of the fact that you bricked it. And over time, hopefully there's a body of work that says you've

02:24:55.640 | generally hit more than you've missed. But if you look at even the best shooters, what are they? 52%.

02:25:01.000 | So these are razor thin margins at the end of the day, which is really, so then what can you

02:25:07.400 | control? I can't control the defense. I can't control what they throw at me. I can just control

02:25:13.560 | my preparation and whether I'm in the best position to launch a reasonable shot. >>

02:25:18.720 | You said that the world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change in the past.

02:25:24.520 | Let's update that. What's today, as we stand here today, what sector will the world's first

02:25:29.880 | trillionaire come from? >> Yeah, I think it's energy transition.

02:25:32.760 | >> So energy, so the things we've been talking about.

02:25:35.240 | >> Yeah. >> Really? So isn't it, okay.

02:25:37.160 | >> Well, I think the way that I think about- >> So this is a single individual,

02:25:40.600 | sorry to interrupt. You see their ability to actually build a company that makes a huge

02:25:46.200 | amount of money as opposed to this distributed idea that you've been talking about.

02:25:50.040 | >> Yeah, I'll give you my philosophy on wealth. Most of it is not you.

02:25:56.840 | An enormous amount of it is the genetic distribution of being born in the right

02:26:03.400 | place and blah, blah, blah, irrespective of the boundary conditions of how you were born

02:26:07.400 | or where you were raised, right? So at the end of the day, you and I ended up in the United States.

02:26:13.160 | It's a huge benefit to us. Second is the benefit of our age. It's much better and much more likely

02:26:21.320 | to be successful as a 46-year-old in 2023 than a 26-year-old in 2023. Because in my case, I have

02:26:29.320 | demographics working for me. For the 26-year-old, he or she has demographics working slightly

02:26:35.560 | against them. >> Can you explain that a little bit?

02:26:37.400 | What are the demographics here? >> In the case of me,

02:26:42.760 | the distribution of population in America looks like a pyramid. In that pyramid, I'm wedged in

02:26:51.160 | between these two massive population cohorts, the boomers and then these Gen Z and millennials.

02:26:56.920 | That's a very advantageous position. It's not dissimilar to the position that Buffett was,

02:27:02.680 | where he was packaged in between boomers beneath him and the silent generation above him.

02:27:09.800 | Being in between two massive population cohorts turns out to be extremely advantageous because

02:27:14.840 | when the cohort above you transitions power and capital and all of this stuff,

02:27:19.960 | you're the next person that likely gets handed it. We have a disproportionate likelihood to be...

02:27:25.240 | We are lucky to be older than younger. That's an advantage. Then the other advantage that has

02:27:32.760 | nothing to do with me is that I stumbled into technology. I got a degree in electrical

02:27:37.560 | engineering and I ended up coming to Silicon Valley. It turned out that in that moment,

02:27:42.280 | it was such a transformational wind of change that was at my back. The wealth that one creates

02:27:50.280 | is a huge part of those variables. Then the last variable is your direct contributions

02:27:59.400 | in that moment. The reason why that can create extreme wealth is because when those things come

02:28:09.080 | together at the right moment, it's like a chemical reaction. It's just crazy.

02:28:15.400 | That was part number one of what I wanted to say. The second thing is when you look then inside of

02:28:23.560 | these systems where you have all these tailwinds. In tech, I think I benefit from these three big

02:28:29.240 | tailwinds. If you build a company or are part of a company or a part of a movement,

02:28:34.440 | your economic participation tends to be a direct byproduct of the actual value

02:28:44.120 | that that thing creates in the world. The thing that that creates in the world

02:28:52.360 | will be bigger if it is not just an economic system, but it's like a philosophical system.

02:28:59.720 | It changes the way that governance happens. It changes the way that people think about all kinds

02:29:04.680 | of other things about their lives. There's a reason, I think, why database companies are worth

02:29:11.800 | X, social companies are worth Y, but the military industrial complex is worth as much. I think there

02:29:19.640 | is a reason why that if you, for example, were to go off and build some newfangled source of energy

02:29:26.360 | that's clean and hyperabundant and safe, that what you're really going to displace or reshape

02:29:34.440 | is trillions and trillions of dollars of worldwide GDP. The global GDP is, I call it, 85 trillion.

02:29:41.240 | It's going at 2% to 3% a year. In the next 10 years, we'll be dealing with $100 trillion of GDP.

02:29:48.840 | Somebody who develops clean energy in 2035 will probably shift 10% of that around, $10 trillion.

02:29:57.000 | A company can easily capture 30% of a market, $3 trillion. A human being can typically own

02:30:07.960 | a third of one of these companies, $1 trillion. You can get to this answer where it's like,

02:30:14.280 | "It's going to happen in our lifetime." But you have to, I think, find these systems that are so

02:30:20.280 | gargantuan and they exist today. It's more bounded because price discovery takes longer.

02:30:26.520 | In an existing thing, it's more unbounded because you know what it is. You know the tentacles that

02:30:30.920 | energy reaches. Of that $80 trillion of worldwide GDP, I bet you if you added up all the energy

02:30:37.080 | companies, but then you added up all of manufacturing, if you added up all of transport,

02:30:42.760 | you'd probably get to like 60 of the 80. >> Do you have an idea of which

02:30:47.480 | alternate energy, sustainable energy is the most promising?

02:30:54.280 | >> Well, I think that we have to do a better job of exploring what I call the suburbs of

02:31:02.680 | the periodic table. We're really good in Seattle, the upper Northwest. We're kind of good in Portland,

02:31:12.120 | but we're non-existent in San Diego, and we have zero plan for North Carolina through Florida.

02:31:17.800 | >> Yeah. Is that a fancy way of saying nuclear should be part of the discussion?

02:31:24.360 | >> I think nuclear, I mean room temperature semiconductors. I'm not convinced right now

02:31:30.520 | that the existing set of nuclear solutions will do a good job of scaling beyond bench scale.

02:31:35.640 | I think there is a lot of complicated technical problems that make it work at a bench scale level,

02:31:40.040 | even partially, but the energy equation is going to be very difficult to overcome in the absence

02:31:45.560 | of some leaps in material science. >> Have you seen any leaps? Is there

02:31:50.120 | promising stuff? You're seeing the cutting edge from a company perspective.

02:31:53.720 | >> Yeah. I would say not yet, but the precursor, yes. I have been spending a fair amount of time,

02:32:01.240 | so talking about a new framework that's in my mind, is around these room temp superconductors.

02:32:09.240 | And so I've been kind of bumbling around in that forest for about a year. I haven't really put

02:32:16.840 | together any meaningful perspectives, but again, talking about trafficking in companies and

02:32:23.320 | investments that are very lonely, but they allow me to generate returns that are relatively unique

02:32:29.560 | and independent. That's an area where I don't see anybody else when I'm there.

02:32:33.480 | I'll give you another area. We, I think, are about to unleash in a world of zero energy and

02:32:40.840 | zero compute costs, computational biology will replace wet chemistry. And when you do that,

02:32:50.200 | you will be able to iterate on tools that will be able to solve a lot of human disease.

02:32:57.480 | I think if you look at the head of the top 400 most recurring rare diseases,

02:33:03.320 | I think half the number, 200, is specific point mutation, is just the mismethylation between C

02:33:11.640 | and T. I mean, that's like, "Whoa, wait, you're telling me in billions of lines of code,

02:33:17.240 | I forgot a semicolon right there? That's causing this whole thing to miscompile? So I just got to

02:33:21.960 | go in there and boop, and it's all done?" That's a crazy idea. That was a C++ C throwback for people

02:33:28.040 | that don't know what I said. - There's two people who are clapping.

02:33:29.880 | - Two people there, everybody else is like, "What? This is not a pipe, what are you talking about?"

02:33:33.800 | - Makes perfect sense. - But, but...

02:33:35.880 | - So that, couldn't that be a truly, a source of a, if you, the computational biology unlocks,

02:33:41.160 | I mean, obviously medicine is begging for... - The thing with energy though is that the

02:33:46.680 | groundwork is well laid. And talking about sort of like the upper bound is well defined,

02:33:53.320 | the upper bound in medicine is not well defined because it is not the sum total of the market

02:33:59.400 | cap of the pharma industries. It is actually the sum total of the value of human life.

02:34:03.400 | And that's an extremely ethical and moral question. - Isn't there a special interest that are

02:34:10.360 | resisting moving, making progress on the energy side? So like governments and how do you break

02:34:18.600 | through that? I mean, you have to acknowledge the reality of that, right?

02:34:20.840 | - I think it's less governments. In fact, like I said, I think President Biden has done

02:34:24.600 | a really incredible job. Well, Chuck Schumer really has done a really incredible job because...

02:34:27.960 | So just to give you the math on this, right? Like back to this, so 3% of everything is of a market

02:34:34.760 | or zealots. But when you get past 5%, things tend to just go nuclear to 50, 60%. The way that they

02:34:43.800 | wrote this last bill, the cost, I'll just use the cars as an example. The cost of an average car

02:34:50.600 | is 22 and a half thousand. The cost of the cheapest battery car is 30,000. And lo and behold,

02:34:57.000 | there's a $7,500 credit. And it's like to think the invisible hand didn't know that that math was

02:35:02.920 | right, I think is kind of a little bit malarkey. And so the battery EV car is going to be the same

02:35:08.680 | price as the thing, and it's going to go to 40, 50%. So we're already at this tipping point. So

02:35:14.680 | we're kind of ready to go. In these other markets, it's a little bit more complicated because there's

02:35:20.920 | a lot of infrastructure that needs to get built. So the gene editing thing, as an example,

02:35:26.600 | we have to build a tool chain that looks more like code that you can write to.

02:35:33.960 | Facebook has written in, I think, PHP, originally.

02:35:36.440 | PHP, yeah.

02:35:37.320 | Which is, I'm still a big fan of. Sometimes you have to use the ugly solution and make it look

02:35:44.440 | good versus trying to come up with a good solution, which will be too late. Let me ask you,

02:35:51.720 | you consider a run for governor of California, then decided against it. What went into each

02:35:57.480 | of these decisions? And broadly, I just have maybe a selfish question about Silicon Valley.

02:36:03.640 | Is it over as a world leader for new tech companies? As this beacon of promise of

02:36:14.360 | young minds stepping in and creating something that changes the world?

02:36:19.720 | I don't know if those two questions are connected.

02:36:21.480 | So it's not over, but I think it's definitely, we're in a challenging moment because...

02:36:30.120 | So back to that analogy of the demographics, if you think about the, like if you bucketed,

02:36:38.920 | forget like our relative successes, but there's a bunch of us in this mid-50s to mid-30s cohort

02:36:47.640 | of people that have now been around for 20 years, 15 years to 25 years that have done stuff, right?

02:36:54.040 | From Andreessen to Zuck to Jack Dorsey, et cetera, Elon, whatever, maybe you throw me in the mix,

02:37:02.040 | David Sachs, whatever, okay? None of us have done a really good job of becoming a statesman

02:37:10.920 | or a stateswoman, and really showing a broad empathy and awareness for the broader systems.

02:37:19.480 | So Silicon Valley is to survive as a system. We need to know that we've transitioned from move

02:37:26.120 | fast and break things to get to the right answer and take your time if that's what it means.

02:37:30.840 | And so we have to be a participant of the system. And I believe that. And I think that it's

02:37:36.840 | important to not be a dilettante and not be thumbing your face to Washington or not push

02:37:43.880 | the boundaries and say, we'll deal with it after the fact, but to work with folks that are trying

02:37:49.400 | to do the best, again, steel men their point of view. Work with them, potentially run for office.

02:37:56.520 | So potentially understand the system. Be a part of their system.

02:38:01.560 | It makes me sad that there's no tech people or not many tech people in Congress and certainly

02:38:08.120 | not in the presidential level, not many governors or senators.

02:38:12.440 | Well, I think that we also have roughly, our rules will never allow some of the best and

02:38:17.960 | brightest folks to run for president because of just the rules against it. But if-

02:38:22.680 | Oh, you mean, yeah.

02:38:23.800 | I mean, look, I think David Sachs would be an incredible presidential candidate. Now,

02:38:27.720 | I also think he'd be a great governor. No, he was born in South Africa.

02:38:32.040 | You know, I think he'd be a great governor. I think he'd be a great

02:38:34.360 | secretary of state. I mean, he'd be great at whatever he wanted to do.

02:38:38.200 | Friedberg wasn't born here. So there's a lot of people that could contribute at different levels.

02:38:47.080 | And I hope that... By the way, the other thing I like about the pod is I also think it helps

02:38:52.200 | normalize tech a little bit because you just see normal people dealing with normal situations.

02:38:59.240 | And I think that that's good. You know, it is a really normative place. It's not the caricature

02:39:04.360 | that it's made out to be, but there is a small virulent strain of people that make it caricature

02:39:09.320 | like.

02:39:09.820 | Well, that's in one direction. What do you think about the whole

02:39:12.680 | culture of, I don't know if better terms, but woke activism? So sort of activism,

02:39:21.000 | which in some contexts is a powerful and important thing, but infiltrating companies.

02:39:26.120 | I'll answer this in the context of Rene Girard. So like he says that people tend to copy each other.

02:39:30.840 | And then when they're copying each other, they're really what they're fighting. What

02:39:34.920 | they're doing is they're fighting over some scarce resource. And then you find a way to

02:39:40.440 | organize against the group of you, against the person or a thing that you think is the actual

02:39:46.440 | cause of all of this conflict and you try to expel them. The thing that wokeism doesn't understand

02:39:52.920 | is that unless that person is truly to blame, the cycle just continues. And, you know, that was a,

02:40:00.360 | that was a framework that he developed that, you know, he's really conclusively proven to be true

02:40:06.200 | and it's observable in humanity and life. So these movements, I think the extreme left and the

02:40:13.800 | extreme right are trying to interpret a way to allow people to compete for some scarce resource.

02:40:21.240 | But I also think that in all of that, what they don't realize is that they can scapegoat whoever

02:40:28.120 | they want, but it's not going to work because the bulwark of people in the middle realize that it's

02:40:34.600 | just not true. Yeah, they realize, but they're still because in leadership positions, there's

02:40:40.760 | still momentum and they still scapegoat and they continue and it seems to hurt the actual ability

02:40:47.880 | of those companies to be successful. In fairness though, if you had to graph the effectiveness of

02:40:52.440 | that function, it's decaying rapidly. It's the least effective it's ever been. You're absolutely

02:40:57.960 | right. Being canceled five years ago was a huge deal. Today, I think it was Jordan Peterson on

02:41:04.200 | your podcast. He said, "I've been canceled and it was amazing." He said 38 times or 40. He said some

02:41:09.240 | number, which was a ginormous number, A, that he kept account of it and B, was able to classify it.

02:41:14.680 | I'm like, "What classifier is going on in his mind?" where he's like, "Ah, that's an attempt

02:41:18.520 | to cancel me, but this one is not." But my point is, well, it's clearly not working.

02:41:22.360 | So the guy is still there and the guy is putting his view out into the world.

02:41:27.160 | And so it's not to judge whether what he says is right or wrong. It's just to observe that this

02:41:33.400 | mechanism of action is now weakened, but it's weakened because it's not the thing that people

02:41:39.400 | think is really to blame. >>COREY: Yeah. You've been canceled on a small scale a few times.

02:41:44.360 | So that's not some, I'm sure it didn't feel small. Actually, it wasn't small. I'm trying to minimize.

02:41:49.000 | Did that psychologically hurt you? >>COREY: Yeah.

02:41:54.280 | >>BF: It was tough? >>COREY: Yeah. In the moment,

02:41:56.840 | you don't know what's going on, but I would like to thank a certain CEO of a certain well-known

02:42:02.840 | company. And he sent me basically like a step-by-step manual.

02:42:11.160 | >>BF: Does it involve mushrooms? No. >>COREY: No. And he was right.

02:42:17.800 | The storm passed and life went on. >>BF: I don't know if you can share

02:42:23.720 | the list of steps, but is the fundamental core ideas that just life goes on?

02:42:29.480 | >>COREY: The core fundamental idea is like, you need to be willing and able to apologize

02:42:38.120 | for what is in your control, but not for other people's mistakes.

02:42:41.720 | Your mistakes, yes. And if you feel like there's something, then you should take accountability of

02:42:48.440 | that. But to apologize for somebody else, for something that they want to hear,

02:42:54.440 | isn't going to solve anything. >>BF: Yeah. There's something about

02:42:58.840 | apologies. If you do them, they should be authentic to what you actually want to say

02:43:04.200 | versus what somebody else wants to hear. >>COREY: Otherwise it doesn't ring true.

02:43:09.240 | >>BF: Yeah. And people can see through that. >>COREY: And people can see through it. And also,

02:43:13.240 | what people see through is not just the fact that your apology was somewhat hollow,

02:43:17.880 | but also that this entire majority of people now walked away. The mob was like, "Okay, thanks."

02:43:21.560 | And then people are like, "Oh, so you didn't care at all?"

02:43:25.320 | And so then it reflects more probably on them. >>BF: Yeah. I know you said you don't like to

02:43:33.880 | give advice, but what advice would you give to a young person? You've lived an incredible life

02:43:40.200 | from very humble beginnings, difficult childhood, and you're one of the most successful people in

02:43:44.920 | the world. So what advice? I mean, a lot of people look to you for inspiration.

02:43:49.000 | Kids in high school or early college that are not doing good or are trying to figure out

02:43:59.080 | basically what to do when they have complete doubt in themselves.

02:44:03.160 | What advice would you give them? >>COREY:

02:44:12.320 | It is really important that if somebody that you respect, and I'm going to just for the purpose of

02:44:18.520 | this put myself in that bucket, and if you're listening to this, I wish somebody had told this

02:44:24.360 | to me. We are all equal, and you will fight this demon inside you that says you are less than a lot

02:44:36.680 | of other people for reasons that will be hard to see until you're much, much older. And so you have

02:44:45.400 | to find either a set of people far, far away, like what I did, or one or two people really,

02:44:53.640 | really close to you, or maybe it's both that will remind you in key moments of your life

02:45:01.000 | that that is true. Otherwise, you will give in to that beast. And it's not the end of the world,

02:45:10.920 | and you'll recover from it. I've made a lot of mistakes, but it requires a lot of energy,

02:45:18.200 | and sometimes it's just easier to just stop and give up. So I think that if you're starting out

02:45:24.600 | in the world, if you've been lucky to have a wonderful life and you had wonderful parents,

02:45:28.360 | man, you should go and give them a huge hug because they did you such a service that

02:45:33.240 | most folks don't do to most kids, unfortunately. And it's not the fault of these parents,

02:45:38.520 | but it's just tough. Life is tough. So give them a kiss and then figure out a way where you can just

02:45:45.720 | do work that validates you and where you feel like you're developing some kind of mastery.

02:45:51.080 | Who cares what anybody else thinks about it? Just do it because it feels good. Do it because

02:45:55.400 | you like to get good at something. But if you're not one of those lucky people,

02:45:59.480 | you can believe in your friends or you can just believe in me.

02:46:04.680 | I'm telling you, preserve optionality. How you do that is by regulating your reactions to things.

02:46:13.880 | And your reactions are going to be largely guided in moments where you think that you are not the

02:46:20.120 | same as everybody else, and specifically that you are less than those people and you're not.

02:46:24.600 | So just save this part of this podcast and just play it on a loop if you need to. But that is my

02:46:33.800 | biggest learning is I am equal. I'm the same as all these other people. And you can imagine what

02:46:40.680 | that means to me to go out in the world, to see people and think, "Okay, I'm the same as this

02:46:44.440 | person. I'm as good as them." And you could imagine what you're probably thinking of what

02:46:49.320 | I'm thinking is not that thing. You're probably thinking, "Man, this guy, yeah,

02:46:53.640 | this guy, I'm so much better." No, I am fighting this thing all the time.

02:47:00.280 | Well, I've also met a bunch of folks who I think is a counter reaction to that. Once they become

02:47:07.880 | successful, they start developing a philosophy that they are better or even some people are

02:47:14.680 | better than others, which I understand. There's LeBron James versus other people and so on.

02:47:21.080 | But I always really resisted that thought because I feel like it's a slippery slope.

02:47:26.200 | They're not better. They have mastery in a thing that they've fallen in love with.

02:47:30.920 | Yeah.

02:47:32.200 | I'm trying to develop mastery in a thing that I love. I love investing. It's like solving puzzles.

02:47:38.840 | And I love that. I love trying to develop mastery in poker. I really love that. I'm learning how

02:47:46.520 | to be a parent to a teenager because I finally have one. It's all new stuff to me and I'm learning.

02:47:52.040 | That's what it's all about.

02:47:55.960 | Yeah. So you don't want to think you're lesser than and you don't want to think you're better

02:48:01.320 | than because those both lead you astray.

02:48:04.360 | I've never thought I was better than. I manifested better than

02:48:07.960 | because I was trying to compensate for feeling less than. My goal is just to feel like everybody

02:48:15.000 | else feels on the presumption that everybody had a normal life.

02:48:18.120 | Given your nickname is the dictator, do you trust yourself with power?

02:48:22.440 | If the world gave you absolute power for a month...

02:48:27.480 | No. No, because I think that I'm still riddled with bias. I don't deserve that position. And

02:48:35.480 | I would not want that weight on my shoulders. I had a spot actually where it was a very

02:48:42.760 | important and big poker game. And it was a spot where I was in the pot. And it was a really large

02:48:51.560 | pot. It was like a million dollar pot. And I had to make a ruling and the ruling was in my favor.

02:48:58.600 | And I was just beside myself. I play for the challenge. I like to get pushed to the limit

02:49:08.360 | of my capabilities. I want to see can I think at the same level of these folks because these

02:49:15.320 | guys are all experts. They're all pros. And I get enormous joy from that challenge.

02:49:20.920 | And I like to win, but I like to win just a small amount. You know what I mean? And then I never

02:49:28.520 | wanted to win in that way. But because it was my game, I had to make this call on a million dollar

02:49:35.240 | pot and I wanted to just shoot myself. I just was like, "This is gross and disgusting." And

02:49:41.480 | he was a complete gentleman, which made it even worse. So I do not want absolute power.

02:49:48.920 | Well, those are the people you do want to have power is the ones that don't want it,

02:49:52.920 | which is a weird system to have. Because then you, in that kind of system, don't get the leaders

02:49:59.640 | that you should have. Because the ones that want power aren't the ones that should have power.

02:50:05.400 | That's a weird, weird system. What do you think? Let me sneak this question in there.

02:50:09.960 | What do you think is the meaning of life?

02:50:11.400 | I don't...

02:50:14.920 | Why are we here? Give a look up at the stars and think about the big "why" question.

02:50:21.720 | I think that it's a chance to just enjoy the ride. I don't think it really... I don't believe

02:50:32.840 | in this idea of legacy that much. I think it's a real trap.

02:50:37.720 | So do you think you'll be forgotten by history?

02:50:41.560 | I hope so. I really, really hope so. Because if you think about it, there are two or three people

02:50:46.680 | that are remembered for positive things, and everybody else, it's all negative things. And

02:50:51.720 | the likelihood that you'll be remembered for a positive thing is harder and harder and harder.

02:50:56.600 | And so the surface area of being remembered is negative. And then the second, what will it

02:51:02.040 | matter? I'll be gone. I really just want to have fun, do my thing, learn, get better. But I want

02:51:13.640 | to reward myself by feeling like, "Wow, that was awesome." I've told this story many times, and

02:51:21.240 | I have put, again, my own narrative fallacy on top of this. But Steve Jobs's sister wrote this

02:51:29.480 | obit in the New York Times when he died, and she ends it by saying his last words were, "Oh, wow,

02:51:34.360 | oh, wow, oh, wow." That seems like an awesome way to die. You're surrounded by your friends and

02:51:39.960 | family, not the fact that he died, obviously, but in a moment where what I read into it was your

02:51:45.400 | family was there. Maybe you thought about all the cool shit that you were able to do.

02:51:52.440 | And then you just started the simulation all over again.

02:51:57.960 | And so just on the off chance that that's true, I don't want to take this thing too seriously.

02:52:03.000 | You know what I mean? Just enjoy it.

02:52:05.960 | So you're not afraid of it, the end?

02:52:07.800 | No. Could end tomorrow. Could end right now.

02:52:12.120 | So every day you can go and you're happy. You're happy with the things you've done.

02:52:17.560 | Yeah. There are obviously things I want to do that I haven't done,

02:52:24.200 | but there are no gaping things. I've really, really, really been in love.

02:52:29.400 | Total gift. There have been moments where I've really, really felt like everybody else.

02:52:38.600 | There have been moments where I had deep, deep, deep joy and connection with my children.

02:52:45.640 | There are moments where I've had incredible giggling fun with my friends.

02:52:51.160 | There's moments where I've been able to enjoy really incredible experiences, wine, food,

02:52:55.400 | all that stuff. Great. I mean, what more do you want? I could keep asking for more,

02:53:02.040 | but I would just be a really crappy human being at some point. You know what I mean? It's enough.

02:53:09.640 | It's enough. It's enough.

02:53:13.560 | This life is pretty beautiful if you allow yourself to see it.

02:53:17.720 | It's really great and it's better than it's ever been for most of us, actually.

02:53:24.040 | Yeah. It's pretty nice.

02:53:25.960 | And all of the millennials and Gen Zs, you're about to get a boatload of money from your parents.

02:53:33.800 | And you better figure out how to be happy before you get that money,

02:53:43.560 | because otherwise you will be miserable.

02:53:47.640 | Get a lot of Dairy Queen. No, that only worked the first time.

02:53:53.880 | It worked two times in grade five and grade six. My God, that next year.

02:53:57.080 | Oh, repeat.

02:53:57.640 | Flex, I worked my ass off. I'm like, but I could never bring myself to ask her.

02:54:02.120 | Yeah.

02:54:02.440 | And then she did it. And I was like, man, this woman's a Miss Bruni. This woman's a gem.

02:54:07.080 | Yeah. But the third time it faded. Isn't that the sad thing about life?

02:54:11.880 | You know, the finiteness of it, the scarcity of it.

02:54:15.960 | Without that, ice cream wouldn't be so damn delicious.

02:54:21.320 | Chamath, you're an incredible human. I definitely recommend that people listen to you on all

02:54:25.800 | platforms. We're very lucky to be able to get your wisdom.

02:54:30.360 | I've talked a lot about you with Andrej Karpathy, who's somebody I really respect.

02:54:36.760 | And he just loves the shit out of you in how much you, how deeply you understand the world.

02:54:42.440 | It's a huge honor.

02:54:43.160 | He's an incredible human being.

02:54:44.200 | On a different, yeah, speaking of semicolons, there's some human beings that understand

02:54:49.480 | everything at the very low level and at the very high level. And those people are also

02:54:54.680 | very rare. So it's a huge honor and also a huge honor that you would be so kind to me,

02:55:02.440 | just like in subtle ways offline, that you would make me feel like I'm worthwhile.

02:55:09.560 | Well, can I just say something as just a layman listener?

02:55:12.520 | What you do, just so I could give you my version, is that you take things and people,

02:55:22.920 | so ideas and people, that are mostly behind a rope and you demystify it.

02:55:31.160 | And what that does for all of us is it makes me feel like I can be a part of that.

02:55:39.960 | And that's a really inspiring thing because you're not giving advice, you're not telling us how to

02:55:44.920 | solve the problem, but you're allowing it to be understood in a way that's really accessible.

02:55:52.680 | And then you're intellectually curious in ways that some of us would never expect that we were,

02:55:59.240 | and then you end up in this rabbit hole. And then you have the courage to go and talk to people that

02:56:04.280 | are really all over the map. For example, when I saw your Jordan Peterson example, you went there,

02:56:13.640 | you talked about Nazism, and I was just like, "Man, this is a complicated argument these guys

02:56:18.920 | are going to tackle." It's really impressive. So I have an enormous amount of respect for what you

02:56:26.440 | do. I think it's very hard to do what you do so consistently. And so I look at you as somebody I

02:56:33.240 | respect because it just shows somebody who's immersed in something and who's very special.

02:56:41.160 | So thank you for including me in this. I'm going to play that clip to myself

02:56:44.360 | privately over and over, just when I feel low and self-critical about myself. Thank you so much,

02:56:50.920 | brother. This is incredible. Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to this conversation with

02:56:55.640 | Chamath Palihapitiya. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:57:01.640 | And now let me leave you with some words from Jonathan Swift.

02:57:04.840 | "A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart."

02:57:10.440 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:57:15.320 | [END]

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Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #338

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