#94 Chamath Palihapitiya: Understanding Yourself

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6cfbf881ff6fbcf3

Being happy.
Personally.
is the pathway to help everything else make sense.
And that
is around mental health.
And I think a key unlock for mental health is just
Finding a resource to talk to.
And when you first start talking
It's going to be
Just kind of blathery bullshit and
It's gonna be imprecise and it's gonna be super awkward and you're gonna feel
Like
What is this?
And then over time, it's like anything, like when you start to get good at it.
It's it's really
Good.
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My guest today is Chamath Polyhapatea.
Chemoth is the founder of Social Capital, part owner of the Golden State Warriors, and so much more.
We talk about what it means to be an observer of the present.
How to think in first principles, the behavior and psychology of successful investing, and so much more, including the best public company CEOs.
Get comfortable. It's time to listen and learn.
Shema, man, I am so excited to talk to you. This has been a long time coming.
It has been. We've tried to organize I think
for many months, if maybe if not a year, and I just I think both of our schedules were a little tight.
Yeah.
And uh but then I had to reschedule once or twice, so I'm sorry about that.
Oh, no worries. Originally we were supposed to do it in Toronto and then uh all the world changed.
Yeah.
The world has changed.
Hey, every time I look around, you're on the news, man. What's up with that?
Well, I think that
It's sometimes valuable
When
you can actually just like speak the truth. Not sometimes, all the time.
And I think that most people are pretty guarded because they have to be. I don't think they're necessarily always in a position to be as candid as they want to be. And uh I think that
in moments of
Sort of.
Just clarity, I have
you know, constantly just try to say what I feel and I think that that resonates with a lot of people.
It oh definitely does I tweeted out today that you were coming on the show and I think we had like over a thousand replies of people the everything from like
Ask him what I should do with my life, to how should I think about the future, to what should I invest in? You're like everybody's guru, man.
Uh I mean I I think Naval is the guru, um, but uh um the
Brown brother from another mother. I uh I I think that
I think that I've gone through a lot of
Yeah, kinda like
ordinary people shit. And I think I talk about it in really simple, plain spoken terms. And I think that that's really useful to people because it demystifies
A lot of things and just makes it
Kind of more normal.
And um
You know, that's been a real theme of my life is just realizing that
A lot of the things that I went through
It's normal.
and feeling part of a pack.
is really helpful actually. It's been really helpful for me'cause it's helped kind of like
regulate my sense of self worth and lift it up in moments where I felt pretty
crappy about myself and
that's just resulted in better outcomes. So I think like a lot of what I talk about
I think folks relate to'cause I speak to it from
Two that lines.
And um
Yeah, in fact I just think that's a really uh
Good place to be actually. It's taken me a long time to get to that place, but it's a good place to be.
Can we double click on that for a second? I mean, you you've got an interesting background, right? You worked at AOL.
You went to Facebook, you're a billionaire at thirty two, you're on a sports team.
From the outside looking in.
You had the most amazing life, but on the inside looking out, you didn't feel that way.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people have
to do things that
I'm motivated.
by other people's perceptions of them and also motivated
by the pressure that's exerted.
uh by the people that are very closely around you that sometimes can be your friends, it can be your family. And I was very much uh of that category, so I was kind of just
you know, meandering through life. Now
That meandering turned out to have
Really good.
outcomes in some respects.
The problem was that all it was doing was just
sort of like, you know, avoiding the inevitable. And the inevitable is this
moment that I think everybody goes through where
They're asking themselves whether they've lived a completely fulfilling life.
The way that they define it.
You know, what I'll say shame is that I think that
sort of not even necessarily millennials, but you know, zoomers underneath them.
They're the most
Honest.
of any generation
About
What makes them happy.
And you see that in
You know, the way that they dress
the music that they listen to.
the media that they consume.
The way that they, you know, sort of like
push back on kind of like a more corporate kind of
you know, tone and things, and they're willing to be happy.
In a way that they've defined for themselves.
In my generation, I'm forty four, that's not how it goes down. The way that it goes down is
You go to the best school you can.
You take on as much debt as you need to.
You try to get the most credential job after college.
You know, you
kind of just check the box. You, you know, find
you know, uh a reasonable
person that you marry
You know, you have two point five kids, you move buy a house in the suburbs, you save for retirement.
And I just think for a lot of people they've realized that that's not the path of maximum fulfillment.
And that
Being happy.
Actually g generates also better outcomes. You know, you have better artists, you have better engineers, you have better everything if people are ultimately just happier.
And I think
Yeah.
generation of people know that a lot more inherently than people my generation or boomers
the generation of public.
Wh what did you come out of that with how did you define happiness?
The end of this.
Journey.
There's a great um
Article.
Uh it's not sorry, it's not even an article. It's um
It's the obituary of Steve Jobs, written by his um sister.
And she wrote it, Mona Simpson. She wrote it in the New York Times uh upon his death.
And
There's just a paragraph in there.
But I think the phrase that he said was like sort of like oh wow and he just kept repeating oh wow um as he was passing away.
And I
interpreted what that may have meant. I have no idea, obviously,'cause he's not around to tell us that that's what happened, but
I have this idea, this sensation that
He sees his family, he thinks about the totality of his life lived.
And he was happy.
But think of what that happiness was able to create, not just for his family.
But for the entire world.
Um
And so I do think that, you know
On the one hand you could say
You know, he was fanatical, he was a tyrant, he was hard to work for.
You know, et cetera, et cetera.
But on the other hand
Maybe there's a different way of saying it, which is that he was very content
He had a family that loved him.
He had a family that he loved.
And as a result of that happiness, he was able to leave that sanctuary.
Go to work.
and take that happiness and channel it into doing amazing things for other people.
That's
Uh a pretty cool idea.
And so
I think that
What I would like to live through.
is
That version.
of the truth for me
Thank you
Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow idea.
And how do I define it?
And I didn't even know that that should be a way to live my life earlier on.
And
You know
When you're talking to me today as a
you know forty four year old.
Guy.
Is I
learn that there are things that give me these oh wow sensations that I just absolutely love. I'll I'll just name a couple. They're
Yeah.
even today this happened. I I you know I'm I'm working a lot these days, just really kind of grinding on a lot of stuff and
You know, these are high pressure decisions that I'm making a lot of the time.
For me.
And so they consume a lot of my mental mind within and bandwidth and
Um
it's really exhausting and uh it there's pressure and you know, sometimes uh honestly I just feel like
Like I just need to just like cry. Like I'm just like I feel really stressed out in these moments and
You know, I'm fighting uphill, I feel like.
And today I was driving to the office and I was having one of those moments and I turned around and I went back home.
And I went to see each of my
four children and I kissed them and I went to see
I partner, I kissed her and um
I felt
Just this moment of just sheer
Happiness like
I felt like that's what I have accomplished. I built a sanctuary for my family.
Field as well.
And then I got it to the car and I came to the office and uh that's an oh wow.
Every summer now I have these oh wild moments because um
My partner's Italian and um
I, you know, had never really spent a lot of time in Europe, but in the last four years I spent obviously a lot of time in the summers and
My children and I have fallen in love.
with the times. Uh I mean and uh what have we learned? We you know we've learned to like
Love the food, love the culture, the boisterousness, the loudness, the love, the intensity, the energy.
I think about it now and I just uh it's like wow.
uh I love so I I've learned to
find things that I really appreciate. A a third one and I'll just I'll stop at that is I have a group of friends and we play poker together.
And if I think about how happy it makes me.
There's a thing that we do, which is we show up at four o'clock.
We play until about six thirty.
And then we have a dinner together, like a family dinner or long table.
And then we go back and we play for a few more hours.
That stopped.
When the coronavirus pandemic started because we couldn't come together
Um we've ape we've been able to get a bunch of
Rapid tests.
And so for the first time this Saturday we're gonna
come together and play.
And I think about this and I'm just like oh wow like I cannot wait
To see that.
So
You know, and I think about this, Shane, none of that
Is about C and D C or
a a good successful company, those are important and those are good demarcations of progress.
Um but those aren't my oh wow moments anyway.
And when I put too much pressure
and value in those being the oh wow oh wow moments, I got distracted and I became unhappy.
And as long as I stay centered on these other things.
I have so much more energy to come and work on those.
First order setup.
you know, business priorities and get get things done. And I and I and I'm trying to
achieve something that is at the very early stages, which is not done yet.
Yeah, I want to talk about that, but before we get there, there's a couple of rabbit holes that I sort of want to explore there. You mentioned Zoomers were willing to speak truth.
Their truth.
Uh pretty easily and and it was harder for
Our generation.
But you're you're also
You know, you're full of controversy sometimes. It doesn't strike me that you have a problem speaking
your truth or you you've ever not said what you felt is
Well, it's not that I've always not.
I think that
I
I learned to lie.
at a very young age because lying I think is one of the most
simple coping mechanisms that we all have.
And
Lying manifests in all kinds of very subtle corrosive ways.
You know, when I was growing up I had a I have a f I have a family who fundamentally we all love each other, but in it's a very complicated
contorted form of love.
Because
It's punctuated with
You know, some mental health issues, uh
You know.
Alcoholism, you know, depression, poverty.
And so, you know
When I was a young person, the way that I coped is to lie.
Are you okay? I'm fine.
Did you do that?
I didn't do that.
You know, where were you? Nowhere.
How did you do on that test?
Fine.
I learned to be evasive.
And what that
created was a deep seated
pattern of lying.
And avoidance.
And you know, people can say maybe lying is not what that is, but at the basic, you know, kind of just to simplify it.
You know, I learned to lie.
Uh.
I think that at some point
Um, I think almost sort of at a very you know physiological biological level.
That's not what
Any of us want to be.
And so I think that I had almost this form of organ rejection.
And so I had to almost
You know, go to the other end of the spectrum.
almost in a way of atoning.
For all of the years of lives.
And all of the accumulated mistruths or half truths.
or invasiveness, whether that was in my personal life or my business life.
And the first moment of clarity around that was actually when I went to work at Facebook because for the first time I was unbelievably candid.
And it was such a cathartic release.
Because I could be
You know, almost curmudgeonly in my candor.
Um so much so that it's
Points probably I was a bit of a caricature because I'm not sure.
You know, there was this guy, me, who seemed very
you know, almost a Cerbic at times, um
Just a little rough around the edges.
And I took it to an extreme there.
And then in the early parts of social capital, I actually think I revert it.
And um I was lying.
Yeah.
Because I was I was filled with
a new level and a new kind of insecurity around, you know.
I felt like an imposter in venture capital. I felt like, you know, I didn't earn the right to start a fund. I didn't
And I gave myself all of these.
hurdles that I put in front of me mentally.
And my solution was to, you know, try to be evasive and to lie my way through that.
And then in two thousand sixteen and seventeen.
Again.
I think I had an even much more cathartic form of uh organ rejection.
around it and I had to sort of recalibrate.
uh the life around me so that I could stop lying.
And um
I think in that I think you you you're finding a person.
that tries to be truthful as often as as I can.
And uh
Oftentimes what that means is saying the uncomfortable thing.
But it's the thing that needs to be said.
And I think that there's a lot of people
У Appreciate that because they themselves.
feel like they're sometimes caught in positions where they have to be evasive or they have to lie.
in order to call.
And you know, if they themselves aren't in a position to do it, I think they appreciate when others can be.
Um and I think that a lot of people have a very positive reaction to that, and I think that's in part what
But I think people get a sensation
uh when they interact with me sometimes. So I'm not sure I'm necessarily controversial.
I do think that I'm behaving in a way
That I think a lot of folks
With love.
to be in a position to do as well.
Right.
I d I don't think it's actually correlated
Money.
I think that it's more correlated.
to self worth and the comfort that you have with yourself
The limitations that you have.
And I'm
The ability to love yourself despite those limitations that's a process that
Too few of us.
Start.
And it's like I said, it's not a
a money thing. It's uh
It's a happiness. So closing the loop on how you started.
I think that you know Zoomers in this interesting way see
All these
Generations
you know, of folks that are older than them.
you know, thirty year old, forty year old, fifty year old, sixty year olds.
seventy year olds, eighty year olds, and we live long enough now where they see
Multiple generations
Uh
evasiveness and unhappiness really. Yeah. Uh and and they see
similarities in all of us.
That they're smart enough.
to decide that they don't want to exhibit because you know it be it would be one thing, Shane, if you saw an eighty year old.
Well, you could say, Oh, I'm not gonna be like that person.
But then you see a seventy year old and you're like, Wow, that's just the junior version of the eighty year.
Then you're sixty year old, and you see that.
Okay.
fifty year old and because we're all alive
You know, the twenty year old sees
eight generations of people ahead of them and they're like, Wait a minute, something here is wrong.
And they're smart enough to say what are the commonalities of all these folks.
And they choose to be different.
Do you still deal with imposter syndrome?
All the time.
What do you tell yourself in those moments?
First of all, I I talked to my partner. She has been
My
Spiritual
Partner.
My
Kind of like co pilot.
Because she really
has an enormous level of empathy and care around
her own mental health and
You know.
uh the mental health of our family.
So we talk a lot.
You know.
And we talk about nonsense and serious things and everything in between, but we just talk and
uh I found that
as in
Man.
I was taught.
that talking.
Is weak.
Uh I also found that as a
Immigrant.
Man, I was taught that
Talking about emotions was doubly weak.
And then I was, you know, sort of taught as kind of
you know, like in this industry that
Um, you know, talking is awkward.
You put all these things together and
You know, the biggest thing that
I found that has helped me is just talking.
And being open.
And it starts with her
My kids I'm really open and
you know, transparent with my kids, they think I'm a you know, basically a fucking loser.
Uh I think that that's really cool.
Um
You know, they they just they just roll their eyes every time I start talking'cause it's like some stupid diet drive, but
All of these things help me stay.
really connected to
The goal of being truthful.
That helps me stay connected to the goal of being
Happy to celebrate these
Oh wow kind of moments in my life.
That helps me.
But to be honest with you
That has to be an active process.
For me.
Because the that thing that you just said
Jane is overpowering for me. The the sense of being an impostor is overpowering.
And it's like
This dragon that I've been trying to slay my whole life and I haven't been able to.
And the more
I don't even want to say success, but yeah, I guess like the more
Like notches up the ladder I go.
The more seві.
It feels.
Um, and the harder it is for me to fight it back.
So um you know, I had this conversation with Matt yesterday and you know
I said to her like
Yeah, I feel
Like
This is why so many people just give up.
Because it's easier to do it than to fight.
and to solve the real root cause of what allows you to get to the next level of success.
That's really why, you know, you have to look at folks that have really overcome this stuff in however way they've done it and achieved a level of success and really celebrate them'cause they're uh
They have a level of mental fortitude that is exceptional.
But yeah, I'm I'm I'm dealing with it right now, this imposter syndrome, and uh I I I it's I think it'll be a battle I fight my whole life.
You know, some people other people have different battles, but that that is definitely not.
What keeps you going? I mean you could just
Fold up, walk away.
live an amazing life, you and generations of your your heirs.
What what keeps you
Sort of
pushing through this
Confronting this dragon.
I I do think that I get a level of enjoyment from it.
You know, this idea of like uh
You know can I beat it?
I like how I feel.
when I'm more connected to the things that make me happy.
I like how I feel when I think like
When I think that I
I'm doing things that
the younger version of me would be proud of.
Not the older version. It's it's interesting. Like a lot of people think like, you know
Like at your deathbed.
And uh I think the exact opposite. I think like, you know, with the twenty two year old self, you know, interacting with this person.
You know, with the sixteen year old person
I think wow, that guy is uh
That's a legit human being. Like he's, you know
He's putting himself out there trying.
So I'm motivated to keep kind of grinding and getting better.
Just seeing what the upper bound is.
It's interesting, a lot of a lot of people are like, Oh, if I just had like ten million dollars or something, I'd just walk away. And I'm like, Well, that's probably the reason you might never have ten million dollars, right? Because the people that achieve that
keep pushing and keep struggling and can't actually walk away in some way.
I think that um money
accelerates
The point at which you can declare yourself free.
Hm. And feel
emancipated. Like I do think that money is a
It liberates people, it gives them freedom.
But going back to what we were saying before.
It doesn't.
Make you happier.
And if you are
Ill equipped.
To then run that.
Race.
The happiness race.
Um and you do it with money.
It's destructive. It's it's more destructive than if you do it without money.
Because you know, if you're unhappy
And you're unconstructively trying to find your happiness and you have cash.
You know, you'll end up
You know
Gambling broke dead high.
You know, like it's all the typical cliches.
They and they they played themselves out of her, you know.
Many generations.
And they'll continue to do so.
Yeah, I I think that like
This is why I think
People can
separate these two paths and actually
Work on them concurrently.
One is the path to freedom.
And the second is the path to happiness.
I think the path to happiness is an internal process.
But the path to freedom, that I can help with. You know, because uh I think I've learned a l an accumulated amount of knowledge here.
And uh it's readily transferable. The happiness path is not because it each of us had our own lived experience, which is so different from everybody else's. And so all you can do is kinda listen to other folks and decide you're gonna start for yourself.
Um, but the answers are not obvious and it's all iteration.
But the path to freedom.
is easily copied.
And I think that
That's sort of sort of what?
uh what motivates me as well, this idea that I can
sort of, you know, all that accumulated
knowledge base, I can just hand it off to folks and if they can benefit from it, that would be great.
What is the path to freedom?
um well sort of financial freedom. So I think I think um
I think that
If more people
believe that they
could be economically
Self sufficient.
I think that
It would solve
A lot of
To
Societal
implications of inequity.
You know, today
We have kind of like this very polarized
body politic really, where on one hand there are folks that
Um have over
sort of indexed on
What I would call
Absolute
freedom and intent, but it has no plan.
And on the other side, it's sort of
over indexed on
A nanny state.
With no plan.
Both of them are very much the same and that neither of them have a credible plan.
And in the middle there's a plurality of people
That
Or just exhausted.
Okay.
That's a that's a perfect boundary condition for
You know, a lot of the inequity that
that exists today in society and a lot of the frustration that people feel as a result of it.
So to me
If we can give people a more reasonable roadmap.
Where they can execute it.
They can learn.
And they can have a community of other like minded folks.
that can put in the time and the work and help each other.
Over
you know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.
to compound
Capital.
No matter how small, but just to start.
I think you'd be surprised at how many people are intellectually capable
of achieving financial freedom on their own.
And in that I think that there's um
There's a path out of this kind of like
Very depressing kind of.
state that we're in.
That that I think is the opportunity is
So you know, I'll give you a an example.
In two thousand and
Fifteen, I think we've started to really pay attention to Tesla.
And we bought these convertible bonds
You know, we thought they were really great.
you know, risk adjusted because
You know, we weren't sure whether
the shorts were gonna win and drive the company into the ground, but we were really sure we wanted to bet on Elon.
Long story short
It all kind of worked out and now you look back and you're like my gosh, this is incredible.
Like
Ir so much.
Knowledge.
That helped us feel like we were making the right decision.
that existed in this long tail of people who took it upon themselves
to build a community of people that wanted to understand the company, not necessarily just to be a blind cheerleader.
But they would really go and double click and they were doing a level of work that was incredible.
And I thought that was so interesting because I thought to myself
You know, typically what would happen is you would
put your money into a a a bank a bank account, you would open up a brokerage account.
maybe you would get access to some research from one of the banks.
You would read it, or maybe an advisor would recommend something to you.
Or maybe you'd end up on some random community and read some random form and buy something.
But instead.
These were like
physicists and you know chemists and
you know, financial people all coming together to understand these things. They were writing research notes, they were putting out, you know, YouTube video clips.
And if you took the time to understand it.
That community
Was helping you understand something really important that was happening in the world.
And you could have financially
participate it because you could just go and buy that.
Uh and it would have worked.
Now let's extrapolate that idea.
Forget Tesla for a second.
There's this incredible thing that's happening, which is that
We are starting to
Financialize everything.
Right, we're starting to
create financial increments.
attached to anything you could imagine.
Meaning.
You know, it used to be the case that you would only buy
Sneakers.
Now you buy and sell sneakers and you know the marketplace that that
that is the leader in that
You know, go
Um today just announced that they raised, you know
Two hundred million dollars at an almost two billion dollar valuation?
So is it a
Is it an e commerce marketplace?
Maybe.
Uh, I look at it as a financial market. They fractionalized.
Shoes, essentially.
um and they fractionalized
And they've wrapped a financial
Transaction layer.
Around taste.
And case making.
You know, there's there's a company called Pipe, there's a company called Rally Road. All these folks, you know, are
you know, uh fractionalizing ownership of all kinds of things.
There's crypto, obviously.
Their stocks.
There's you know specific bonds so
The point is the surface area
The investible universe is growing.
Some of it is still very regulated, some of it is really unregulated.
But the trend is obvious.
So we're going to
Financialise everything.
And we're gonna fractionalize ownership of probably everything.
And so
what there's an opportunity now to do is to curate and cultivate a community around that.
To help people.
And that's really what I would like to do.
I think that it would be a really useful thing to level the playing field.
So that whether you're
You know
Mom and pop school teacher with five or ten K
You're a new grad with, you know, a thousand
K that they had saved up.
Or whether you're an accredited investor.
I don't judge. I would like to treat them all equally.
And I would like to say look.
I've made some mistakes, I've had some winners, I've really learned how to allocate capital.
Here's how I see the world.
And here are ways in which I think that you could participate beside me as my partner.
And
If you want to, you can't.
Um, and I'll always put, you know, my money on the line so that you know that I am not trying to
surreptitiously become an agent.
I
Have a principle.
And I think that if we can organize that in some useful way.
Um, I think that we can help a lot of people achieve
uh freedom.
And if they're concurrently working on happiness
Um, I think he'll really
Fuck some shit up and fix some stuff. It'll be really good.
You said you you in a previous I think interview or maybe on Twitter that your job was to be an observer of the present.
I was wondering if you can double click on that.
Yeah, I'll I'll I'll give you um
Something that we you know
Drive.
Your listeners and viewers crazy.
Let's look at the
Two thousand and twenty election from first principles. Let's really look at it from first principles.
Well, let's think about foreign policy.
Um and foreign policy I think are really
Four things, but it really comes down to three things.
So number one
are sort of like nefarious state actors, right?
Let's just let's just use an example illustratively.
Russia.
Well, I think most people feel like, you know, Russia uh is pretty sketchy and you know they're generally quote unquote bad.
Okay, well let's uh
Let's let's think about another state actor, you know, North Korea.
I don't I don't think you're gonna see a lot of people jump up on either side of the aisle supporting North Korea.
Um let's think about
Uh China.
Um I think that
we've all realized that uh you know the bloom is off the road off the rose and that you know
We've allowed globalization, a strain of global that
has put America strategically on our back.
Yes.
And that doesn't make any sense.
you know, we may not have access to our own semiconductors. We don't have access to critical, you know, uh rare earth metals to drive electrification. We, you know, uh have outsourced critical parts of our healthcare infrastructure.
to
folks that you know can dictate whether we can take care of our our own people. That that doesn't make any sense, right? Everybody believes that now. Let's take the Middle East.
Uh, you know, the Middle East was incredibly critical.
uh because you know a handful of Western countries coming out of World War Two essentially
Dippy'd up and and build some artificial maps.
uh essentially to make sure that we had access to this precious resource, oil. Well, you know, in two thousand twenty, we now have, you know, a twenty or thirty year shot clock where we've decided that
where we're gonna stop burning oil. You know, we've essentially already stopped burning coal.
And it's just a matter of time until we stop burning fossil fuels.
Well
At that point
The strategic relevance of the Middle East.
Decays significantly.
So think about that now. So from a foreign policy perspective.
Both sides.
Basically
See the world in the exact same way, Democrats and Republicans.
They both hate Russia, they both hate China, and they both think that energy independence means that the Middle East won't matter.
Wow.
That's observing the present.
Let's take a different example.
Think about uh
monetary and fiscal policy.
Whether we like it or not.
We used to be in a world
Where
Фискорі полісі в сепа.
Sometimes they would be
along the same lines, but they were separate bodies acting independently.
Now the Treasury and the Fed
are inexorably intertwine.
And it's not just in the United States if you look at it this problem in um you know
Western democracies in in Europe, it's the same situation.
This is crazy, right? We have inexorably brought together.
fiscal and monetary policy.
That's just the facts.
Now let's look at spending.
Whether you call it the Green New Deal on the left
Or the infrastructure bill on the right.
We are going to spend in the next decade.
Tens of trillions of dollars.
Чува.
Dig ourselves out.
Of this unemployment and gdp hole.
That has been exacerbated.
by the coronavirus pandemic.
That's gonna happen.
Neither candidate.
Will come to the American people and say we want to spend a trillion dollars on
You know, digging up
coal from the ground and burn.
coal fired power plants. It's not gonna happen.
One's gonna call it a Green New Deal, the other person's gonna call it infrastructure spending, but we're going to
you know, radically change.
The face of how
America
operates as a functional economy.
Okay, and it it's relatively
Predictable in my opinion.
how they're gonna spend that money.
So
If I'm a keen observer of the present, if I would put all of that together
Channel I'll say something very controversial, which is we have an election
That is now actually of style.
And not of substance. Now that doesn't mean it's not important.
But substantively
The positions on critical matters of foreign policy
Domestic monetary and fiscal policy.
And spending
will roughly be plus or minus the same.
It takes a lot of mental fortitude.
To think through it.
And look at it that way.
And not let one's own biases jump in.
Uh because it will
tear you into, you know.
Into a thousand different mental pieces.
But that's what I mean by being a keen observer of the present. So okay.
What does a selection come down to?
I think it comes down to
Political correctness versus cancer culture.
If I had to kind of summarize it in a nutshell.
That's what it is.
And I think that people will vote.
on November third
about which outcome they want.
Піка субстантивні інакше.
The spending patterns, the policy decisions.
Um will roughly be the same.
And again, see, it's such a controversial thing, and I think people can just go absolutely crazy to hear somebody say that. They're gonna go crazy when I don't ask you who you predict will win, but what I really want to know is how do you take that and then what do you do with that in the future? You said it, okay, well
this is gonna be a predictable path of spending. How do you as an investor
Then take that knowledge.
Fabi fabulous question. So this goes back to what I'm trying to do, which is
If I can observe
The present.
in a reasonably
unemotional and detached way.
To your point, I can put a plan together.
And when I have a plan
you know, that plan is specifically for me oriented around how I'm going to
Make sure that the ideas that I want to see exist in the world.
Win it.
And
This is gonna sound
maybe turn people off the way I say it, but at my level of capital, that's what I can do. I can vote with my dollars to really make things come to life. And I think that that
Um I really take that job seriously.
And and I and I and I aim to do that now.
Which is like okay.
I'm learning how to be happy.
You know, I I've achieved a level of freedom.
But now it's about change and I wanna implement my form of change.
And I want to see that in the world, so
I'm trying to figure out how my ideas have a better chance of succeeding.
And then I want to make sure that I implement a plan
To make that happen.
And then
That adds to my knowledge base.
And then my hope is to share that with other people.
So that they can then
learn from that as they will, and maybe they can
They can also do their version of the
So
You know, if I was really
Yeah, I was
Six years old.
In nineteen eighty.
No.
four years old in nineteen eighty. But imagine I was
Thirty four years old, or forty four years old.
I would have woken up and I would have said
Read the paper.
Doesn't matter how much money I
Okay.
If I
New then.
What I know now.
I would wake up in nineteen eighty and say
Oh my god.
The thirty year rate is at you know fifteen, sixteen percent.
Interest rate.
Man, this thing, you know, if I had to take a gas.
I really believe in the productivity and the ingenuity of America.
I'm just gonna be uh I'm gonna take a guess that fifteen percent goes to zero.
before fifteen percent goes to fifty percent.
And you would have been really bright.
Um
Eighties, nineties.
the two thousands and now the two thousand and tense.
Had you just been levered long equities.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You would have made a fortune.
And you would have been right and you would have achieved freedom. It doesn't matter whether you started with a dollar
Ten dollars, a thousand, ten thousand, ten million.
You would have been
Unbelievably rich.
And in many ways, you know, Buffett's simplicity.
Warren's elegance of his mental model.
And I'm not trying to diminish his skill by saying this.
Is is a keen observer.
of this most important high level order idea.
Which is that
Rates are going to zero.
Productivity is going to go up.
Ingenuity
the resourcefulness of America goes up. I wanna be long that I'm long equities.
It for.
Now, K where are we?
Well we're raised it's you.
Right. So let's take our all cumulative knowledge and look at today. Let's just be a keen observer of the present.
Rates are in Europe.
Where are they gonna go?
Are they gonna go to negative five or plus five?
Well now the key question is
Mm. Well probably on the margin.
Your instinctive reaction.
Will be plus five.
And I would say
Why?
I mean why why is zero?
Some artificial number.
Where everything starts and stops.
This is not like temperature. It's not like we're saying it's absolute zero.
Right.
It's not like there is no colder temperature than you know, two hundred or whatever Kelvin, two sixty something Kelvin or whatever it is.
It's just zero. It's like zero.
Degree Celsius.
Can you have negative one degree Celsius, of course. Ask anybody that lives in the Midwest.
Um, you know, or the East Coast. So could rates go negative? Yeah.
Could rates go positive?
Well
I don't know.
If I'm observing the present, what I would say is
you know, the overwhelming majority of the value
in the last ten years has been about educating
Billions of people all around the world.
That answer.
Roughly deflationary.
Meaning
As long as you wait tomorrow and delay gratification.
Somebody will show up and give you more for less.
Right.
Yeah, I I had a
I don't know, I'm making up a name of a company. I had a storage account on drive dot com.
All of a sudden Dropbox showed up and said, More for less.
And then I was using Dropbox for a while, and then Google Drive showed up and said even more.
For even less. And I'm pretty sure that the next person that figures out how to do storage and scale will come up with even, even more.
For even less.
Facebook did the same thing, you know, uh, Spotify does the same thing, Netflix does the same thing, all these things that create so much value.
Are training us psychologically.
To behaving
Deflationary ways to delay gratification slightly.
Or to make the cost of switching so low.
that even if you don't want to delay gratification, you can just change your mind later and pop to the next thing that gives you more for less.
So it is very conceivable that we are in a deflationary posture for a long time.
Now it's also possible that
Inflation could go up.
So
My kind of view as well.
I need to answer this problem in a different way.
And the way that I would try to answer this problem is to say to myself, Well what sectors of the economy
Will benefit.
Irrespective of whether we go to negative five or plus five.
Because I don't know what the answer to that question is. It'll be obvious in hindsight, but if it's not obvious today.
And so
I construct an allocation for myself to try to
Um solve for that.
Well
People are gonna be buying things.
So
You know, they're probably gonna be buying things online.
So
you know, e commerce consumption, that's a big category that will win where the rates are minus five or plus five. People need to care about health care.
Right. So they're gonna consume things.
And there's probably going to be pressure.
over time to do
You know.
Better and better things.
a and more useful things.
Just because
You know, we can't keep spending the way we are with the outcomes.
That we're getting.
Right.
Um okay, so that's that's the second category.
You know, we probably want to have a reasonable way of equipping ourselves.
with skills and education.
Um, so that's another big category.
Um, you know, we're probably gonna need to have clean sustainable energy.
That's another category.
We're probably gonna want to eat in ways that are more constructively useful for us.
That's another category. We're probably gonna want to hedge.
Just the chance that none of us knows what we're doing.
So you know you need some kind of like alternative
asset category, that's another thing.
So you can kind of go down the line.
You know, whether you use Maslow's hierarchy or something else as a jumping off point.
And kind of say look.
Дансе
A high level answer, the framework is obvious.
healthcare, education, climate change, fin tech, blah blah blah.
And then you need to fill in
An allocation.
Then you need to figure out the mix of
you know early stage versus late stage or public versus
You know, uh some of these other things, and then you can construct an answer.
So you know
The way that I answer this is to say well
Uh I'm basically going to be law.
Growth.
Because whether rates are minus five or plus five, the thing that overcomes all of that noise is
Toss.
Well,
and CEOs
That can invest all the money they make today.
For the future.
Simply because I
Can now lazily
Let that person work on my behalf.
Because that's less of a problem that I have. If you as a CEO shame
I was an investor in your company.
And you said Schmack, I generate
Thirty percent free cash flow and I'm gonna give you a dividend. I would say Shane, fuck you.
Mm.
I don't want that money. Keep that shit. What am I supposed to do with it? Reinvest it.
Grow faster, please.
Uh I mean, one of the most incredible insights that that we figured out in twenty four
Twenty fourteen.
I sold all Facebook, all my shoes. You went right into Amazon, didn't you?
But the way we underwrote that investment, there's a guy that was working on our team who now runs a hedge fund.
Young guy, brilliant guy who
Randomly emailed me.
And I ended up hiring.
Emailing inbox.
uh at social capital dot com this kid Saki at W great great guy he's not a kid.
He's he was a kid that's
Uh and we worked on this analysis and and basically you know
He said to me twelve, I think that
Bases is a better
Capital allocated in
Perfect.
And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
And we constructed this really
Elegant chart which showed
Basically the P L of Amazon and it looked at every expense line.
And he had
taken every single expense line, created a product around it, and made it a revenue.
And I thought
Yeah, this guy is a genius.
By the way, that deck is floating around, so you can see this chart. Uh
out there uh in the wild.
But that's capital allocation. That's really skillful.
So you want that. You want you want a guy that's basically like, listen guys, I got this.
We're gonna generate a couple billion dollars. I'm gonna put
All of it back in the ground for you.
And it's gonna grow really well, and just trust me.
And I think that those those are the real high quality folks you want to get behind. So basically my solution is you gotta be long growth.
Higher growth, the better.
In the areas that matter for people.
And I think that you know in ten years from now
That'll be a playbook that really works.
By the way, that sounds kind of like he's not saying anything.
I think it is saying something because like you know, the historical model of how you would get freedom
Is you know, sixty percent equities.
Forty percent.
Bonds.
you know, the sixty percent you would say, uh, you know, you'd be
Long ETFs, maybe.
Okay, well
You know, long ETF is basically long fang.
And I I think that you want a little bit more uncorrelated exposure than just saying.
Yeah, that's that's kind of like
What I'm working through right now is trying to really refine an approach that I think can work for the next decade.
uh you know, fifteen, twenty years and then share with Google.
So it sounds like part of your process is to go through this and figure out what's not changing.
And try to allocate there, do you also look at what do you where you see massive change?
And how you could possibly take advantage of that, or is that a category you just don't evaluate?
Not in that language.
I I I kind of tend to think about things that are just
Will they be more important?
Um and if they're going to be more important.
How can we accelerate the right outcomes?
I think climate change is a really good example of that where
It doesn't matter whether you believe in climate change or not.
I think that
What we know to be true we don't like.
Which is that
You know, the places we used to ski at we can't ski at anymore.
The places we used to go and bathe on the beach may disappear, not exist.
And so, if nothing else, just because of our own selfish desire to be happy.
We should probably want a better control.
At least to the extent that we can.
Our impact.
on you know taking our own happiness away.
So, you know, I don't think people in the Mid West
What
You know
Hurricane season.
And if there are experiments that we can run.
Where we can observe whether they help.
We should run them.
And so, you know, if you have
All these gigatons of carbon being emitted
And you can run an experiment that takes them out.
We should probably do it.
And will know conclusively whether
you know, it it'll change hurricane season.
So why not just run the experiment in an unemotional, detached way?
But like, you know, if you view climate change in that lens.
It's uh multi decade.
Multi
decatrillion dollar opportunity. The the world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change.
Oh, that's interesting. Well
As you were saying that I was sort of also thinking, there's things that we value today.
that are gonna be massively
under or overvalued in the future. You know, commercial real estate strikes me as something that maybe
Maybe that's not gonna have the same future as past. What do you think of that and w what are those industries for you?
Yeah, I'll say something that actually makes me a little sad, but I think it's true. I would not view it
I don't view it as commercial real estate versus uh
Ready?
um residential real estate.
I would say it this way.
I think that architecture
Will unfortunately
Have a lot less value.
in the future.
Because of climate change.
Now what does that mean?
Well
For example, if you look at
Some of the most progressive countries in the world.
You're up.
On the climate issue.
And you look and you know, again, start to go back to first principles. Where is the carbon emitted?
you know, where are the greenhouse gases emitted? Well it's overwhelmingly in cities.
And then you start to look at okay, well, you know, what are some of the things that we could do to
Electrify or to decarbonize and
One thing that you get to is
You have all this incredibly beautiful architecture.
But it's completely dated.
And the amount of carbon that you know these heating systems, these water systems generate.
you know getting stuck into these
Very intricate, beautiful, you know.
U walk by these piazas.
You think God, these is these things have been around for
Five hundred years.
And on the one hand you're like it's amazing, but on the other hand you're like
This is gonna be really tough for
You know, the city of
Paris or or Milan or Amsterdam to defend
historic architecture in the face of also wanting to be carbon neutral.
And I think in the United States it's also going to have some direct implications as well. So if architecturally
You know, we unfortunately have to replace
Some of these old
Beautiful stuff.
With more simple modern stuff.
You know, we'll have a more
Utilitarian landscape.
Or maybe you'll just have a bunch of variations of modern.
But you know, that's a direct
implication of of climate change, I think, that nobody talks about. So, you know, how will that affect
People's happiness or people's creativity.
uh that they're all living in these sort of like I don't know if you've ever been to Shanghai, but if you cross from Sh you know, Pudon to Shanghai and you go across this one month bridge.
Yes.
It sort of looks like this
kind of like weird future state where you just have these
You know, buildings rising up.
Uh every single you know
to the horizon on each side.
They all look the same and you think
God, that's depressing if I had to live in that.
But we may have to live in that in a
you know, climate neutral world.
Do you want that?
You said successful investing is about behavior and psychology.
Can you expand on that?
I think that um
When push comes to shove.
What you're always going to be fighting is yourself.
Panicking.
overreacting, underreacting.
refusing to observe the present
Living too much in the past.
Wanting too much to believe in the future.
So it's all psychological traps.
Um, because the data is there.
If you want to observe.
And then just clinically re underwriting how it's it's
You know, as as part of your risk equation.
No, which bucket does it sit in? How big is that
Little back inside the bucket.
And so I
try to really understand
How to create an edge.
And I don't think an edge comes from, you know, attending conferences or
you know, writing some crazy algorithmic software, maybe a few people can do those things and find an edge.
But what is a more kind of like mainstream accessible idea?
And I think it is that
If you define
certain behavioral principles
That
protect you from the worst parts of your own psychology, that's a winning strategy.
Um
And so, you know, I have like
A handful of these rules that I try to live by.
And they these behavioral rules around
You know.
trying to think about things like buying companies versus buying stocks, that trying to think about
you know, the quality of the CEO, the quality of the business, trying to think in long duration, not looking at the stock price every day, you know, reading annual reports, avoiding quarterly reports, you know.
All these things that try for me.
Um
To solve for my blind spots.
And um
That's allowed me to take bigger and bigger swings because
I feel like I'm practicing
Things that
Yeah.
Protect me from myself.
So I think a lot of
But
You know, you need to do
As a person.
is
Um, by the way, notice how all these things tie together. It's like you know, nobody would have ever told you that focusing on your happiness would make you a great investor, but focusing on your happiness in part is saying
you know, you're exploring who you are as a person, you're finding what makes you happy, but the other part of that is you're finding out what blind spots are and your weaknesses, right? And you're finding ways to
You want that.
Well when you translate that that knowledge of those things into business, particularly
you know, in investing, it it's enormously helpful.
Um it's a money making strategy.
Um, so I really I really think that spending time understanding yourself and then translating that into

Actionable
Card grills.
That you write down
And you stick to uh
is a really important
I I I love the idea of of sort of creating these correct
automatic behaviors that put you on the path to success by
either addressing your blind spots or sort of like showing you more. Are there are there sort of like personal rules that you have as well? Or are there
Like let's let's let's go deep on that. Like what do you do to
overcome your blind spots in all areas of your life, not just investing, but personally too.
I talk.
And um again I I go back to the same thing. I just I I just talk. I
And when I feel when I find that I revert.
Into a comfort zone.
Where I'm repeating.
past behaviors that I don't like, it's because I've stopped talking.
To not
to a couple of friends that I rely on.
To you know, two therapists that I talk to on a regular basis.
Peace
All about my mental health.
Um, the healthier I am mentally
The more I'm able
to
Overcome.
These natural inclinations to revert.
to comfortable patterns that have been very well established and well worked.
They're not healthy, but they're just habits.
You know, by talking.
What happens is people who know me
They develop a pattern recognition and then they start to tell me
Hey, you're being really insecure.
Yeah.
Hey, why are you you know?
talking in that way or talking about this thing.
And now
what I could do before I would get very defensive and insecure and I would
attack the person when they would say that. So it uh it also needs people who really deeply at the end of the day love you and care care about you.
And that's hard to find. I mean it's not like those those folks really grow on trees.
I have
Two people not
My friend Rob
And I really
Talk to them a lot.
Um and then I have
Two therapists and I talked to them.


Um and so that's really helpful for.
So yeah, it's it's just pattern. It's just their pattern recognition.
You know, talking is also really good'cause like it allows you to vent. And so
you know, if you if you think about sort of like plaque
You know, flossy.
Doesn't stop.
one hundred percent of the plaque from building up, but it does prevent, you know, ninety, ninety five percent. So then when the dentist gets in there,
You know, she's only or he's only cleaning out a little bit.
muck and my versus like all kinds.
Just bracket shit.
And so for me venting is like uh
keeping, you know, the plaque from building up.
Uh
it's stripping away the plaque. It just allows me to get the negative energy out to refra some of the things that are happening in my life.
in a more constructive way, and then I can come back to the problem at hand.
with the health fear mindset and outlook.
I just I I really think
The big insight, the big unlock is
It's not work and personal. I don't think these are separate worlds. There
Deeply
Subconsciously intertwine and interconnected.
And being happy.
Personally
Is the pathway to help everything else make sense.
And that
is around mental health.
And I think a key unlock for mental health is just
Finding a resource to talk to.
And when you first start talking
It's going to be
Just kind of blathery bullshit and uh
it's gonna be imprecise and it's gonna be super awkward and you're gonna feel
Yeah.
What is this?
And then over time, it's like anything, like when you start to get good at it.
It's it's really
Good.
You need to exercise that muscle. You you mentioned pattern recognition. I thought that was really interesting. Like you've interviewed thousands of CEOs over the years.
What are some of the questions that you asked and the patterns that you recognize, and how do you develop that pattern recognition to find the ones that are going to make the biggest difference?
Uh I've learned uh that my pattern recognition before was too brittle.
It was too superficial.
I would ask dumb, obvious questions for which any good CEO will have very good practised answers.
And so now I don't do that.
I'm trying to solve for something a little bit more elusive, which is

And mental agility.
The integrity one can't be defined by a question.
It's about subtle observations over a long period of time.
Because people take a long time to reveal themselves.
And going back to how we first started.
Um people are very good at lying and being evasive.
Very good.
And I don't mean to say that in a negative way that you can't trust people. You absolutely can. And I actually think the way to overcome
All of this stuff is to actually put your trust out there and just trust
with reasonable guard rules, but to trust and just to assume the best intentions of everybody. I think that's a very healthy mindset. It it just
de-escalates a bunch of mental stress that you could otherwise have. Um but people reveal themselves in small little ways.
Over long periods of time.
And when you can observe enough of those observations you can pool them together to get a really good sense of integrity.
So that you know, for me it's like a
Two, three, four, six months.
Nine month, one year journey.
And every moment is an opportunity to just re
underwrite my integrity and theirs.
You know, am I being
Completely called
And honest to them.
And am I giving them my best?
You know, so am I am I leaning in with a hundred percent of my integrity?
And then are they giving it back to me?
And it doesn't have to be in a business interaction, it could be in a personal interaction, it could be how they talk to the
Water at a restaurant.
random conversations you have and their reactions to things, their openness to different points of view. So that's one thing.
And then mental agility is just more about
What happens when you
Keep things open ended.
That's
Not what you would do.
if you were interviewing someone for a very specific role at a company like you know
engineer or something.
You know?
There they're it's about functional competence and these two things don't matter.
But when I'm evaluating a CEO, those are the only two things that matter. And so it's about a bunch of open ended conversations where you see how they think.
And you know, when you see how they frame a problem.
And when you ask kind of seemingly dumb questions, and if you're okay to ask what sounds like a dumb question.
And what they actually hear.
It's a very open ended.
Question.
That's a great way to sort of figure out uh
mental agility because it
Sparks then.
and how their mind works and you hear an answer that you wouldn't get otherwise. And what you hear is a framework and a process.
And uh and I really like that. You know, like meaning like when you frame questions like
So what do you think about and you just say something like random?
You know just like random. Like Jim, what do you think about
The triangle office. And you'd be like, What the hell kind of question is that? Like that has nothing to do with what I know.
Mm.
Um
And then you know, you just find people's mental agility.
Um and I and I honestly think CEOs are incredibly the best CEOs are incredibly mentally agile people. They're kinda curious. They know you know a little bit about a lot. You know, that's how you have to run a company. You have to know a little bit about a lot.
And uh you have to be good at engaging and understanding things, asking questions back.
You know what?
What about the triangle office?
you know, makes you want to ask me that question.
And then I would say, Well, uh I just think it's like what do you think about sort of like, you know, structured approaches that have this sort of like
dynamic allocation of like, you know
of resources. So like you know the triangle offense to me is like this kind of like really cool way where you like both have rigidity and flexibility. And then you know then you may say, yeah, you know, well here's a way that I think about my business that way. And all of a sudden you're having a completely random conversation. It required me to say something completely fucking dumb and like what seems like a complete non sequitur to
To the average person.
And then the intellectually, mentally agile person.
It had you know, mostly are it.
Kindness and curiosity.
engages you and then you end up
down a totally different path.
That is a great way.
For me to kind check a C.
I like that a lot. I'm glad you didn't put me on the spot with the triangle off. I mean I was just making it up randomly. That that's David, but yeah. Talk to me like public company CEOs. Who who do you think is the
the the sort of like top five public company CEOs not asking for investment advice here, just who are the best pure CEOs for the next ten years.
That's a great question. Okay.
Um
Elon Musk.
Jeff Bezos.
Oh so really okay, you're really putting me on the spot. Um
I love it. I got you thinking.
I'm I'm really thinking to try to answer this in a super thoughtful way. Um
Toby.
Toby Toby Ludke.
I I think Toby's really, really exceptional.
The um phenomenal.
He's world class on the level of those two.
My gosh, it's such a good I wow, never been asked it so well.
Jack Dorsey.
Mm.
exceptional um and I
Uh, I really owe him actually uh an apology because I had a very dismissive sensation of Jack and I don't really know him that well, obviously, but it's just uh just in my observations of
sort of his decision making
Particular at square.
Um, particularly around Cash App and
uh you know the decision to you know
Uh
The idea of m moving to Africa is just so smart, so genius. I mean just goes to show you the
the short term mindedness of these folks that that overreacted, I think. Um
But Dorsey
Yeah.
That's four, right? Yeah, that's four.
Elon Bezos Toby.
Jack Dorsey.
Um

Uh me.
Which company?
Um I will eventually
have something that represents the totality of my intellectual capital, meaning like
You're gonna go public.
I would I I would really like to.
I would like to be under that pressure.
And um I would really like to work on behalf of
Everybody.
Uh everybody meaning like
you know, if I can level the playing field and give folks
But I don't know what that is. See, that that's the problem. Like I don't I don't know like how to answer that question, like
It's like some amorphous blob, like well, what is it that I do? I don't know what I do.
You you could go public tomorrow, though, why don't you?
But I think I'm pretty good.
Like I re I really do think I'm good and I think I'm getting better.
Oh, talk to me about that. How do you measure
the difference between good and like getting better.
For yourself.
We all
like asymptote at some at some trajectory.
And
I think that I am now
One
to one and a half orders of magnitude away from my asymptote.
So
You can kind of see it.
But it's very faint.
Now I think I have a toolkit.
To implement the process.
That can get me close to my ass.
And I would love for me to be able to talk to you.
In forty years I'll be
Eighty four.
And say
Um
Like within
A couple of turns of the asymptomatic.
So for me it's
It's believing in myself more.
It's knowing how to take
Smarter risk.
being risk on
In larger quantum.
So I can write
You know.
hundred multi hundred million dollar checks now
And feel
Okay about it.
I need to be able to do that.
with billions and tens of billions and it this sounds crazy but
Five or six people in the world really know how to do that well.
it's not it's not a shot that a lot of people get a chance to take, you know, even if you're running like
you know, the largest private equity fund in the world, the the quantums of money that people are investing
that is that is of their own is still relatively limited and small.
Um even if the you know the headline numbers are big. So
I want to learn to do that. I want to learn to to feel like less of an imposter.
The more I do that, I think the smarter I can get at distilling and observing the present, acting on that.
And um
passing that through to other people so that they can act on it too.
And so you know
I don't have the skill to go deep in one of these things and
You know, build one of these platforms.
I think my skill is slightly different, which is sort of to oranize
A lot of things together.
um in a thematic understanding
This is where I think at
Like I I can't be a CEO of a million dollar or hundred ten million dollar, hundred or even billion dollar company because
That's about functional competence.
But when a company becomes ten billion dollar plus, it's all about capital allocation.
And I really think um just
I'm an outlier in my just maniacal desire to be really good at that.
So I would want to bet on myself.
So but that's not an accurate answer to your question because you said public company CEOs and it's not so I'm not public. I thought you were just gonna break that you're going public right here on the show.
No, I know. No, I have no plans, but uh yeah, no that whole
Whatever. Okay, so that's taking the other equation. That was stupid. Oh no, see that's me being feeling like an imposter.
Uh I mean like it's like what a it's uh it's you're overthinking this.
Mm.
Yeah, it's a coping mechanism. Wha w what what is your decision process?
For when you're making an al uh capital allocation decision. I know you've made a few recently, like without any specific names, so I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but
What's that process in your head like? Like how are you actually what's what are you talking to yourself about mentally?
To make sure'cause it it's all on you.
Yeah, I uh I I I re I really love it. Like, you know, we do a lot of work. Like I I mean, I have great partners, I have a team that I work with who are just exceptional people.
They are the most high integrity people I've ever worked with.
And they give me enormous energy.
And uh
Some some you know folks that I partnered up with
um who have their own organizations as well.
Those folks.
Or super high integrity.
And so all these people that I spend my day with every day
are just kind.
Could
Honest people.
Each of us I don't think are the smartest ones, but when we put ourselves together we are really, really smart collectively.
And that's
That's awesome.
And so we all do different things and everybody's bringing different things to the table. And then what happens, it allows me to kind of synthesize all kinds of different inputs and learnings and
you know, variations on a model, regulatory research, market research, you know
Consumer marketing research.
All of this stuff.
And learn about it, which is super fun.
And in my mind what's happening is basically like
Here's how this can go right, here's how this can go wrong, here's how this can go right, here's how this can go wrong, and I'm bouncing back and forth.
And all of these things are just
Fascinating.
And if I have to characterize it this this is gonna sound nuts, but it's like a
And then that oscillation goes faster and faster and faster, and then I find a point of
Include.
Is that like the matrix moment for you where like all of this data all of a sudden just sort of like.
Yeah, it it is like that.
It's like
You know, I know that.
uh leading into something.
I become
А лил дета.
I am
А литло овер.
My mind's racing my
You know, so w sometimes I'll be
saying non sequiturs on calls
And uh my partners are very patient with me in those processes.
Ca you've made like the public calls. You did Bitcoin in twenty twelve.
You did Amazon in twenty fourteen.
You did Tesla in twenty fifteen.
Like you've nailed
fairly, I would say, controversial things at the moment. I mean, in hindsight, they've all worked out exceptionally well, but
At the moment they everybody thought you were crazy.
Yeah.
They really, really did. And and that's awesome because it's like
advantageo divergence, right? You're diverging from the crowd and you're right.
Yeah, and uh and
And what it does is it it
has given me confidence in my process.
It's random.
You know, it's about
ingesting a lot of stuff. It's allowing yourself to be influenced but then come back home.
Right, that's another thing I love.
Meaning
Um, if I'm having a conversation
Or or in a sort of a teaching.
kind of a situation where I'm learning about something, I allow myself to be seduced. I allow myself to sort of fall for the narrative. I allow myself to believe
The totality of what that other person believes.
Fully and completely.
Because I want to really start to understand the nooks and crannies.
Now that process doesn't work if you want to be intellectually lazy.
Or if you find yourself being intellectually lazy and you stop when you get
You know, confirmatory
that first confirmatory meeting.
Or that first confirmatory article or you know
You could joke, but like that first informatory Google link. Ah, I'm done. You know? It doesn't work that way.
But if you're willing
to bounce around.
And
Іно фанта би у
In your opinion up front.
You find that people who have extreme opinions will talk to you in a very unguarded way.
And I I think I've I've trained myself to let myself be seduced by those folks so that I can learn from them.
Uh, but I always come back home. I come back to the center, I come back to no opinion.
What what's the trick for that, right? Like there's this quote from Ender's game that I was thinking. Have you ever watched that that movie or read the book where he says there's this moment where
I understand my enemy better than they understand themselves, and in that moment I sort of love them and defeat them.
And it sounds like you're allowing yourself to understand somebody else's opinion like so fully.
but you don't get caught up in it.
How do you avoid
No, I do in the moment.
Um but I know to slow it down.
And then I also know to come back home. So I think I think maybe the
Maybe the clarifying question
Shame would be like what is your process of coming back home?
Yeah.
So what I have to do is I have to go
And then being again.
It takes it.
None of this is possible without an incredible team.
That has super high integrity.
The anchoring principle of which is kindness.
So I will come back to my partners, I'll be like guys.
And they're like, Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
And they they de escalated. Right. Right. So you know, or I'll go to nah.
She's like
Okay.
I got you.
Okay.
Okay.
Got it.
You know, or or Rob or you know, like all these and so
It's it's wonderful.
Um
And so then I go
Hm, okay, I was getting a little excited there. Or I've come back. Can you believe this? I can't believe this.
They're like, Uhhuh, okay, yeah, gotcha, gotcha. Uhhuh.
Good. Okay.
Ah, and you know, I l I've learned that I do that.
Um and so I can I get back home faster. Um and uh it helps me.
But uh but I do that a lot. I allow myself
to live in the persona of that person and that opinion because it it allows me to understand
Um
Where are they coming from?
That sounds like a superpower, man. Like just to be able to understand at somebody's level without bringing any of yourself into it and just be like, I really want to see the world through your eyes. I want to see everything. I wanna feel what you feel. I wanna see what's valuable, all the variables, I wanna see how they connect.
But the way that you see the world and then coming back and then saying
Now I can see the world through this person's eyes and my eyes.
I have fewer blind spots and I have a more
Yeah.
more accurate view of reality, if you will.
Yeah.
Are you still are you still high on Bitcoin?
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, I just think that um
You know, I think that
We are
dismantling financial orthodoxy.
And
In that dismantling.
And in the leveling of the playing field.
There will be moments of
um volatility.
And
To have a small amount of insurance that's uncorrelated to the orthodoxy, I think it's just a smart
Risk management thing.
I don't I'm not super emotionally caught up in it, you know, it's not like I'm cheering on the failure of
you know, central banks and like I'm not decrying all the money getting printed.
I'm not that emotional.
That stuff.
uh but I just think it's smart.
thing to have under the mattress just in case.
How do you think about all this spending? I mean we're b er every
Western country is about to basically, you know, spend themselves into I don't know what position, but they're gonna spend more money in the next
you know, ten to fifteen years than they've probably spent in the past hundred.
And a lot of it
on the surface and I haven't looked into this as much as you have, but a lot of it on the surface seems like
We're gonna prop up the status quo.
instead of investing where things are going in the future, right? So
Uh, I know some countries are writing checks to people to stay at home, but they're not requiring them to adapt to new skills that'll be valuable in the future. They're sort of just propping up the way the world used to be. How do you think about that?
Yeah, I I I think that
Um
Or chin check me, like am I completely wrong?
Um, I think in part
It's not
Totally true what you're saying.
Um meaning like you know if you look at sort of the EU budget.
Um, an enormous percentage of that budget is going to um, you know, a carbon neutral
EU by you know, twenty
frankly, not even twenty fifty. They're trying to pull it forward and and do it twenty forty in some industries, you know, twenty thirty.
So I think the spending is actually going
uh in in reasonable places.
I think that there are there's always waste.
And the reason is that, you know.
Politics and political bodies
Don't know enough to write specific legislation.
So they get influenced by all kinds of folks. And so that's what creates waste. And so you have to be okay with that. It's just the natural dynamic of democracies. And you know.
The waste
We we we deal with the waste because in return we get freedom.
you know, a different kind of freedom, right? I mean like you know, maybe you can have the most
you know, efficient thing in country in the world, but if it's autocratic, you may not want that.
We've learned this. We we want resilient
companies, we want resilient countries, we want resilient people.
And I think this this focus on hyper efficiency also had us
you know, manufacturing PPE in certain locations and not having a national stockpile. And it you know, we've done this in in a lot of ways where we've
Ceded this
Um
redundancy or actually we're taught this in school, like business school teaches you, right? Like redundancy is a waste, and you can turn that waste into capital.
And so we become hyper efficient.
I I agree with you.
Just with a small.
business school as an example has taught you that redundancy is waste
And waste can be converted into profit, and profit is converted into compensation.
And I think that is what people have really drank the Kool Aid on.
It's so
You know, when they ran out of
waste that they could convert into profit.
They had these
ultra quote unquote efficient companies
And then they just redirected.
You know, the the middle part of that equation
To generate more compensation, which was like, you know, okay, well, we've eliminated all the waste, we've outsourced everything to China, we're generating more money than ever. Now what should we do? And then people said, Oh, we'll just start to buy back the stock, and that'll also drive.
Sure.
You know, these things these things I think are
cycles that that all flow from
the incentives around comp, unfortunately.
Yeah, I know. I thought that was that was excellent. Do you think government should bail out
Public companies.
Industries.
Which ones?
I think that the government should really be plowing money
into the next generation of industries.
And I think that
The government should always
be on the bleeding edge of not needing to make money.
in in some critical important industries for the future.
And so
In the absence of doing that, we've lost touch with the things that have really propelled the United States forward. For example, you know, why was a space race so important?
um you know on the one hand it was about you know American determinism right like we are going to do this this is going to happen but it was also that it created an entire generation of industries
Yeah.
were derivative from the space industry because you were training people with a level of skill and precision and capability that they could then apply to other markets.
So we always need to be in space, you know, we always need to be
pushing the boundaries, you know, we need to go
You know, not just to the moon, but now to Mars and beyond.
Um it can't just be Elon's task.
That's not fair.
You know?
You put him against the wall and he's got to raise an enormous amount of capital.
That you know if if we had government sponsorship for
uh we could have we could have done a lot more sooner.
In many ways, you know.
that de this deflationary supercycle really started in nineteen seventy when we basically ended the space program and it's in in in the early version of the
So I think that you know, that's a a really big thing.
Um that's where that's where I think like
you know, governments should be spending their money. They should be making bold bets.
On other markets too, like you know.
uh climate change or they should be changing incentives around, you know
healthcare, they should be changing incentives around education. You know, if you were gonna spend money
you know, why don't you just wipe out all student debt? I don't think that's such a bad thing and in return make people
you know, join some sort of like American Peace Corps that kind of like does work and volunteers and
Yeah, th there's all kinds of ways that that
That government's gonna allocate capital.
Probably a little bit.
More productively.
I like that. I'm gonna switch gears and start asking some of these Twitter questions so you can you can answer rapid fire if you want. Of all the provocative and controversial things that you've said, which ones do you regret?
Nine.
What do you think future Chamath will disagree with?
That you agree with today.
Anything come to mind that you're sort of on the edge about?
No, but if I'm if I'm evolving, I will have
Learn so much more that
My thoughts today will seem slightly immature and naive.
What's the last thing you change your mind about?
Oh my gosh.
Three or four things just today.
What do you think of the entire venture capital industry?
Um well intentioned, somewhat misguided.
Somewhat low integrity.
In certain places.
Misaligned.
Is this work from home thing real and what are some of the implications?
Partially real.
I think the biggest implication is um
Belongingness.
community.

Um a group.
Wow.
And so
I think when we can go back to the office we'll want to.
I think one thing that we miss on this, um
is that we like to feel part of something larger than ourselves.
And that's become harder not only in our communities in some ways. I mean, in some ways it's easier'cause we're all going through this common struggle.
But we're also uh it's harder in our community and we don't feel like even though you're working for a company or you're working with people, it doesn't feel as much.
And I've noticed a lot of people have started saying, Well, it's becoming really transactional now.
I don't see people at the office and ask about their weekend anymore. It's becoming very sort of
I think that's really interesting sort of observation.
I think that's well said. I think that's a really important thing.
I I completely agree with you.
How do you manage risk?
Uh I mean I have a I have a framework. Uh it's basically a barbell.
Um
You know, a big chunk of the liquid bets, a big chunk of
very concentrated liquid bets and then a slug in the middle that's just more kind of like random.
Cash or the S P five hundred for the next five years?
I said.
Uh, you had something about why men
Live.
Uh less long.
Do you remember that on Twitter?
Yeah, I I tweeted something out. What was that? Um
Didn't it have something to do with like we couldn't talk about our emotions or something? Yeah. No, no, no. It has to do with mental health and emotion. I I I really do believe that. I mean, I think that
You know, like like well I mean just ask the question like why do women live longer than men?
Why do women live longer than why? I mean why?
Why?
I don't know. I I I think that there's something to the fact that there
able to talk about feelings in a way that uh is unnatural for men.
One hundred percent. I really think people think this is like a crock of horseshit. I don't, but I think that
Um physiologie і зна just
how your lower intestine processes bla bla bla like that's not what it means.
Like
the the body is like a very complicated
combination of emotions
And you know, cells and organs and all of these biological psychological
functions interacting.
And we've all seen that play out.
Um, and so you know, it's like it's inconceivable that your mental health doesn't improve your health.
I mean right? You you sound like an idiot if you said that.
And uh I just think that
Dudes don't talk.
And it's a little bit stigmatized than it is for women.
And I think that that's a wonderful
Superpower.
That women can teach the rest of us. My I mean, like I said, partners taught me how to talk.
And I would be eternally grateful for it.
For having talk about that.
Next question. What are some of the lessons you learned from the book The Adult Children of Alcoholics, which you recommended a few times.
The most important one.
Is how I was normal.
And uh it's again it's pretty obvious.
Or not obvious but may sound
Land, but like you know.
To feel so deeply insecure and somewhat of an impostor my whole life, always the outsider.
No, um
That's the first book that said, Hey, there's an entire group of people that will behave this way based on these inputs.
And I was like, Wait a minute, I behave th those ways.
Wait, you're telling me that I'm not this
deficient broken person that I'm a byproduct of this
And this is well studied and it's like
It's actually normal and you can
Improve where
You are?
Was it was a profound moment.
Alright, last question. What's the most mis uh misvalued asset in the world today?
Either high or low.
Oh wow, that's a really good question. Okay.
Um
You can pick most undervalued or most overvalued.
Oh my gosh, wow.
See, I I really take these questions seriously like when you ask me that. I wanna
No, but I wanna give you like a right answer and uh I don't really know. I ha I You can just say I don't know. I mean Yeah, I don't know.
Okay. I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question, to be honest with you. It's a really good question. I I love the the video thing. We just started doing this, but I can see the wheels turning in your head. I love it.
This has been an amazing conversation, Chamath. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks, man. I really uh I really appreciate it. Thanks, Fat.
Uh
Um
Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.
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