Kind: captions
Language: en
in terms of your mistakes Society tells
you don't make them because we will
judge you and we will look down on you
and I think the really successful people
realize that actually no
it's the cycle time of mistakes that
gets you to success
because your error rate will diminish
the more mistakes that you make You
observe them you figure out where it's
coming from is it a psychological thing
is it a you know cognitive thing and
then you fix it
following is a conversation with your
mouth
a venture capitalist and engineer
founder and CEO of Social Capital
previously in early senior executive at
Facebook and is uh the co-host of the
all in podcast a podcast that I highly
recommend for the wisdom and the
camaraderie of the four co-hosts also
known as Besties
this is the Lux Friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's chamath balajapatia
you grew up in a dysfunctional household
on welfare you've talked about this
before what war for you personally
psychologically some difficult moments
in your childhood
I'll answer that question in a slightly
different way which is that
I think when you grow up
in a household that's defined by
physical abuse and psychological abuse
you're hyper Vigilant all the time
and so it's actually easier for me to
point to moments where
I was happy
or I felt Compassion or I felt safe
otherwise every moment I'll give you a
couple of examples like
you know I was thinking about this a
while ago
there was a tree outside of my apartment
where we lived when I was growing up
and my father would sometimes would make
me go outside to take the tree branch
that he would hit me with
um and so you can imagine if you're a 10
11 year old kid and you have to deal
with that what do you do well a hyper
Vigilant child learns how to basically
estimate the strength of these branches
right how far
can he go before it breaks
you have to estimate his anger and
estimate the effective strength of you
know branches and bring back something
because you know I remember these
moments where if it was
he would look at it and then he would
make me go out again and get it right
get a different one
um or you know there was a certain belt
that he wore that had this kind of um
belt buckle that stuck out
and you just wanted to make sure if that
if that was the thing that you were
going to get hit by
that it wasn't the Buckle facing out
because that really hurt
and so you became hyper aware of which
part of the Buckle was facing out versus
facing in in those moments
and there are like hundreds of these
little examples
which essentially I would I would say
the through line is that you're just so
on edge
right and you walk into this house and
you're just basically trying to get to
the point where you leave the house
um and so in that microcosm of growing
up
any moment that's not like that is
seared in my memory in a way that I just
can't
describe to a person I'll give you an
example
I volunteered when I was in grade five
or six I can't remember which it was in
the kindergarten of my school
and I would just go and the teacher
would you know ask you to clean things
up
and at the end of that great five year
she took me and two other kids to Dairy
Queen
and I'd never been I've never I'd never
gone to a restaurant literally because
we just we didn't have the money
and I remember the first time I tasted
this you know this Dairy Queen meal it
was like a hamburger fries a coconut a
blizzard and I was like what is this and
I felt
so special you know because you're
getting something that most people would
take for granted oh it's a Sunday or
it's a you know or I'm really busy let
me go take my kid to to fast food I
think that you know until I left High
School
I think and this is not just specific to
me but a lot of other people it's
you're in this hyper Vigilant Loop
punctuated with these incredibly
visceral moments of compassion by other
people you know a different example
um we had such a strict budget
and we didn't have a car
and so you know I was responsible with
my mom to always go shopping
and so I learned very early on how to
you know look for coupons how to buy
things that were on sale or special
and we had a very basic diet because you
have to budget this thing really
precisely
but the end of every year
where I lived there was a large grocery
chain called Loblaws
and Loblaws would discount
a cheesecake from 7.99 to 4.99
and my parents would buy that
once a year and we probably did that six
or seven times
and you can't imagine how special we
felt myself my two sisters we would sit
there we would watch the you know the
New Year's Eve celebration on TV we
would cut this cheesecake into you know
five pieces
it felt like everything
um so that's sort of how you know my my
existence when I was at that age is For
Better or For Worse that's how I
remember it the hyper vigilance Loop is
that still with you today what are The
Echoes of that that's told you today the
good and the bad if you put yourself
in the mind of a young child
the thing that that
does to you
is at a very core basic level it says
you're worthless
right because if you can step outside of
that and you think about any child in
the world they don't deserve to go
through that
and at some point by the way I should
tell you like I don't blame my parents
anymore it was a process to get there
but I feel like they did the best they
could
and they suffered their own issues and
enormous pressures and stresses
and so you know I've really for the most
part forgiven them
how did you start to interrupt let go of
that blame
that was a really long process where
I would say the first 35 years of my
life
I compartmentalized and I avoided all of
those memories
and I saw external validation
right going back to this self-worth idea
if you're taught as a child that you're
worthless because why would somebody do
these things to you
it's not because you're worth something
you think to yourself very viscerally
you're worth nothing
and so then you go out and you seek
external validation maybe you try to go
and get into a great College you try to
get a good job you try to make a lot of
money you try to you know demonstrate in
superficial ways with the car you drive
or the clothes you wear
that you deserve people to care about
you
to try to make up for that really deep
hole
but at some point you it doesn't get
filled in
and so you have a choice
and so for me what happened was in in
the course of a six-month period I lost
my best friend and I lost my father
and
it was really like the dam broke loose
because I the compartmentalization
stopped working because the reminder
of why I was compartmentalizing was gone
and so I had to go through this period
of disharmony
to really understand
and Steel Man his perspective
and can you imagine trying to do that to
go through all of the things where you
have to now look at it from his
perspective and find compassion and
empathy
for what he went through
and then I shift you know the focus to
my mom and I said well you were not the
victim actually you were somewhat
complicit as well because you were of
sound mind and body and you were in the
room when it happened
so then I had to go through that process
with her and steal man her perspective
and at the end of it I never Justified
what they did but I've been able to
forgive what they did
um I think they did the best they could
and at the end of the day they did the
most important thing which is they gave
me and my sisters a shot by emigrating
by giving up everything by staying in
Canada and doing whatever it took
between the two of them
to sort of claw and scrape together
enough money to live so that my sisters
and I could have a shot and I'm very
thankful for them could they have done
better obviously
but I'm okay with what has taken place
but it's it's been a long process of of
that steel Manning so that you can
develop some empathy and compassion and
forgive
do you think if you talk to your dad
shortly after he died and you went to
that process or today you'll be able to
have the same strength
to forgive him
I think it would be a very complicated
Journey
I think I've learned to be incredibly
open about what has happened
and all of the mistakes I've made
I think it's it would require him to be
pretty radically honest about confirming
what I think he went through
because otherwise it just wouldn't work
otherwise I would say let's keep things
where they are which is I did the work
you know with with people that have
helped me obviously but you know it's
better for him to just you know kind of
hopefully he's looking from some place
and he's thinking
it was worth it I think he deserves to
think that all of this because you know
I think the Immigrant
challenge we're not even the Immigrant
challenge the lower middle class
challenge anybody who really wants
better for their kids and doesn't have a
good toolkit to give it to them
some of them
just they choke up on the bat they just
get so agitated about this idea that all
this sacrifice will not be worth it
that it spills out in really
unproductive ways
and I would put him in that category
and their self
evaluation introspection they have
tunnel vision so they're not
able to often see the damage they did I
mean I've I know like yourself
a few successful people that had very
difficult relationships
with their dad and you take the
perspective of the dad
they're completely in denial about any
of it so if you actually have a
conversation there would not be a deep
honesty there uh and that I think that's
maybe in part the way of life
yeah and you know I remember pretty
distinctly after I left and in this you
know in my middle 30s where
you know by all measure I had roughly
become reasonably successful
and my dad didn't particularly care
about that which was so odd because I
had to confront the fact that you know
whether it was a title or money or press
clippings he never really cared he moved
on to a different set of goals which was
more about my character and you know
being a good person to my family and
really preparing me to lead our family
when he wasn't there
and that bothered me
because I thought I thought I got to the
finish line and I thought there was
going to be a
metal you know meaning like I can tell
you Lex you know he never told me that
he loved me
I'm not sure if that's normal or not it
was my normality and I thought there's
going to be something some gold star
which never appeared
and so that's like a hard thing to kind
of confront because you're like well now
what is this what is this all about
um was this all just kind of a a ruse
but then I realized well hold on a
second there were these moments
where in his way again putting yourself
in his shoes
I think he was trying to say he was
sorry he would hold my hand
you know and he would interlock the
fingers which I felt is that's a really
intimate way of holding somebody's hand
I think
um so I remember those things so you
know these are the things that are just
etched in at least in my mind and
at the end of it you know I think uh
I've done a decent job in repairing my
relationship with him even though you
know it was posthumous it does make me
wonder in which way you and I or we
might be broken and not see it it might
be hurting others and not see it well I
think that when you grow up in those
kinds of environments and they're all
different kinds of this kind of
dysfunction
but if
what you get from that is that you're
not worthwhile you're not you're less
than many many other people
when you enter adulthood or you know
semi-adulthood in your early 20s you
will be in a cycle where you are hurting
other people
you may not know it
hopefully you find somebody who holds
you accountable and tells you and loves
you enough through that
but you are going to take all of that
disharmony in your childhood and you're
going to inject that disharmony into
whether it's your professional
relationships or your personal
relationships or both
until
you get to some form of rock bottom and
you start to repair
and I think there's a lot of people that
resonate with that because they have
each suffered their own things that at
some point in their lives have told them
that they're less than
and um and then they go and cope
and when you cope
eventually those coping mechanisms
escalate and at some point it'll be
unhealthy either for you but oftentimes
it's for the people around you
well from those humble beginnings you
are now a billionaire
how has money changed your life or maybe
the landscape of experience in your life
does it buy happiness it doesn't buy
happiness but it buys you a level of
comfort for you to really amplify What
happiness is
I kind of think about it in the
following way let's just say that
there's a a hundred things on a table
and the table says find happiness here
and there are different prices
the way that the world works
is that many of these experiences are
cordoned off a little bit behind the
Velvet Rope
where
you think that there's more happiness as
the prices of things escalate right if
you live in an apartment you admire the
person with the house
if you live in a house you admire the
person with the bigger house
that person admires the person with you
know
um an island right
um
some person drives their car admires the
person who flies who admires a person
who flies business class who admires a
person who flies first
you know to private there's all of these
escalations on this table
and most people get to the first five or
six
and so they just naturally assume that
items you know seven through a hundred
is really where happiness is found
and the just to you know tell you the
the Finish Line I've tried a hundred and
back and then I've tried to 400 to it uh
and happiness isn't there
um
but it does give you a level of comfort
I read a study
and I don't know if it's true or not but
it said that
um the absolute sort of like maximal
link between money and happiness
is around 50 million dollars
and there was a it was just like a
social studies kind of thing that I
think one of the Ivy Leagues put out and
underneath it the way that they
explained it was because you could have
a home you could have all kinds of the
Creature Comforts you could take care of
your family
um and then you were left to ponder
what it is that you really want
I think the challenge for most people is
to realize that
this escalating arms race of you know
more things will solve your problems is
not true
more and better is not the solution it's
it's this idea that
you
are on a very precise Journey that's
unique to yourself you are playing a
game
of which only you are the player
everybody else is an interloper
and you have a responsibility to design
the gameplay
and I think a lot of people don't
realize that because if they did I think
they would make a lot of different
decisions about how they live their life
and I still do the same thing I mean
revert
to basically running around asking other
people what will make you like me more
you know what will make me more popular
in your eyes and I try to do it and it
never works
um it is just a complete dead end is
there negative aspects to money like for
example it becoming harder to find
people you can trust
I think the most negative aspect is that
it amplifies
a 360 degree view of your personality
because there are a lot of people and
Society tells you that more money is
actually better you are a better person
somehow and you're factually more
worthwhile than some other people that
have less money
that's also a lie but when you're given
that kind of attention it's very easy
for you to become a caricature of
yourself
um that's probably the single worst
thing that happens to you but I say it
in the opposite way I think all I've
ever seen in Silicon Valley as an
example
um is that when somebody gets a hold of
a lot of money it tends to cause them to
become exactly who they were meant to be
they're either a kind person they're
either a curious person they're either a
jerk you know they're either cheap and
they can use all kinds of masks but now
that there's no expectations and Society
gives you a get out of jail free card
you start to behave the way that's most
comfortable to you so you see somebody's
innate personality
and that's a really interesting thing to
observe because then you can very
quickly bucket sort where do you want to
spend time and who is really you know
additive to your gameplay
and who is really a negative detractor
to your gameplay you're an investor but
you're also kind of a philosopher
um you analyze the world in all these
different uh perspectives on all in
podcasts on Twitter everywhere uh
do you worry that money makes puts you
out of touch
from
being able to truly empathize with the
experience of the general population
which in part first of all on a human
level that could be limiting but also as
an analyst of human civilization that
could be limiting
I think it definitely can for a lot of
people because it's just a it's an
abstraction for you to stop caring right
um I also think the other thing is that
you can very quickly
um especially in today's world become
the scapegoat just to use a girardian
like Rene Gerard if you look if you
think about like memetic theory in a
nutshell
you know we're all competing
for these very scarce resources that we
are told is worthwhile and if you view
the world through that gerardian lens
what are we really doing we are all
fighting for scarce resources whether
that's Twitter followers money Acclaim
notoriety and we all compete with each
other and in that competition
you know Gerard writes like the only way
you escape that Loop is by scapegoating
something or somebody
and I think we are in that Loop right
now where just the fact of being
successful is a thing that one should
scapegoat to end all of this you know
tension that we have in the world
I I think that it's a little misguided
because I don't think it solves the
fundamental problem
um and we can talk about the solution to
some of these problems are but
um that's I think the loop that we're
all living and so if you become a
character caricature and you feed
yourself into it
I mean you're not doing anything to to
Really Advance things
your nickname is the dictator how did
you get the nickname since we're talking
about the corrupting nature of money
that came from poker in a poker game you
know when you sit down it's chaos
especially like in in our home game
there's a ton of big egos there's people
always watching you know rail birding
the game all kinds of interesting folks
and in that somebody needs to establish
hygiene and rules and I really care
about the Integrity of the game and it
would just require somebody to just say
okay enough
uh and so and then people were just like
okay stop dictating and that's where
that's where that nickname so who to you
speaking of which is the greatest poker
of uh player of all time and why is it
Phil Hellmuth
exactly you know mute probably knew this
question was coming yeah here's what
I'll say I think helmuth is the antidote
to computers more than any other player
playing today
and when you see him
in a heads up situation so I think like
he's played nine or ten heads up
tournaments in a row
and he's played like basically call it
10 of the top 20 people so far
and he's beaten all but one of them
when you're playing heads up you know
1v1
that is the most
um
GTO
understandable spot meaning Game Theory
optimal position that's where computers
can give you an enormous Edge the minute
you add even a third player the value of
computers and the value of their
recommendations
basically falls off a cliff okay so one
way to think about it is Helm youth is
forced to play against people that are
essentially trained like AIS
and so to be able to beat you know eight
out of nine of them means that you are
playing so orthogonally to what is
considered Game Theory optimal and your
overlaying human reasoning
the judgment to say well in this spot I
should do X but I'm going to do y it's
not dissimilar in chess like what makes
you know Magnus Carlson so good you know
sometimes he takes these weird lines
he'll sacrifice positions you know he'll
overplay certain positions for certain
you know Bishops versus Knights and all
these spots that are very confusing
and what it does is it throws people off
their game I think he just won a recent
online tournament and it's like by move
six
there is no GTO
move for his opponent to make because
it's like out of the rule book maybe he
read some game you know I read the quote
it was like he probably read some game
in some bar in Russia in 1954 memorized
it and all of a sudden by six moves in
the computer AI is worthless so that's
what makes helmuth great
the
there is one person that I think is
superior
um and I think it's what Daniel also
said and I would Echo that because I
played Phil as well but Phil Ivey is
um the most well-rounded
cold-blooded
bloodthirsty animal
he is he's just and he he sees into your
solex in a way where you're just like oh
my God stop looking at me
have you ever played him yeah yeah we
played we've played and you know he
crushes the games crushes the games so
what what is feeling crushed mean and
feel like in poker is it like that you
just can't read at all you being
constantly pressured you feel off
balance you try to Bluff and the person
reads you perfectly that kind of stuff
it's it's a this is a really really
excellent question because I think this
has parallels to a bunch of other things
okay let's just use poker as a microcosm
to explain a bunch of other systems or
games
maybe it's um
running a company
or investing okay so let's use those
three examples but we use poker to
explain it what does success look like
well success looks like you have
positive expected value
right in poker the simple way to
summarize that is
your opponent
let's just say you and I are playing
are going to make a bunch of mistakes
there's a bunch of it that's going to be
absolutely perfect
and then there's a few spots where you
make mistakes
and then there's a bunch of places in
the poker game where I play perfectly
and I make a few mistakes
basically your mistakes minus my
mistakes is The Edge right
that's that's pure that's how poker
works if I make fewer mistakes than you
make I will make money and I will win
that is the objective of the game
translate that into business
you're running a company
you have a team of employees you have a
pool of human capital that's capable of
being productive in the world and
creating something
but you are going to make mistakes
in making that
maybe it doesn't completely fit the
market maybe it's mispriced maybe it
actually doesn't require all of the
people that you need so the margins are
wrong
and then there's the competitive set of
all the other Alternatives that customer
has
their mistakes minus your mistakes
is the expected value of Google Facebook
Apple
Etc okay now take investing
every time you buy something somebody
else on the other side is selling it to
you
is that their mistake we don't know yet
but their mistakes minus your mistakes
is how you make a lot of money over long
periods of time as an investor
somebody sold you Google at forty
dollars a share you bought it and you
kept it
huge mistake on their part minimal
mistakes on your part
the difference of that is the money that
you made
so life can be summarized in many ways
in that way so the question is
what can you do about other people's
mistakes and the answer is nothing
that is somebody else's game you can try
to influence them you could try to
subvert them maybe you plant a spy
inside of that other person's company to
sabotage them I guess there are things
at the edges that you can do
but my firm belief is that life success
really boils down to how do you control
your mistakes
now this is a bit counterintuitive
the way you control your mistakes is by
making a lot of mistakes
so taking risks you have to is somehow
you have to you to minimize the number
of mistakes let's just say you want to
find love yeah you know you want to find
something go on deeply connected with
yeah
are you do you do that by not going out
on dates and yes
sorry sorry the only person that thinks
that's yesterday no I'm joking I'm
joking no but you know what I mean like
you have to date people you have to open
yourself up you have to be authentic and
like you put you you give yourself a
chance to get hurt yes but you're a good
person so you know what happens when you
get hurt that is actually their mistake
okay and if you are inauthentic that's
your mistake
that's a controllable thing in you you
can tell them the truth who you are and
say Here's my pluses and minuses my
point is there are very few things in
life
that you can't break down I think into
that very simple idea
and in terms of your mistakes Society
tells you don't make them because we
will judge you and we will look down on
you
and I think the really successful people
realize that actually no
it's the cycle time of mistakes that
gets you to success
because your error rate will diminish
the more mistakes that you make You
observe them you figure out where it's
coming from is it a psychological thing
is it a you know cognitive thing and
then you fix it so the implied thing
there is that there's a
uh in in business and investing in poker
and dating in life is that there's this
platonic GTO Game Theory optimal thing
out there and so when you say mistakes
you're always comparing to that optimal
path you could have taken I think uh
slightly different I would say mistake
is maybe a bad proxy but it's the best
proxy I have for learning
but I'm using the language of what
Society tells you sure got it Society
tells you that when you try something
and it doesn't work it's a mistake
so I just use that word because it's the
word that resonates most with most
people got it the real thing that it is
is learning yeah it's like in neural
networks it's lost the neural network is
lost exactly uh yeah all right so you're
using the mistake that is most uh the
the word that is the most understandable
especially by the way people experience
it I guess most of life is a sequence of
mistakes the problem is when you use the
word mistake and you think about
mistakes it actually has the
counterproductive effect of you becoming
conservative in just being risk-averse
so that if you folk if you re if you
flip it and say try to maximize the
number of successes somehow that leads
you to take more risk
um mistake scares people
I think mistakes scare people because
Society likes
these very simplified boundaries of who
is winning and who is losing
and they want to reward
people who make traditional choices
and succeed
but the thing is what's so
corrosive about that
is that they're actually not even being
put in a position to actually make a
quote-unquote mistake and fail so I'll
give you if you look at like getting
into an elite school
right Society rewards you for being in
the Ivy Leagues
in a way that you know in my opinion
incorrectly doesn't reward you for being
in a non-ivy league School
there's a certain level of status and
presumption of intellect and capability
that comes with being there
um but that system doesn't really have a
counterfactual because it's not as if
you both go to MIT and Ohio State
and then we can see two versions of Lex
Friedman so that we can figure out that
The Jig Is up and there was no
difference
right and so instead it reinforces this
idea that there is no truth-seeking
function there is no way to actually
make this thing whole
and so it tells you you have to get in
here and if you don't your life is over
you've made a huge mistake you know or
you've failed completely
and so you have to find different unique
ways of dismantling this this is why you
know part of what I realized
where I got very lucky is
I had no friends in high school
I had a few cohort of acquaintances
but part of being so hyper Vigilant when
I grew up was I was so ashamed of that
world that I had to live in I didn't
want to bring anyone into it I could not
see myself that anybody would accept me
but the thing with that is that I had no
definition of what expectations should
be so they were not Guided by the people
around me and so I would escape to
Define my expectations it's interesting
but you didn't feel
um like your dad
didn't put you in a prison of
expectation
or we because like that's if you know a
friend like that so the flip side of
that you don't have any other signals
it's very easy to believe like when
you're in a cult that well he you know
he was angry he pushed me
he used me as a mechanism to alleviate
his own frustration and this may sound
very crazy but he also believed in me
and so that's what created this weird
Duality where you were just I was always
confused that you could be somebody
great he believed that you could be he
did him
because I couldn't reconcile then the
other half of the day you know those
behaviors
but what it allowed me to do was I
escaped in my mind
and I found these archetypes around me
that were saviors to me
so you know I grew up in Ottawa Ontario
Canada I grew up right at the point
where the Telecom boom was happening
companies like Nortel and Newbridge
networks and mitel Bell Northern
research these were all built in in the
suburbs of Ottawa
and so there were these Larger than Life
figures entrepreneurs Terry Matthews
Michael Copeland
and so I thought I'm going to be like
them I would read Forbes Magazine I
would read Fortune Magazine I would look
at the rich people on that list and say
I would be like them
not knowing
that maybe that's not who you wanted it
to be
but it was a lifeline and it kept my
mind relatively whole
because I could direct my ambition in a
Direction
and so why that's so important just
circling back to this is I didn't have a
group of friends who were like I'm going
to go to Community College
you know I didn't have a group of
friends that said well you know the goal
is just to go to university get a simple
job and like you know join the public
service have a good life
and so because I had no expectations and
I was so afraid to venture out of my own
house I never saw what middle class life
was like and so I never aspired to it
now if I was close to it I probably
would have aspired to it because I my
parents in their best year made 32 000
Canadian together
and if you're trying to raise a family
of five people on thirty two thousand
dollars it's a complicated job and most
of the time they were probably making 20
something thousand and I was working
since I was 14. so I knew that our
station in life was not the destination
we had to get out
um but because I didn't have an obvious
place it's not like I had a best friend
whose house I was going to and I saw
some normal functional home
if I had had that in this weird way I
would have aspired to that
what was the worst job you had to do the
best job
but the worst job was I worked at Burger
King when I was 14 years old and I would
do the closing shift and that was from
like 6 p.m till about two in the morning
and in Ontario where I lived
Ottawa borders Quebec in Ontario the
drinking age is 19 you can see where I'm
going with this the drinking age in
Quebec is 18 and that year made all the
difference to all these kids and so they
would go get completely drunk they would
come back they would come to the Burger
King you know you would see all these
kids you went to high school with can
you imagine how mortifying it is you
know you're working there in this get up
and they would light that place on fire
vomit everywhere puking pooing peeing
and when the thing shuts down at one
o'clock you know you got to clean that
all up
all of it changing the garbage taking it
out it was
um a grind
and it really teaches you okay I do not
want this job
I don't want to but it's funny that that
didn't push you towards the stability
and the security of the middle class
like I didn't have any good examples of
that I didn't have those around me I was
so ashamed
I could have never built a relationship
where I could have seen those
interactions to want that and so my
desires were framed by these two random
rich people that lived in my town who
I'd never met
and what I read in magazines about
people like Bill Gates and Warren
Buffett
you were an early senior executive at
Facebook uh during a period of a lot of
scaling in the company history I mean
it's actually a fascinating period of
human history in terms of Technology
well
in terms of human civilization honestly
uh what did you learn from that
time about what it takes to build and
scale a successful tech company a
company that has almost immeasurable
impact on the world
that was an incredible moment in time
because everything was so new
to your point like even how the
standards of Web 2.0 at that time were
being defined we were defining them you
know I mean I think if you if you look
in sort of the if you search in the
patents
um
patent Library there's a bunch of these
patents that like me and Zuck have for
like random things like cookies you know
or like cross-site JavaScript like all
these crazy things that are just like
these duh kind of ideas in 2023
we had to invent our way around how do
websites communicate with each other you
know how do we build in the cloud versus
in a data center how do we actually have
high performance systems you mentioned
data science the term and yeah we
invented this I invented this thing
called data scientist because we had a
PhD from Google that refused to join
unless because he got a job offer that
says data analyst yeah
um and so we said column of scientist
because he was a PhD in particle physics
so he really you know he was a scientist
and I said great you're a scientist here
and that launched a discipline that
launched it just made a term you know
what's a rose by any other name but yeah
like you know sometimes words like this
can launch entire
fields and it did in that case and you
didn't I mean I guess at that time you
didn't anticipate the impact of machine
learning on the entirety of this whole
process because you need machine
learning to have both ads and
recommender systems to have the feed for
the Social Network exactly right the
first real scaled version of machine
learning not AI but machine learning was
this thing that Facebook introduced
called pymk which is people you may know
and the simple idea was that can we
initiate a viral mechanic inside the
application
where you log in we grab your
credentials we go to your email inbox
we Harvest your address book
we do a compare we make some guesses and
we start to present other people that
you may actually know that may not be in
your address book really simple you know
a couple joins of some tables whatever
and it started to just go crazy and the
number of people that you were you were
creating this density and entropy inside
this social graph with what was some
really simple basic math
and that was eye-opening for us and what
it what it led us down this path of is
really understanding the power of like
all this machine learning and so that
infused itself into news feed you know
and how the content that you saw could
be tailored to who you were and the type
of person that you were so there was a
moment in time that all of this stuff
was so new
um how did you translate the app to
multiple languages how do you launch the
company in all of these countries
how much of it is just kind of stumbling
into things using your best like first
principles gut thinking and how much is
it like 5 10 15 20 year Vision like how
much was thinking about the future
of the internet and the metaverse and
the humanity and all that kind of stuff
like because the news feed sounds
trivial I'll say something but that's
like changes everything well
you have to remember like you know news
feed
was named and we had this thing where we
would just name things what they were
and at the time all of these other
companies and if you go back into the
Wayback machine you can see this people
would vent would invent you know an I
you know an MP3 player and they would
come up with some crazy name or they
would invent a software product and come
up with a crazy name right and it
sounded like the Pharma industry you
know
blockazimab you know tag your best
friends yeah and you think what is this
this makes no sense and you know this
was zuck's thing he was like well this
is a feat of news so we're going to call
it news feed
this is where you tag your photos so
we're going to call that photo tagging I
mean literally you know pretty obvious
stuff
um so
the thing the way that those things came
about though was very experimentally and
this is where I think it's really
important for people
to understand I think Bezos explains
this the best
there is a tendency after things work
to create a narrative fallacy because it
feeds your ego and you want to have been
the person that saw it coming
and I think it's much more honest to say
we were very good
probabilistic thinkers
that tried to learn as quickly as
possible meaning to make as many
mistakes as possible you know I mean if
you look at this very famous placard
that Facebook had from back in the day
what did it say it said move fast and
break things in societal language that's
saying make mistakes as quickly as you
can
because the minute you break something
that's you don't do that by Design it's
not a feature theoretically it's a bug
but he understood that and we embraced
that idea
um I used to run this meeting once a
week where the whole goal was I want to
see that there was a thousand
experiments that were run and show me
them all from the dumbest to the most
impactful
and we would go through that Loop and
what did it train people not that you
got celebrated for the right answer
but you got celebrated for trying
I ran 12 experiments 12 failed and we'd
be like you're the best
can I just take a small tangent on that
is to move fast and break things
has become as like a catchphrase of the
thing that embodies the toxic culture of
Silicon Valley in today's
uh discourse which uh confuses me of
course words and phrases get sort of
captured and so on becomes very
reductive you know that's a very loaded
set of words that together can be
many years later people can view very
reductive can you still man each side of
that so yeah pro move fast and break
things yeah and against yeah
um so I think the pro have moved fast
and break things is saying the following
there's a space of things we know
and a massive space of things we don't
know
and there's a rate of growth of the
things we know
but the rate of growth of the things we
don't know is actually we have to assume
growing faster
so the most important thing is to move
into the space of the things we don't
know as quickly as possible
and so in order to acquire knowledge
we're going to assume
that the failure mode is the nominal
state
and so we just need to move as quickly
as we can break as many things as
possible which means like things are
breaking in code
do the you know root cause analysis
figure out how to make things better and
then rapidly move into the space and he
or she who moves fastest into that space
will win it doesn't imply carelessness
right it doesn't imply
moving fast without also aggressively
picking up the lessons from the mistakes
you make well again let's let's steel
Manning the pro which is it's a
thoughtful
um
movement
around velocity and acquisition of
knowledge
now let's deal man the con case
when these systems become big enough
there is no more room
to experiment in an open-ended way
because the implications have broad
societal impacts that are not clear up
front
so let's take a different less
controversial example if we said you
know Lipitor
um worked well for all people except
South Asians and there's a specific
immuno response that we can iterate to
and if we move quickly enough we can run
10 000 experiments and we think the
answer is in that space
well the problem is that those 10 000
experiments May kill 10 million people
so you have to move methodically when
that drug was experimental
and it wasn't being given to 500 million
people in the world
moving fast made sense because you could
have a pig model a mouse model a monkey
model you could figure out toxicity but
we picked all that low hanging fruit
and so now these small iterations
have huge impacts that need to be
measured and implemented
different example is like you know if
you work at Boeing
and you have an implementation that
gives you a two percent efficiency by
reshaping the wing or adding winglets
there needs to be a methodical move slow
be right process
because mistakes when they compound when
it's already implemented and at scale
have huge externalities that are
impossible to measure until after the
fact and you see this in the 737 Max
so that's how one would Steel Man the
the con case which is that when an
industry becomes critical you got to
slow down
this makes me sad because some
Industries like Twitter and Facebook are
a good example
they achieve scale very quickly
before really exploring the big area of
things to learn so you basically pick
one low-hanging fruit and that became
your huge success and now you're sitting
there with that stupid fruit well so
you're you're I think so as an example
like you know if you had to
you know if if I was running Facebook
for a day
you know the big opportunity in my
opinion was really not the metaverse
but it was actually getting the closest
that anybody could get to AGI
and if I had to steal man that product
case here's what how I would have
pitched it to the board into Zuck I
would have said listen there are three
and a half billion people monthly using
this thing if we think about human
intelligence very reductively
we would say that there's a large
portion of it which is cognitive
and then there's a large portion of it
which is emotional
we have the best ability to build a
multimodal model
that basically takes all of these
massive inputs together to try to Intuit
how a system would react to all kinds of
stimuli
that to me would have been a profound
Leap Forward for Humanity can you dig
into that a little bit more so in terms
of
uh now this is a board meeting how would
that make Facebook money
I think that you have all of these
systems over time that that we don't
know could benefit from
um some layer of reasoning to make it
better
um
what does Spotify look like when instead
of just a very simple recommendation
engine it actually understands sort of
your emotional context and your mood and
can move you to a body of music that you
would like what does it look like if you
know your television instead of having
to go and channel surf you know 50 000
shows on a horrible UI you know instead
just has a sense of what you're into and
shows it to you
um what does it mean when you get in
your car and it actually drives you to a
place because you should actually eat
there even though you don't know it
these are all random things that make no
sense a priority but it starts to make
the person or the provider of that
service
the critical reasoning layer for all
these everyday products that today would
look very flat without that reasoning
and I think you license that and you
make a lot of money so in many ways
instead of becoming more of the pixels
that you see you've become more of the
bare metal that actually creates that
experience and if you and if you look at
the companies
that are multi-decade Legacy kinds of
businesses the thing that they have done
is quietly and surreptitiously move down
the stack you never move up the stack to
survive you need to move down the stack
so if you take that OSI reference stack
right these layers of how you build an
app from the physical layer to the
transport layer all the way up to the
app layer
you can map from the 1980s all the big
companies that have been created right
all the way from Fairchild semiconductor
and Nat semi to Intel to Cisco to three
com
you know Oracle Netscape at one point
all the way up to the Googles and
Facebooks of the world
but if you look at where all the Locking
happened
it's by companies like apple who used to
make software saying I'm going to get
one close I'm going to make the bare
metal and I'm going to become the
platform or Google same thing I'm going
to create this dominant platform and I'm
going to create a substrate that
organizes all this information that's
just omnipresent and everywhere
so the key is if you are lucky enough to
be one of these apps
that are in front of people
you better start digging quickly and
moving your way down and get out of the
way and disappear but by disappearing
you will become much much bigger
and it's impossible to usurp you yeah I
100 agree with you
um that's why you're so smart this is uh
the depersonalization and
the algorithms that enable deep
personalization almost like a operating
system layer so pushing away from the
interface and the actual system that
does the personalization I think the
challenge is there there's obviously
technical challenges
but there's also societal challenges
that
it's like in a relationship if you have
an intimate algorithmic connection with
individual humans you can do both good
and bad and so there's risks that you're
taking you can so if you're making a lot
of money now is Twitter and Facebook
with ads surface layer ads what is the
incentive to take the risk of guiding
people more
because you can hurt people you can piss
off people you can
um I mean there's a cost to forming a
more intimate relationship with the
users
in the short term I think you said a
really really key thing which is
um which was a really great
emotional instinctive reaction which is
when I said the AGI thing you said well
how would you ever make money from that
that is the key the presumption is that
this thing would not be an important
thing at the beginning and I think what
that allows you to do if you were
Twitter or Google or Apple or Facebook
anybody Microsoft embarking on building
something like this is that you can
actually have it off the critical path
and you can experiment with this for
years if that's what it takes to find a
version one that is special enough where
it's worth showcasing
and so in many ways you get the free
option you're going to be spending any
of these companies will be spending tens
of billions of dollars in Opex and capex
every year and all kinds of stuff
it is not a thing that money
um actually makes more likely to succeed
in fact
you actually don't need to give these
kinds of things a lot of money at all
because starting in 2023 or right now
you know you have the two most important
tectonic shifts that have ever happened
in our lifetime in technology they're
not talked about but these things allow
AGI I think to emerge over the next 10
or 15 years where it wasn't possible for
the first thing is that the marginal
cost of energy is zero
not gonna pay for anything anymore
right and we can double click into why
that why that is and the second is the
marginal cost of compute to zero and so
when you when you take the
multiplication or you know if you want
to get really fancy mathematically the
convolution of these two things together
it's going to change everything so think
about
what a billion dollars gets today when
we can use open AI as an example
a billion dollars gets open AI a handful
of functional models and a pretty fast
iterative loop
right
but imagine what
um openai had to overcome
that to overcome a compute challenge
they had to strip together a whole bunch
of gpus that to build all kinds of
scaffolding software they had to find
data center support that consumes all
kinds of money so that billion dollars
didn't go that far so it's a testament
to how clever
that openai team is but in four years
from now when energy costs zero and
basically gpus like you know they're
falling off a truck and and you can use
them for effectively for free
now all of a sudden a billion dollars
gives you some amount of teraflops of
compute that is probably
the total number of teraflops available
today in the world like that's how
gargantuan this move is when you take
these two variables to zero there's like
a million things to ask I almost don't
want to get distracted by the marginal
cost of energy going to zero because I
have no idea what you're talking about
that is fascinating can I give you the
30 seconds sure okay yes okay so if you
look inside of the two most Progressive
States the three most Progressive States
New York California and Massachusetts a
lot of left-leaning folks a lot of
people who believe in climate science
and climate change
the energy costs in those three states
are the worst they are in the entire
country and energy is compounding at
three to four percent per annum so every
decade to 15 years energy costs in these
states double in some cases and in some
months our energy costs are increasing
by 11 a month
but the ability to actually generate
energy is now effectively zero the cost
per kilowatt hour to put a solar panel
on your roof and a battery wall inside
your garage it's the cheapest it's ever
been these things are the most efficient
they they've ever been and so to acquire
energy from the Sun and store it for
your use later on literally is a zero
cost proposition so what's how do you
explain the gap between the cost going
great question
so this is the other side of regulatory
capture right you know we all fight to
build monopolies while there are
monopolies hiding in plain sight the
utilities are a perfect example there
are a hundred million homes in America
there are about 1700 Utilities in
America so they have captive markets
but in return for that captive Market
the law says need to invest a certain
amount per year in upgrading that power
line in changing out that turbine in
making sure you transition from coal to
wind or whatever
just as an example
upgrading power lines in the United
States over the next decade is a two
trillion dollar proposition
these 1700 organizations have to spend I
think it's a quarter of a trillion
dollars a year
just to change the power lines that is
why even though it costs nothing to make
energy you are paying double every five
every seven or eight years
it's capex and Opex of a very brittle
old infrastructure it's like you trying
to build an app and being forced to
build your own Data Center and you say
but wait I just want to write to AWS I
just want to use gcp I just want to move
on
all that complexity solved for me and
some law says no you can't you got to
use it so that's what consumers are
dealing with but it's also what
industrial and Manufacturing
organizations it's what we all deal with
so how do we get rid ourselves off this
old infrastructure that we're paying so
the thing that's happening today which I
think is
this is why I think it's the most
important Trend right now in the world
is that a hundred million homeowners
are each going to become their own
little power plant and compete with
these 1700 utilities
just just deal with the United States
for a second because I think it's easier
to see here 100 million homes solar
panel on the roof and by the way just to
make it clear the sun doesn't need to
shine right these these panels now work
where you have these UV bands that can
actually extrapolate beyond the visible
spectrum so they're usable in all
weather conditions
and a simple system can support you
collecting enough power to not just run
your functional day-to-day life
but then to contribute what's left over
back into the grid
for Google's data center or Facebook's
data center where you get a small check
the cost is going to zero how obvious is
this to people you're making yourself
okay so because this is a pretty
profound prediction if the cost is
indeed go to zero
that I mean the compute the cost of
compute going to zero I can so the cost
to compute going to zero is can kind of
understand but the energy seems like a
radical prediction of yours well it's
just it's just naturally what's
happening right now now let me let me
give you a different way of explaining
this
if you look at any system there's a
really important thing that happens it's
what clay Christensen calls crossing the
chasm if you explained it numerically
here's how I would explain it to you Lex
if you introduce a disruptive product
typically what happens is the first
three to five percent of people are
these zealous believers
and they ignore
all the logical reasons why this product
doesn't make any sense
because they believe in the proposition
of the future and they buy it
the problem is at five percent if you
want a product to get to mass Market you
have one of two choices which is you
either bring the cost down low enough or
the feature set becomes so compelling
that even at a high price point an
example of the latter is the iPhone
the iPhone today the 14 iPhone cost more
than the original iPhone it's probably
doubled in price over the last 14 or 15
years but we view it as an essential
element of what we need in our daily
lives
it turns out that battery EVs and solar
panels are an example of the former
because people like President Biden with
all of these subsidies
have now introduced so much money for
people to just do this where it is a
money making proposition for a hundred
million homes
and what you're seeing as a result are
all of these companies
who want to get in front of that Trend
why because they want to own the
relationship with 100 million homeowners
they want to manage the power
infrastructure Amazon Home Depot Lowe's
you know you just name the company
so if you do that and you control that
relationship
they're going to show you they're going
you know for example Amazon will
probably say if you're a member of prime
we'll stick the panels on your house for
free
we'll do all the work for you for free
and it's just a feature of being a
member of prime and we'll manage all
that energy for you it makes so much
sense and it is mathematically accretive
for Amazon to do that
it's not a creative
for the existing energy industry because
they get blown up
it's extremely accretive for peace and
prosperity
if you think the number of Wars we fight
over natural resources take them all off
the table if we don't need energy from
abroad
there's no reason to fight
you know this you'd have to find a
reason to fight
um meaning sorry there'd be a moral
reason to fight but the last number of
wars that we fought
uh were not as much rooted in Morality
as they were rooted in yeah it feels
like they're very much rooted in uh
conflicts over resources energy
specifically and then sorry just the
last thing I want to say I keep
interviewing apologies but the chips
all what what people want to say is that
you know now that we're at two and three
nanometer scale for typical kind of like
transistor Fab
we're done and you know forget about
transistor density forget about Moore's
Lots over and I would just say no look
at teraflops and really teraflops is the
combination of CPUs but much much less
important and really is the combination
of Asics so application specific ICS and
gpus
and so you put the two together I mean
if I gave you a billion dollars five
years from now
the amount of damage you could do
damaged in good way in terms of you know
building racks and racks of gpus the
kind of models that you could build the
training sets and the data that you
could consume to solve a problem
it's it's enough to to do something
really powerful whereas today it's not
yet quite enough
so there's this really interesting idea
that you talk about in terms of Facebook
and Twitter that's connected to this
that if you were running sort of Twitter
or Facebook that you would move them all
to like AWS
so you would uh have somebody else to
come the compute the infrastructure it
probably if you could explain that
reasoning
means that you believe in this idea of
energy going to zero compute going to
zero so let people that are optimizing
that
do the best job and I think that's a you
know the initially in the early 2000s
and the beginning of the 2010s
if you were a big enough scale
oh sorry everybody was building their
own stuff then between 2010 through 2020
really the idea was everybody should be
on AWS except the biggest of the biggest
folks
I think in the 2020s and 30s I think the
answer is actually everybody should be
in these public clouds and the reason is
the engineering velocity of the guts
so you know take a simple example which
is you know we have not seen a massive
iteration in database design until
snowflake right I think maybe postgres
was like the last big turn of the dial
why is that I don't exactly know except
that everybody that's on AWS and
everybody that's on gcp in Azure gets to
now benefit from
a hundred plus billion dollars of
aggregate market cap rapidly iterating
making mistakes
fixing solving learning and that is a
best-in-class industry now right
then there's going to be all these AI
layers around analytics so that app
companies can make better decisions
all of these things will allow you to
build more Nimble organizations because
you'll have this Federated model of
development
I'll take these things off the shelf
maybe I'll roll my own stitching over
here
because the thing that where you make
money is still for most people and how
the apps provision and experience to a
user and everybody else can make a lot
of money just servicing that so they
work in a really
um they play well together in the
sandbox
so in the future everybody just should
be there it doesn't make sense for
anybody I don't think because you know
if you were to rule your own data
centers you know for example like Google
for a long time had these massive leaps
where they had GFS and bigtable
those are really good in the 2000s and
2010s
and this is not just throw shade at
Google it's very hard for whatever
exists that is a that is the progeny of
GFS and bigtable to be anywhere near as
good as a hundred billion dollar
Industries attempt to build that stack
and you're putting your organization
under enormous pressure to be that good
I guess the implied risk taken there is
that you could become the next AWS like
um
Tesla doing some of the compute in-house
I guess the bet there is that you can
become the next the next AWS for the new
wave of computation if that level if
that kind of computation is different so
if it's machine learning
I don't know if anyone's won that battle
yet which is machine learning Centric
well software has a very powerful
property in that there's a lot of things
that can happen asynchronous
asynchronously so that real-time
inference can be actually really
lightweight code deployment and that's
why I think you can have a very
Federated ecosystem inside of inside of
all of these places Tesla is very
different because in order to build the
best car it's kind of like trying to
build the best iPhone which is that you
need to control it all the way down to
the bare metal in order to do it well
and that's just not possible if you're
trying to be a systems integrator which
is what everybody other than this modern
generation of car companies
have been and they've done a very good
job of that
but it won't be the experience that
allows you to win in in the next 20
years
so let's Linger on the social media
thing so
if you you said if you ran Facebook for
a day let's let's let's extend that if
you were to build a new Social Network
today
how would you fix
Twitter how would you fix social media
if you want to answer a different
question is if you were Elon Musk
somebody you know and you were taking
over Twitter what would you fix I
thought about this a little bit
um
first of all let me give you a backdrop
I wouldn't actually build a social media
company at all
and the answer is the reasoning is the
following
um I really tend to believe as you've
probably gotten a sense of sort of
patterns and probabilities
and if you said to meth
probabilistically answer where where are
we going in apps and social experiences
what I would say is Lex
we spent the first decade building
platforms and getting them to scale
and if you want to think about it again
back to sort of this poker analogy
others mistakes minus your mistakes is
the value
well the value that was captured was
trillions of dollars essentially to
Apple and to Google
and they did that by basically
um attracting billions of monthly active
users to their platform
then this next way were the apps
Facebook qq10 Tick Tock Twitter Snapchat
that whole panoply of apps
and interestingly they were in many ways
an atomized version of the platforms
right they sat on top of them they were
an ecosystem participant
but the value they created was the same
trillions of dollars of Enterprise Value
billions of monthly active users
well there's an interesting phenomenon
that's kind of hiding in plain sight
which is that the next most obvious
Atomic unit
are content creators now let me give you
two examples Lex Friedman this random
crazy guy uh Mr Beast you know Jimmy
Donaldson just the two of you alone
added add it up okay and you guys are
going to approach in the next five years
a billion people the only thing that you
guys haven't figured out yet is how to
capture trillions of dollars of value
now maybe you don't want to and maybe
that's not your State admission right
right but let's just look at Mr Beast
alone because he is trying to do exactly
that probably yeah and I think Jimmy is
going to build an enormous business but
if you take Jimmy and all of the other
content creators right
you guys are atomizing
what the apps have done
you're providing your own curated news
feeds you're providing your own curated
communities you're allowed you let
people move in and out of these things
in a very lightweight way and value is
accruing to you so the honest answer to
your question is I would focus on the
content creator side of things because I
believe that's where the puck is going
that's a much more important shift in
how we all consume information content
and are entertained it's through Brands
like you individual people that we can
humanize and understand are the filter
but aren't you just
arguing against the point you made
earlier which is what you would
recommend is the invest in the AGI the
the depersonalization because because
they they could still be a participant
in that in that end state if that
happens you have the option value of
being an enabler of that
right you can help improve what they do
again you can be this bare metal service
provider where you can be a tax
yeah right you can participate in every
thing that you do every question that's
asked every comment that's curated if
you could have more intelligence as you
provide a service to your fans in your
audience you would probably pay a small
percentage of that Revenue I suspect all
content creators would and so it's that
stack of services that is like a smart
human being it's like you know how do
you help produce this information you
would pay a producer for that I mean
maybe you would but so back to your
question so what would I do
I think that you have to move into that
world
pretty aggressively
um
I think that right now you first have to
solve what is broken inside of these
social networks
and I don't think it's a technical
problem
so just to put it out there I don't
think it's a
you know it's one where there are these
nefarious organizations that happens
brigading XYZ that happens
but the real problem is a psychological
one that we're dealing with which is
people
through a whole set of situations
have lost
belief in themselves
and I think that that
comes up as this very virulent form of
rejection that they tried to put into
these social networks so if you look
inside of comments on anything like you
could have a con like you could have a
person that says on Twitter
I saved this dog from a fiery building
and there would be negative commenters
and you're like well again
put yourself in their shoes what do you
how do I steal man their case I do this
all the time you know I get people throw
shade at me I'm like okay let me steal
man their point of view
and the best that I can come up with is
you know I'm working really hard over
here I'm trying I played by all the
rules that were told to me I've played
well I played fairly and I am not being
rewarded in a system of value that you
recognize
and that is making me mad
and now I need to cope and I need to
vent
so back in the day my dad used to drink
he would make me go get things to hit me
with
today you go to Twitter you spot off you
try to deal with the latent anger that
you feel so a social network has to be
designed in my opinion
to solve that psychological Corner case
because it is what makes a network
unusable
to get real density you have to find a
way of moving away from that toxicity
because it ruins a product experience
you could have the best pixels in the
world
but if people are virulently spitting
into their keyboards
other people are just going to say you
know what I'm done with this it doesn't
make me feel good
so the social network has to have a
social cost you can do it in a couple
ways one is where you have real world
identity so then there's a cost to being
virulent
and there's a cost to being caustic
a second way is to actually just overlay
an economic framework
so that there's a more pertinent
economic value that you assign to
basically spouting off and the more you
want to spend the more you can say
and I think both have a lot of value I
don't know what the right answer is I
tend to like the latter
I think real world identity shuts down a
lot of debate because there's still too
much
um you know there's a sensation that
there that there'll be some retribution
um so I think there's more free speech
over here but it cannot be Costless
because in that there's a level of
toxicity that just makes these products
unusable what about a third option and
by the way all of these can work
together
if we look at this what you call the
Corner case was just hilarious what I
would call The Human Condition uh
which is uh you know that anger
is rooted with the challenges of life
and
what about having a um
an algorithm that shows you what you see
that's personalized to you and helps you
maximize your personal growth in the
long term such that you're challenging
yourself you're improving you're
learning there's just enough of
criticism
to uh keep you on your toes but just
enough of like the dopamine rush to keep
you entertained and finding that balance
for each individual person you just
described an AGI of a very empathetic
well-rounded friend yes exactly and and
then you can throw that person even
Anonymous into a pool of Discord and
they would be better I think you're
absolutely right that's a very very very
elegant way of stating it you're
absolutely but like you said the AGI
might be a few years away so that's a
huge investment like my concern my gut
feeling is this age thing we're calling
AGI is actually not that difficult to
build technically but it requires a
certain culture and it requires a
certain certain risks to be taken I
think you could reductively boil down
the human intellect into
cognition and emotion
and you know depending on who you are
and depending on the moment they're
weighted very differently obviously
um cognition is so easily done by
computers
that we should assume that that's a
solved problem
so our differentiation is the reasoning
part it's the emotional overlay it's
that it's the empathy it's the ability
to steal man the opposite person's case
and and feel why that person
you know you can forgive them without
excusing what they did as an example
um
that is a very difficult thing I think
to capture in software but
I think it's a matter of when not if
if done crudely it takes a form of
censorship just Banning people off the
platform let me ask you some tricky
questions
uh do you think Trump should have been
removed from Twitter no what's the
what's the pro case can you I'm having
fun here you still man each side yeah
um
let's deal man to get him off the
platform
here we have a guy
who
um
is virulent in all ways
he promotes confrontation
he lacks decorum he
incites the fervent Believers of his
cause
to act up and push the boundaries
bordering on and potentially even
including breaking the law
he does not observe the social norms of
a society that keep us while functioning
including an orderly transition of power
if he is left in a moment where he feels
trapped and cornered he could behave in
ways that will confuse the people that
believe in him to act in ways that they
so regret that
um it could bring our democracy to an
end or create so much damage or create a
wound that's so deep it will take years
of conflict and years of Confrontation
to heal it
we need to remove him and we need to do
it now it's been too long we've Let It
Go on too long
the other side of the argument would be
he was a duly elected person whose views
have been run over for way too long
and he uses the ability to say extreme
things in order to showcase
how corrupt these systems have become
and how insular these organizations are
in protecting their own class
and so if you really want to prevent
class Warfare and if you really want to
keep the American dream alive for
everybody we need to show
that the First Amendment the
Constitution the Second Amendment all of
this infrastructure is actually bigger
than any partisan view no matter how bad
it is and that people
will make their own decisions
and there are a lot of people that can
see past the words he uses
and focus on the substance of what he's
trying to get across and more generally
agree than disagree and so when you
silence that voice
what you're effectively saying is this
is a rigged game and all of those things
that we've told we were told were not
true are actually true
if you were to look at the crude
algorithms of Twitter of course I don't
have any Insider knowledge but I could
imagine that they saw
the let's say there's a metric that
measures how negative the experience is
of the platform and they probably saw uh
in several ways you could look at this
but the presence of Donald Trump on the
platform was consistently increasing how
shitty people are feeling uh short-term
and long term because they're probably
yelling at each other having worse and
worse and worse experience if you even
do a survey of how do you feel about
using this platform over the last week
they would say horrible relative to
maybe a year ago when uh Donald Trump
was not actively Tweeting or so on so
here you're sitting at Twitter and
saying
okay I I and I know everyone's talking
about speech and all that kind of stuff
but I kind of want to build a platform
where the users are happy
and they're becoming more and more
unhappy how do I solve this happiness
problem well let's
ban let's let's uh yeah let's ban the
sources of the unhappiness now we can't
just say you're a source of unhappiness
so we'll ban you let's wait until that
Source says something that we can claim
uh breaks our rules like insights
violence or so on that would work if you
could measure
your construct of Happiness properly the
problem is I think what Twitter looked
at were active commenters and got it
confused for overall system happiness
because for every piece of content
that's created on the internet of the
hundred people that consume it maybe one
or two people comment on it and so by
over amplifying that signal and assuming
that it was the plurality of people
that's where they actually made a huge
blunder because there was no scientific
method I think to get to the answer of
de-platforming him and it did expose
this idea that it's a bit of a rigged
game and that there are these deep
biases
that some of these organizations have to
opinions that are counter to theirs and
to their Orthodox view of the world
so in general you lean towards keeping
um
first of all presidents on the platform
but also
controversial voices all the time I
think it's really important to keep them
there let me ask you a trick tricky one
in the recent news that's become
especially relevant uh for me what do
you think about if you've been paying
attention to yay Kanye West
a recent controversial Outburst on
social media about
and
Jews
black people
racism in general
slavery Holocaust all these topics that
he touched on in different ways on
different platforms but including
Twitter what do you do with that and
like what do you do what do you do with
that from a platform perspective what do
you do from a Humanity perspective of
how to add love to the world
let's um should we take both sides of
them sure option one is he is
completely out of line and option two is
he's not just the same sure right so the
path one
is
he is an incredibly important taste
maker in the world
that defines the belief system for a lot
of people
and there just is no room
for any form of racism or bias or
anti-Semitism in today's day and age
particularly by people
whose words and comments will be
Amplified around the world
we've already paid a large price for
that and then the expectation
of success is some amount of societal
decorum that keeps moving the ball
forward
the other side would say
life
I think goes from Harmony to disharmony
to repair
and anybody who has gone through a very
complicated divorce
will tell you that in that moment your
life is extremely disharmonious
and you are struggling to cope
and because he is famous
we are seeing
a person really struggling in a moment
that may need help
and we owe it to him
not for what he said because that stuff
isn't excusable
but we owe it to him
to help him in a way and particularly
his friends
and if he has real friends
hopefully what they see is that what I
see on the outside looking in
is a person that is clearly struggling
can I ask you like a human question and
I know it's outside looking in but
there's several questions I want to ask
so one is about the pain of going
through a divorce and having kids and
all that kind of stuff and two when
you're rich and powerful and famous I
don't know maybe you can enlighten me
into which is the most corruptive
um but how do you know who are the
friends
to trust
so a lot of the world is calling Kanye
insane and if orlick has mental illness
all that kind of stuff and so how do you
have friends close to you let's say
let's say something like that message
but from a place of
uh love and where they actually care for
you as opposed to trying to get you to
shut up
the reason I ask all those questions I
think
if you care about the guy how do you
help him right
I've been through a divorce it's gut
wrenching
the most horrible part is having to tell
your kids
I can't even describe it to you
um how proud I am and how resilient
these three beautiful little creatures
were when my ex-wife and I had to sit
them down and talk through it
um
and for that thing I'll be just so
protective of them and so proud of them
and
um it's hard now I don't know that
that's what he went through
um but it doesn't matter in that moment
there's no Fame there's no money there's
nothing there's just the raw intimacy of
a nuclear family
breaking up in that there is a death
and it's the death of that idea
and that is extremely extremely
profound in its impact especially in
your children
um it is really hard really hard could
you have seen yourself in the way you
see the world being clouded during
especially at first to where you would
make poor decisions outside of your
outside of that nuclear family so like
business poor business decisions poor
tweeting decisions poor uh I think that
writing decision if I had to boil down
a lot of those what I would say is that
there are moments in my life Flex where
I have felt meaningfully less than
and in those moments the loop that I
would fall into is I would look to cope
and be seen by other people so I would
throw away
all of the work I was doing around my
own internal validation
and I would try to say something or do
something that would get the attention
of others and oftentimes you know when
that Loop was
um was unproductive it's because those
things had really crappy consequences so
you know that was that was yeah so yeah
I I went through that as well so I had
to go through you know this
disharmonious phase in my life and then
to repair it you know I had the benefit
of meeting someone and building a
relationship
um block by block
where there is just enormous
accountability
where
my partner not had has
just incredible empathy
um but accountability
and so she can put herself in my shoes
sometimes when I'm a really tough person
to be around
but then she doesn't let me off the hook
she can forgive me but it doesn't make
you know what I may have said or
whatever you know uh excusable
and that's been really healthy for me
and it's helped me repair my
relationships
be a better parent you know be a better
friend to my ex-wife who's a beautiful
woman who you know I love deeply and
will always love her and it took me a
few years to see that that it was just a
chapter that had come to an end but
she's an incredible mother and an
incredible businesswoman and I'm so
thankful that I've had two incredible
women in my life
that's like a blessing but it's hard so
with that it's hard to find a person
that has that I mean a lot of stuff you
said is pretty profound but having that
person who has empathy and
accountability so basically that's
ultimately what great friendship is
which is people that love you have
empathy for you but can also call you
out on your bullshit she's a LeBron
james-like figure and the reason I say
that is
I've seen and met so many people I've
seen the Distribution on the scale of
friendship and empathy
she's the LeBron James of friendship
she's a goat well what's so funny is
like you know we have a dinner around
poker
and it's taken on a life of its own
mostly because of her because these guys
look to her
and I'm like whoa whoa
[Laughter]
her registers are already full she's
thinking of all kinds of crap with me
um but um
but it's a it's a it's a very innate
skill and it's paired with you know it's
but it's not just an emotional thing
meaning
she's the person that I make all my
decisions with
these decisions we're making together as
a team I've never understood that you
know there's that African pop proverb
like go fast go alone go far go together
and
Lex since since I was born I was by
myself
and I had to cope and I didn't have a
good tool kit to use into the world
and in these last five or six years
she's helped me and at first my toolkit
was literally like
sticks you know and then I found a way
to you know she helped me sharpen a
Little Rock and that became a little
knife but even that was crap and then
she showed me fire and then I forged a
knife and that and that's what it feels
like where now this toolkit is like most
average people
and I feel
humble to be average
because I was here down here on the
ground
so it's made all these things more
reasonable so I see
what comes from having deep profound
friendships and love to help you through
these critical moments I have another
friend who
um who I would say just completely
unabashedly loves me this guy Rob
Goldberg he doesn't hold me accountable
that much which I love like I could say
I killed a homeless person he's like ah
they probably deserved it you know
whereas that would be like that was not
good what you just did so but I have
both
I mean I have Nat every day you know Rob
I don't talk to that often but to have
two people
I had zero I think most people
unfortunately have zero
um so I think like what what he needs
is somebody to just listen
you don't have to put a label on these
things
and you just have to try to guide in
these very unique moments where you can
just like de-escalate
what is going on in your mind and I
suspect what's going on in his mind
again to play Armstrong quarterback I
don't know
is that he is in a moment where he just
feels lower than low
and we all do it we've all had these
moments where we don't know how to get
attention
and if you didn't grow up in a healthy
environment you may go through a
negative way to get attention
and it's not to excuse it
but it's to understand it
that's so profound the feeling less than
and at those low points
going externally to find it and maybe
creating
conflict
and Scandal to get that attention
the way that my doctor explained it to
me is um
you have to think about yourself worth
like a knot it's inside of a very
complicated set of knots so it's like a
some people don't have these knots it's
just presented to you on a platter
but for some of us because of the way we
grow up it's covered in all these knots
so the whole goal is to loosen those
knots
and it happens slowly it happens
unpredictably and it takes a long time
and so while you're doing that you are
going to have moments where when you
feel less than you're not prepared to
look inside and say actually here's how
I feel about myself it's pretty cool I'm
happy with how where I'm at
I have to ask on the topic of friendship
you do an amazing podcast called all in
podcast people should stop listening to
this and go listen to that you just did
your 100th episode I mean it's one of my
favorite podcasts it's incredible for
the
the the technical and the human
psychological wisdom that you guys
constantly give and in the way you
analyze the world but also just the
chemistry uh between the between you
you're clearly there's there's a tension
and there's a camaraderie that's all all
laid out on on the table so
I don't know the two Davids that well
but I have met Jason what do you love
about him I mean I'll give you a little
psychological breakdown of all three of
these guys sure
um just my opinion yeah and I love you
guys
um would they agree with your
psychological breakdown I don't know you
know I I think that what I would say
about Jay Cal is
he is
unbelievably loyal
um to no end
and you know he's like any of those
movies
where which are about like the the mafia
or whatever where like you know
something bad's going wrong and you need
somebody to show up
that's jcal so if you killed the said
proverbial homeless person he would be
right there to help you the body yeah
but he's the one that he'll defend you
in every way shape or form even if it's
not doesn't make sense in that moment he
doesn't see
that as an action of whether it'll solve
the problem he sees that as an act of
Devotion to you your friend and that's
an Incredible Gift that he gives us
the other side of it is that you know J
Cal
needs to learn
how to trust that other people love him
back as much as he loves us foreign
because he assumes that he's not as
lovable as the rest of us
but he's infinitely more lovable than he
understands he's I mean you have to see
Lex like he is
unbelievably funny I mean I cannot tell
you how funny this guy is
um Next Level funny yeah his timing
timing everything charm the care he
takes
so he is as lovable but he doesn't
believe himself to be and that manifests
itself in areas that drive us all crazy
from time to time which makes it for a
very pleasant listening experience okay
so what about the the two David's Deus
Ex and David Friedberg David sacks is
the one that I would say I have the most
emotional connection with
um
he and I can go a year without talking
and then we'll talk for four hours
straight and then we know where we are
and we have this ability to pick up and
have a level of intimacy with each other
and I think that's just because I've
known David for so long now
um
that I find really comforting
and then Freeburg is this person who I
think similar to me had a very turbulent
upbringing has fought through it to
build an incredible life for himself and
I have this enormous respect for his
journey I don't particularly care about
his outcomes to be honest but I just
have I look at that guy and I think
and he did it and so if I didn't do it
um I would be glad that he did it if it
makes any sense
um
and you can see that he
um feels like his entire responsibility
is really around his kids
and just kind of like
give a better counterfactual
and uh and you know sometimes I think he
gets that right and wrong
but he's a very special human being that
way on that show the two of you have a
very kind of
like from a geopolitics perspective I
don't know there's just a very
uh effective way to think deeply about
the world the big picture of the world
he's a very systems level thinker yeah
very very absolutely
fairy systems levels very rooted in you
know a broad body of knowledge which I
have a tremendous respect for he brings
all these things in
sax is incredible because he has this
unbelievable understanding of things but
it has a core nucleus so free bird can
just basically abstract a whole bunch of
systems and talk about it I tend to be
more like that where I try to kind of I
find it to be more of a puzzle
socks is more like anchored in you know
a philosophical and historical context
as the answer
and he starts there but he gets to these
profound understandings of systems as
well on the podcast in life you guys
hold to your opinion pretty strong
uh what's uh what's the secret to being
able to argue passionately with friends
so hold your position but also not
murder each other which you guys seem to
come close to I think it's like strong
opinions weekly held
yeah like you know like look today you
and I yeah what have we we Steel Man
like the two sides of three different
things yeah
um now you could be confused and think I
believe in those things I believe that
it's important to be able to
intellectually Traverse there whether I
believe in it or not and like steel man
not Superman like that's a really but we
introde those things by saying let us
steal men in this position sometimes you
guys skip the uh we skip you're right we
we edit those things out and sometimes
we'll sit on either sides and we'll just
kind of bat things back and forth just
to see what the other person thinks so
that's how like as fans we should listen
to that sometimes like so sometimes
because you hold the strong opinion
sometimes uh like for example the cost
of energy going to zero
is that
like what's the degree of certainty on
that is is this kind of like you really
taking a prediction of how the world
will unroll and if it does this will
benefit uh a huge amount of companies
and people that will believe that idea
so you really you you like uh you spend
a few days a few weeks with that idea
I've been spending two years with that
idea and that idea has manifested into
um many pages and pages of more and more
branches of a tree
but it started with that idea so if you
think about this tree this logical tree
that I built I would consider it more of
a mosaic and at the at the base or root
however you want to talk about it is
this idea the incremental cost of energy
goes to zero how does it manifest and so
I talked about one traversal which is
the competition of households versus
utilities
but if even some of that comes to pass
we're going to see a bunch of other
implications from a regulatory and
Technology perspective if some of those
come to pass so I've tried to think
think
sort of this you know six seven eight
hops forward
and I have some like to use the chest
analogy I have a bunch of short lines
which I think can work
um and I've started to test those by
making Investments
tens of millions over here to 100
Millions over there
but it's a distribution based on how
probabilistic I think this these
outcomes are
and how downside protected I can be and
how much I will learn how many mistakes
I can make you know Etc
and then very quickly over the next two
years some of those things will happen
or not happen and I will rapidly
re-underwrite
and I'll rewrite that tree
and then I'll get some more data I'll
make some more Investments
and I'll rapidly re-underwrite so you
know in order for me to get to this tree
maybe you can ask how did I get there it
was complete accident
the way that it happened was I have a
friend of mine who works at a great
organization called Fortress his name is
Drew McKnight and he called me one day
and he said hey I'm doing a deal will
you anchor it we're going public
and it's a rare earth mining company and
I said Drew like if
I'm going to get tart and feathered in
Silicon Valley for backing a mining
company and he said just talk to the guy
and learn
and the guy Jim lotinski blew me away
he's like here's what it means for
energy and here's what it means for the
supply chain here's what it means for
the United States versus China
but LAX I did that deal and then I did
seven others and that deal made money
let's have another
but I learned I made enough mistakes
where the net of it was I got to a
thesis that I believed in I could see it
and I was like okay
I paid the price I acquired the learning
I made my mistakes I know where I am at
and this is step one
and then I learned a little bit more I
made some more Investments and that's
how I that's how I do the job that's the
minute that you try to wait for
perfection in order to make a bet either
on yourself or a company
a girlfriend whatever it's too late so
if we just Linger on that tree
it seems like a lot of geopolitics a lot
of international military even conflict
is around energy so how does your
thinking about energy connect to what
you see happening in the next 10 20
years maybe you can look at the war in
Ukraine
or relationship with China and other
places through the lens of energy what
what's the hopeful what's the cynical
trajectory that the world might take
through with this uh drive towards Zero
Energy Zero cost energy so the United
States was in a period of energy Surplus
um until the last few years some number
of years in Trump and I think some
number of now the current Administration
with President Biden
um but we know what it means
um to basically have more than enough
energy to fund our own domestic
manufacturing and living standards
foreign
and I think that by being able to
generate this energy from the Sun that
is very capex efficient that is very
climate efficient
gives us a huge Tailwind
the second thing is that we are now in a
world in a regime for many years to come
of non-zero interest rates
and it may interest you to know that the
really the last time
that you know we had long-dated Wars
supported you know at low interest rates
was World War II where I think the
average interest rates was like 1.07 in
the tenure
and every other War tends to have these
very quick open and closes because these
long protracted fights get very
difficult to finance when rates are
non-zero
so just as an example even starting in
2023 so the Practical example today in
the United States is President Biden's
budget is about 1.5 trillion and for
next year that's
not including the entitlement spending
okay meaning Medicare Social Security
right so the stuff that he wants to
spend that he has discretion over is
about 1.582 trillion is the exact number
next year our interest payments are
going to be 455 billion dollars that's
29 of every budget dollar is going to
pay interest
so you have these two worlds coming
together right Lex
if you have us
you know hurtling forward
to being able to generate our own energy
and the economic Peril that comes with
trying to underwrite several trillion
dollars for war which we can't afford to
pay when rates are at five percent means
that despite all the Bluster the
probabilistic distribution of us
engaging in war with Russia and Ukraine
seems relatively low
the the override would obviously be a
moral
reason to do it that may or may not come
if there's some nuclear proliferation
but now you have to steal man the other
side of the equation which is well what
were to happen if you were sitting there
and you were Putin let's deal man
setting off a tactical nuke someplace
okay I'm getting calls every other day
from my two largest energy buyers India
and China telling me slow my roll
I have the entire world looking to find
the final excuse to turn me off and
unplug me from the entire world economy
the only morally reprehensible thing
that's left in my Arsenal that could do
all of these things together would be to
set off attack nuke I would be the only
person since World War II to have done
that
you know it's it seems like it's a
really really really
big step to take
and so I think that
X of the clamoring for war that the
military-industrial complex wants us to
buy into
the financial reasons to do it and the
natural reason resources needs to do it
are making it very unlikely
that is not just true for us
I think it's also true for Europe I
think the European economy is going to
roll over
I think it's going I see a very hard
Landing for them which means that if the
economy slows down there's going to be
less need for energy
and so it starts to become a thing where
a negotiated settlement is actually the
win-win for everybody
but none of this would be possible
without zero interest rates in a world
of zero interest rates we would be in
war
so you believe in the financial forces
and pressures overpowering I believe in
the human lives
I really do believe in these even in in
international War more so there I think
the Invisible Hand and by the Invisible
Hand for the audience I think really
what it means is you know the the
financial complex and really the Central
Bank complex and the interplay between
fiscal and monetary policy
um is a very convoluted and complicated
set of things
but if we had zero interest rates
we would be probably in the middle of it
now
see there's a complexity to this game at
the international
level where the nation some nations are
authoritarian and are there's
significant corruption
and so that adds uh from a game
theoretic optimal perspective
you know the invisible hand has is
operating in the mud
preventing War
the person the person that is the most
important figure in the world right now
is Jerome Powell he is probably doing
more to prevent more than anybody else
he keeps ratcheting rates it's just
impossible it's a mathematical
impossibility for the United States
unless there is such a cataclysmic moral
transgression by Russia so there is tail
risk that it is possible
where we say forget it all bets are off
we're going back to zero rates issue a
hundred year bond we're going to finance
a war machine
there is a small risk of that but I
think the propensity of the majority of
outcomes is more of a negotiated
settlement so what about I mean if you
what's the motivation of Putin to invade
Ukraine in the first place if Financial
forces are the most
um the most powerful forces
why did it happen
because it seems like there's other
forces at play of uh
maintaining superpower status on the
world stage yeah it seems like
geopolitics doesn't happen just
with the Invisible Hand in consideration
I agree with that I can't beg to know to
be honest I don't know
um
but he did it
and I think it's easier for me
to guess the outcome from here it would
have been impossible for me to really
understand it is
what got him to this place
but it seems like there's an end game
here and there's
um there's not much playability
yeah I feel like I'm on a sturdy ground
because there's been so many experts at
every stage of this that have been wrong
well there are no experts well on this
uh there are no experts Lex I understand
this well okay let's dig into that
because there's some because we just
said Phil helmuth is the um is the
greatest poker player of all time he has
an opinion yeah he doesn't he's so he
would be mistaken hey poker Phil has an
opinion Ivy has an opinion as well on
how to play all these games
meaning an opinion means here's the
lines I take here are the decisions I
make
I live and die by those and if I'm right
I win if I'm wrong I lose I've made more
mistakes than my opponent
I thought you said there's an optimal
so aren't there people that have a
deeper understand
a higher likelihood of being able to
describe and know the optimal the
optimal set of actions here at every
layer well they're they're they're being
theoretically set of optimal decisions
but you can't play your life
um
against a computer like meaning the
minute that you face an opponent and
that person takes you off that optimal
path you have to adjust yeah
like what happens if a tactical nuke
it would be really bad
um
I think the world is resilient enough I
think the ukrainians are resilient
enough to overcome it it would be really
bad it's just an it's an incredibly sad
moment in human history but do you
wonder what U.S does
is there any understanding do you think
people inside the United States
understand not not the regular citizens
but people in the military do you think
Joe Biden understands do you think I
think Joe Biden does understand I think
that I think they have a clear plan I
think that there are
few reasons to let the gerontocracy rule
but this is one of the reasons where I
think they are better Adept than other
people
um you know folks that were around
during the Bay of Pigs folks that
hopefully have studied that and studied
you know nuclear de-escalation
we'll have a better Playbook than I do
my suspicion
is that
there is a you know in an emergency
break glass plan and I think before
military intervention or anything else
I think that there are an enormous
number of financial sanctions that you
can do to just completely cripple
Russia that they haven't undertaken yet
um and if you couple that with an
economic system in Europe that is less
and less in need of energy
because it is going into a recession it
makes it easier for them to be able to
walk away while the U.S ships a bunch of
you know LNG over there so
I I don't know the game theory on all of
this but does it make you nervous
that uh or we're just being
temperamental does it feels like the
world hangs in a balance like uh it
feels like
at least for my naive perspective
I thought we were getting to a place
where surely human civilization can't
destroy itself and here's a presentation
of what looks like a hot war or multiple
parties involved in escalating
escalation towards a world war is not
entirely out of the realm of possibility
it's not I
would really really hope that
he
is spending time with his two young
twins
well this is
part of what I really I really hope he's
spending time with his kids
agreed but not kids not just kids but
friends and the the uh he may not have
friends but
it's very hard for anybody to look at
their kids and not think about
protecting the future
well there's um partially because of the
pandemic but partially because of the
nature of power it feels like you're
surrounded by people you can't trust
more and more I do think the pandemic
had a effect on that too the isolating
effect a lot of people were not their
best selves during the pandemic from a
super heavy topic let me go back to
the space where you're one of the most
successful people in the world
how to build companies how to find good
companies what it takes
to find good companies what it takes to
build good companies what advice do you
have for someone who wants to build the
next
super successful startup in the tech
space and you know have a chance to be
impactful like Facebook Apple
that's I think that's the key word if
your precondition is to start something
successful you've already failed because
you're now you're playing somebody
else's game what success means is not
clear you're walking into the woods
it's murky it's dark it's wet it's
raining there's all these animals about
um
there's no Comfort there so you better
really like hiking
and
there's no short way to shortcut that so
isn't it obvious what successes like
success scale so it's not what are the
no I think that there's a very brittle
basic definition of success that's
outside in
um
but it's not that's not what it is
um you know I know people that are much
much richer than I am
you know
and they are just so completely broken
and I think to myself the only
difference between you and me
is outsider's perception of your wealth
versus mine
but the
the happiness and the joy that I have in
the simple basic routines of my life
give me enormous Joy
and so
I feel successful no matter what anybody
says about my success or lack of success
um there are people
that live normal lives that have good
jobs that have good families you know
I've this like idyllic sense like
I see it on Tick Tock all the time so I
know it exists these neighborhoods where
there's like a cul-de-sac and these
beautiful homes and these kids are
biking around
and every time I see that Lex I
immediately flash back to what I didn't
have
and I think that's success look at how
happy those kids are so no you there is
no one definition and so if people are
starting out to try to make a million
dollars 100 million dollars a billion
dollars you're gonna fail
there's a definition of personal success
but is there's also some level of um
that's different from person to person
but there's also some level of
the responsibility you have if there's a
mission to have a positive impact on the
world so I'm not sure that Elon is happy
no
in fact I think if you focus on trying
to have an impact on the world I think
you're going to end up deeply unhappy
but does that matter
like what may happen what happens it may
happen as a byproduct
but I think that you should strive to
find your own personal happiness and
then measure
how that manifests as it relates to
society and to other people but if the
answer to those questions is zero that
doesn't make you less of a person no 100
but then the other way is there are
times when you need to sacrifice your
own personal happiness
Force for a bigger thing for that you've
created yeah if you're if you're in a
position to do it I think some folks are
tested Elon is probably the best example
and
it must be
really really hard to be him
um really hard I have
enormous
levels of empathy and care for him I
really love him as a person because I
just see that it's not like it's not
that fun
and and he has these ways of
Being Human that in his position I just
think are so dear that if he never I
just hope he never loses them just a
simple example like two days ago
I don't know why but I went on Twitter
and I saw the perfume thing yeah so I'm
like ah fuck it I'm just gonna go buy
some perfume so I bought his perfume the
burnt hair thing yeah
and I said and I emailed him the receipt
and I'm like all right you got me for a
bottle
um and he responded in like eight
seconds and it was just a smiley face or
whatever yeah just deeply normal things
that you do amongst people that are just
so nobody sees that
you know what I mean but it would be
he deserves for that stuff to be seen
because the rest of his life is so
brutally hard yeah
um he's just a normal guy that is just
caught in this Ultra Mega vortex
why do you think there's so few elons
it's an extremely
lonely set of trade-offs
because to your point if you get tested
so if you think about it again
probabilistically there's eight billion
people in the world maybe 50 of them get
put in a position where they are
building something of such colossal
importance that they even have this
choice
and then of that 50 maybe 10 of them are
put in a moment where they actually have
to make a trade-off
you know you're not going to be able to
see your fam I'm making this up you're
not going to be able to see your family
you're not you know you're going to have
to basically move into your factory
you're gonna have to sleep on the floor
but here's the outcome energy
Independence and you know resource
abundance and peace you know a massive
peace dividend
and then he says to himself I don't know
that he did because I've never had this
combo yeah you know what that's worth it
and like and then you look at your kids
and you're like
I'm making this decision I don't know
how to explain that to you yeah you want
to be in that position there's no
there's no amount of money where I would
want to be in that position so that
takes an enormous fortitude and a moral
compass
that he has and that's what I think
people need to need to appreciate about
that guy it's also on the first number
he said it's confusing that there's 50
people or 10 people
like that are put in the position to
have that level of impact it's unclear
that that has to be that way it seems
like there could be much more
there should be there's definitely
people with the potential
um but you know think about think about
his journey you know his mom had to
leave a very complicated environment
moved to Canada moved to Toronto you
know a small apartment uh just north of
Bain Bloor you know if you've ever been
to Toronto
um I remember talking to her about this
apartment is so crazy because I used to
live like around the corner from that
place and raise these three kids and
just have to so
how many people are going to start with
those boundary conditions
you know and really grind it out
it's just very few people in the end
that
um will have the resiliency to stick it
through where you don't give in to the
self-doubt
and so it uh you know it's a really it's
just a really hard set of boundary
conditions where you can have 50 or 100
of these people that's why they needed
to be really they need to be really
appreciated
yeah well that's true for
all humans that
follow the the threat of their passion
and do something beautiful in this world
that could be in a small scale or a big
scale appreciation is a
that's a gift you give to the other
person but also a gift to yourself
that's somehow it becomes like this uh
contagious thing I went to this you are
so right you just like it my my brain
just lit up because yesterday I went to
an investor day of my friend of mine
um describe Brad gerstner and you know
on the one very reductive World Brad and
I are theoretically competitors but
we're not he makes his own set of
decisions I make my own set of decisions
we're both trying to do our own view of
what is good work in the world
but he's been profoundly successful and
it was really the first moment of my
adult life where I could sit in a moment
like that
and really be appreciative of his
success and not feel less then
and so you know little selfishly for me
but mostly for him as well
I was so proud to be in the room that's
my friend that guy plays poker with me
every Thursday he is crushing it it's
awesome you know and that's the it's a
it's a really amazing feeling
I mean to to linger on the
the trade-offs the complicated
trade-offs with all this
uh what's your take on work-life balance
in uh in a in a company that's trying to
do
big things
I think that you have to have
some very very strict boundaries
but otherwise I think balance is kind of
dumb
it will make you Limited
I think you need to immerse yourself in
the problem
but you need to Define that immersion
with boundaries
so if you you know if you ask me like
you know what does like my process look
like
it's monotonous and regimented but it's
all the time except when it's not and
that's also monotonous and regimented
um
and I think that makes me very good at
my craft
because it gives me what I need
to stay connected to the problem without
feeling resentful about the problem
which part the monotonous all in nature
of it or the the when you say hard
boundaries essentially
go all out until you stop and you don't
stop often I'm in a little bit of a
quandary right now
because I'm trying to redefine my goals
and you're catching me in a moment where
I have even in these last
few years of evolution I think I've made
some good progress
but in one very specific way I'm still
very reptilian
and I'm trying to let go which was that
exactly if you can you know in my
business it really gets reduced to what
is your annual rate of compounding
that's my demarcation you know Steph
Curry and LeBron James Michael Jordan
it's how many points did you average not
just in a season
but over your career
you know and in their case to really be
the greatest of all time
its points rebounds assists steals
there's all kinds of measures
to be you know in that Pantheon of being
really really good at your craft
um and in my business it's very
reductive it's how well have you
compounded
and if you look at all the heroes that I
have
put on a pedestal in my mind
um
they've compounded you know at above 30
percent for a very long time
as have I
but now I feel like I really need to let
go because I think I know how to do the
basics of my job
and if I had to summarize like an
investing challenge or investing I think
really it's you know when you first
start out investing you're a momentum
person you saw it in GameStop just a
bunch of people aping each other
and then it goes from momentum
to you start to think about cash flows
you know how much profit is this person
going to make whatever so that's like
the evolution you know this is the this
is the basic thing to this is a
reasonably sophisticated way then a much
smaller group of people think about it
in terms of macro geopolitics
but then a very finite few cracked this
special code which is there's a
philosophy and it's the philosophy that
creates the system
and I'm scratching at that furiously but
I cannot break through and I haven't
broken through and I know that in order
to break through I gotta let go
so this is the journey that I'm in as in
my in my professional life
so it is an all-consuming thing but I'm
always home for dinner
you know we have very prescribed moments
where we take vacation the weekends you
know like if I I can tell you about my
week if you're curious but it's like I
would love I would love to know your
week it's since it's regimented and uh
uh monotonous I woke up I wake up at 6
45.
um
get the kids go downstairs we all have
some form of you know not super healthy
breakfast I make a latte I've become in
and and the latte is like I have a
machine I measure the beans you know I
make sure that the timer is such where I
have to pull it for a certain specific
ratio you know just so you know 20 grams
I gotta pull 30 grams with the water and
I got you know I got to do it 30 seconds
Etc so your uh coffee snob it helps me
stay in rhythm sure
um before I used to have another machine
I just pushed a button yeah but then I
would push the button religiously in the
exact same way you know what I mean
because actually uh
on that topic
you know the morning with kids can be
pretty stressful thing are you able to
find sort of happiness is that also that
morning is a source of Happiness it's
great my kids are lovely their maniacs
um
I just see
you know and maybe I don't I've never
asked Friedberg this but I'll just put
my words I see all of the things in
moments
where
there was no compassion given to me and
so I just give him a ton of love and
compassion I have an infinite patience
for my children not for other kids yes
of course but for a lot of kids so
anyway so we have a breakfast thing
um
and then I go upstairs
um and I go I change and I and I work
out from eight to nine and that's like
the first 15 minutes I walk up on a
steep incline you know uh 12 to 14 you
know three and a half to four miles per
hour
walk
and then you know Monday's a push day
Tuesdays
front of the legs Wednesdays pull
Thursdays back of the legs
um eight to nine
Monday I always start I talk to my
therapist from nine to ten so as soon as
I finish working out I get on the phone
and I talk to him
and it helps me lock in for the for the
for the week
and I and I and I'm just talking about
the past
um and it's just helping me the recent
past usually sometimes the recent past
but usually it's about the past past
something that I remember when I was a
kid
because that's the work about just
loosening those knots you know so I put
in that hour of work
um respect that hour
but then I'm in the office and then it's
like you know I go until
12 15 12 30.
go home
have lunch
like a proper like go home sit down have
lunch with Nat talk she leaves her work
can we talk how are we doing you know
just check in our youngest daughter will
be there because she's one
and she's making a mess
and then I I'll have another coffee
that's it my limit for the day oh no
more caffeine that's it and then uh I go
back to the office and I'll be there
until six seven sometimes
and I do that Monday Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday
I'm allowed to have meetings Wednesday
nothing it's all reading must be unless
it's a complete emergency it has to be
uh kind of a full reading and reading is
a bunch of blogs uh YouTube videos so
I'm not trying not to do any talking no
talking it's like being in silence being
present thinking about things by the way
how do you take notes give us a sketch I
have a pad and I write stuff down
sometimes I go to my phone I'm a little
all over the place sometimes I do Google
Docs I don't have this is one thing I
need to get better at actually
but typically what happens is I actually
do a lot of thinking in my mind and I'm
sort of filing a lot of stuff away and
then it all spills out and then I have
to write
and then that gives me a body of work
that I can evaluate and think about and
then I usually put it away
um and a lot of the time it goes nowhere
but every now and then I come back to it
and it just unlocks two or three things
and I have a sense of how else I'm
thinking about things
um and then Friday at the end of the day
uh Nat and I talk to a couple's
therapists
um and that's about checking out
properly
so it's like okay
now it's like focusing the weekend is
family
being present being aware you know and
if there's email obviously if I have to
do meetings from time to time no problem
um but there's boundaries checking out
properly
um oh man that is so powerful just like
yeah officially transitioning yeah
so these are these are really important
boundaries so that I can be immersed and
what that means is like look on a
Saturday afternoon you know on a random
day she'll be like where's your mouth
and I'll be up in my room and I've found
a podcast talking about like um uh decis
which is like ductal cancer in situ
because I've been fascinated about
breast cancer surgeries for a while and
uh learning about that and she's like
what are you doing I'm like I'm
listening to podcasts about decis and
she's like what's that like you know
ductal cancer in C2
she's like okay
and so you know I so I have time to
continue to just constantly learning
learning putting stuff in my memory
banks to organize into something and
that's like a that's a week
but then in these fixed moments of time
phone down everything down we go on
vacation you know we go on a boat we go
to whatever where it's just us and the
kids
is there a structure when you're at work
is there instructed to your day in terms
of meetings in terms of south side of
Wednesday
you know because you're having to keep
meetings to less than 30 minutes
have to and you know oftentimes meetings
can be as short as like 10 or 15 minutes
because then I'm just like okay
because I'm trying to reinforce that
it's very rare that we all have
something really important to say
and so the ritual that is becomes really
valuable to get scale
is not the ritual of meetings but the
ritual of respecting the collective time
of the unit
and so it's like you know what folks I'm
going to assume that you guys are also
tackling really important projects you
also want to have good boundaries in
this immersion go back to your kids and
have dinner with them every night it's
not just for me it's for you so how
about this why don't you go and do your
work this painting didn't need to be 30
minutes it could be five and the rest of
the time is yours and and it's weird
because when people join that system at
Social Capital they just
it's like face time and it's like let me
make sure and let me talk a lot so I
can't say anything I respect the person
that says nothing for two years and the
first thing that they say is not obvious
that person is immensely more valuable
than the person that tries to talk all
the time
what have you learned from your um so
after Facebook you started social
capital or what what is now called
Social Capital what have you learned
from all the successful investing you've
done there
about investing or about life yeah or
about running a team if I'm very loath
to give advice because I think it so
much of it is situational but my
observation is that starting a business
is really hard any kind of business
and most people don't know what they're
doing
and as a result we make enormous
mistakes
but I would summarize this and this may
be a little heterodoxical I think there
are only three kinds of mistakes because
if we go back to what we said before in
the business
it's just learning you're exploring the
dark space to get to the answer faster
than other people
and those the mistakes that you make are
three
or the three kinds of decisions let's
say
you'll hire somebody
and
they're really really really average but
they're a really good person
oh yeah
you'll hire somebody
and they really weren't candid with who
they are and their real personality and
their morality and their ethics only
expose them
over a long period of time
and then you hire somebody
and uh they're not that good
uh morally but they're highly performant
what do you do with those three things
and I think successful companies
have figured out how to answer those
three things because those are the
things
that in my opinion determine success and
failure so it's basically hiring and you
just identified three failure cases for
hiring but very different failure cases
and very complicated ones right like the
highly performant person who's not that
great as a human being do you keep them
around well a lot of people would air
towards keeping that person around what
is the right answer I don't know it's
the context of the situation
um and the second one is also very
tricky what about if they really turned
out that they were just not candid with
who they are and it took you a long time
to figure out who you were these are all
mistakes of the senior person that's
running this organization
I think if you can learn
to manage those situations well
those are the real edge cases where you
can make mistakes that are fatal to a
company
yeah that's what I've learned over 11
and a half years honestly otherwise the
business of investing
I feel that it's like a it's a secret
and if you are willing to just keep
chipping away
you'll peel back enough of these you
know
layers will come off and you'll see if
the scales will come off and you'll
eventually see it I really struggle with
maybe you can be my therapist for a
little bit well that first case which
you originally mentioned because I love
people I see the good in people I really
struggle with just a mediocre performing
person who's who's a good human being
that's a tough one
I'll let you off the hook yeah I think
those are incredibly important and
useful people I think that if a company
is like a body they are like cartilage
can you replace cartilage yeah but would
you if he didn't have to no
okay can I can I play Devil's Advocate
yeah so those folks
because of their goodness
make it okay to be mediocre
they they create a culture where well we
what's important in life which is
something I agree in my personal life is
to be good to each other to be friendly
to be good vibes all that kind of stuff
you know when I was at Google just like
the good atmosphere everyone's playing
and just it's fun fun right
um but to me
like when I when I put on my hat of like
having a mission and a goal what I love
to see is the superstars that shine for
some in some way like do something
incredible and I want everyone to also
admire that those Superstars and perhaps
not just for the productivity's sake or
performing or successful company's sake
but because that too is an incredible
thing that humans are able to accomplish
which is shine I hear you but that's not
a decision you make meaning you get
lucky when you have those people in your
company
that's not the hard part for you the
hard part is figuring out what to do
with one two and three yeah keep demote
promote fire what do you do
and this is why it's all about those
three buckets I personally believe that
folks in that bucket one
as long as those folks aren't more than
50 to 60 percent of a company are good
and they can be managed as long as they
are one to two degrees away from one of
those people that you just mentioned
yeah yeah because it's easy then to drag
the entire company down if they're too
far away from the LeBron James because
you don't know what LeBron James looks
and feels and smells and you know so you
need that tactile sense of what
Excellence looks like in front of you
a great example is if you like if you
just go on YouTube and you search these
clips of how Kobe Bryant's teammates
described not Kobe but how their own
behavior
not performance because there's a bunch
of average people that Kobe played with
this whole career but their behavior
changed
by being somewhat closer to him and I
think that's an important psychological
thing to note
for how you can do reasonably good team
construction if you're lucky enough to
find those generational talents
you have to find a composition of a team
that keeps them roughly close
to enough of the org that way that
group of people
can continue to add value and then
you'll have courage to fire these next
two groups of people and I think the
answer is to fire those two groups of
people because no matter how good you
are that stuff just injects poison into
a into a living organism and that living
organism will die when exposed to poison
so would you invest in a lot of
companies you've looked at a lot of
companies what do you think makes for a
good leader so we talked about building
a team but a good leader for a company
what are the qualities
you know I um when I first meet people
um I never asked to see a resume
um
and when I'm meeting a Company CEO for
the first time I couldn't care less
about the business in fact
um and I try to take the time
to let them reveal themselves now in
this environment you know I'm doing most
of the talking but if this were the
other way around and you were ever
raising capital and usage math I'd be
interested in you looking at this
business
I'd probably say eight to ten words
for hours and just listen prod you know
I throw things out prod and let you
Meander and in you Meandering I'm trying
to build a sense of who this person is
once I have a rough sense of that which
is not necessarily right but it's a
starting point
then I can go and understand why this
idea makes sense in this moment and what
I'm really trying to do is just kind of
like unpack where are the biases that
may make you you know fail
and then we go back to you
the thing that Silicon Valley has the
benefit of though is that they don't
have to do any of this stuff
if there's momentum because then the
rule book goes out the window and people
clamor to invest so one of the things
that I do
and this is again back to this pugilism
that I inflict on myself
is I have these two things that I look
at thing number one is I have a table
that says
how much did we make from all of our
best investments how much did we lose
from all of our worst Investments what
is the ratio of winners to losers over
11 years
and in our case it's 23 to 1. on you
know billions of dollars so you can you
can kind of like you can see a lot of
signal
but what that allows me to do is really
like say wait a minute like we cannot
violate these rules around how much
money we're willing to commit in an
errant personality you know the second
is I ask myself of all the other top VCS
in Silicon Valley name them all you know
um what's our correlation meaning
when I do a deal how often does anybody
from Sequoia Excel Benchmark Kleiner who
you name it
do it at the same time or after
and vice versa and then then I look at
the data to see how much they do it
amongst themselves
what's a good sign I'm at zero as
virtually close to zero as possible
that's a good thing well
it's not a good thing when the markets
are way way up
because it creates
an enormous amount of momentum so I have
to make money the hard way I have to you
know because I'm trafficking and things
that are highly uncorrelated
to the the Gestalt of Silicon Valley
which can be a lonely business
but it's really valuable in moments
where markets get crushed because
correlation is the first thing that
causes massive destruction of of capital
massive because one person all of a
sudden with one blow up in one company
Boom the contagion hits everybody except
the person that was you know not and so
now those are like more sophisticated
elements of risk management which is
again this pugilism that I inflict on my
nobody asks me to do that nobody
actually at some level when the markets
are up really care that when markets are
sideways or when markets are down I
think that
that allows me to feel proud of our
process
you know but that requires you to think
a lot a lot outside the box it's lonely
because you're taking risks also your
public personality so you say stuff that
if it's wrong you get yelled at for
constantly for uh for being I mean your
mistakes aren't private no and that's
something that
um has been a really really healthy
moment of growth
it's like an athlete you know
if you really want to be a winner you
got to hit the shot
in front of the fans
and if you miss it you have to be
willing to take the responsibility of
the fact that you bricked it
and over time hopefully there's a body
of work that says you've generally hit
more than you've missed
but if you look at even the best
Shooters what are they 52 percent
so these are razor thin margins at the
end of the day which is really so then
what can you control
I can't control the defense I can't
control what they throw up me I can just
control my preparation and whether I'm
in the best position to launch a
reasonable shot
you said that the world's first
trillionaire would be somebody in
climate change in the past
um let's update that what's uh today as
we stand here today what sector will the
world's first trillionaire come from
yeah I think it's energy transition so
energy so the things we've been talking
about yeah really so isn't it okay well
I think I think the way that I think
about so this is a single division it's
hard to interrupt you see their ability
to actually build a company that makes
huge amount of money as opposed to this
distributed idea that you've been
talking about yeah I'll give you my
philosophy on wealth
um
most of it is not you
um an enormous amount of it is
the genetic distribution of being born
in the right place and blah blah
irrespective of the boundary conditions
of how you were born or where you were
raised right so you know at the end of
the day you and I ended up in the United
States it's a huge benefit to us
second is the benefit of our age
it's much better and much more likely to
be successful as a 46 year old in 2023
than a 26 year old in 2023 because in my
case I have demographics working for me
with a 26 year old he or she has
demographics working slightly against
them can you explain that a little bit
what are the demographics here
in the case of me
the distribution of population in
America looks like a pyramid
and in that pyramid
I'm swedged in between these two massive
population cohorts the Boomers and then
these you know gen Z and millennials
um and that's a very advantageous
position it's not dissimilar to the
position that Buffett was where he was
you know packaged in between Boomers
beneath him and the silent generation
above him and being in between two
massive population cohorts turns out to
be extremely advantageous because when
the cohort above you transitions power
and capital and all of this stuff you're
the next person that likely gets handed
it so we have a disproportionate
likelihood to be you know we are lucky
to be older than younger
um so that's that's an advantage and
then the other advantage that has
nothing to do with me
is that I stumbled into technology I got
a degree in electrical engineering and I
ended up coming to Silicon Valley
and it turned out that in that moment it
was such a transformational Wind of
Change that was at my back
right so
the wealth that one creates is
a huge part of those variables and then
the last variable is your direct
contributions
in that moment and the reason why
that can create
extreme wealth
is because when those things come
together at the right
moment
it's like a chemical reaction I mean
it's just crazy so
that was sort of part number one of what
I wanted to say the second thing is when
you look then inside of these systems
where you have all these Tailwinds right
so in Tech I think I benefit from these
three big tail ones
if you build the company or are part of
a company or a part of a movement
your economic participation
tends to be a direct byproduct
of the actual value that that thing
creates in the world
and that the thing that that creates in
the world
will be bigger
if it is not just an economic system
but it's like a philosophical system
it changes the way the governance
happens it changes the way that people
think about all kinds of other things
about their lives
so there's a reason
I think why database companies are worth
acts social companies are worth why but
the military industrial complex is worth
you know as much
and I think there's a reason why that if
you for example were to go off and build
some newfangled source of energy that's
clean and Hyper abundant
and safe
that what you're really going to
displace
or reshape is trillions and trillions of
dollars of worldwide GDP so the global
GDP is I call it 85 trillion right it's
going at two to three percent a year
so in the next 10 years we'll be dealing
with a hundred trillion dollars of GDP
right somebody Who develops clean energy
in 2035
will probably shift
10 of that around
10 trillion dollars
a company can easily capture thirty
percent of a market three trillion
dollars
a human being can typically own a third
of one of these companies one trillion
dollars
so you can kind of get to this answer
where it's like it's going to happen in
our lifetime
but you have to I think find these
systems that are so gargantuan and they
exist today
it's more bounded because price
Discovery takes longer and an existing
thing it's more unbounded because you
know what it is you know the tentacles
that energy reaches
right of that 80 trillion dollars of
worldwide GDP I bet you if you added up
all the energy companies but then you
added up all of manufacturing
you know if you added up all of
Transport you'd probably get to like 60
of the 80.
do you have an idea of which energy
uh which alternate energy sustainable
energy
is the most promising well I think that
we
have to do a better job of exploring
what I call the suburbs of the periodic
table
so you know we're really good in Seattle
you know the upper Northwest yes you
know we're kind of good in Portland
but we're not existent in San Diego and
we have zero plan for North Carolina
through Florida
yeah and so is that a fancy way of
saying nuclear is should be part of the
discussion I think nuclear I think room
temperature semiconductors
I'm I'm not convinced right now that the
existing set of nuclear Solutions will
do a good job of scaling Beyond bench
scale I think there is a lot of
complicated technical problems that make
it work at a bench scale level even
partially but the energy equation
is going to be very difficult to
overcome in the absence of some leaps in
Material Science
have you seen any leaps is there
promising stuff like you're you're
seeing The Cutting Edge from a company
perspective yeah I would say not yet I
do but the precursor yes I have been
spending a fair amount of time so
talking about like a new framework
that's in my mind is around these room
temp superconductors
um and so I've been kind of bumbling
around in that Forest
for about a year
I haven't really put together any
meaningful perspectives but again
talking about like trafficking in in
companies and Investments that are
very lonely but they allow me to
generate returns that are relatively
unique and independent that's an area
where I don't see anybody else when I'm
there I'll give you another area
you know we
um I think are about to unleash in a
world of zero energy and and zero
compute costs
computational biology will replace white
chemistry
and when you do that
you will be able to iterate On Tools
that will be able to solve a lot of
human disease
I think like if you look at the head
of like the top 400 most recurring rare
diseases
I think like half the number 200 is a
specific point mutation as just the
mismethylation between C and T
I mean that's like whoa wait you're
telling me in billions of lines of code
I forgot you know semicolon right there
that's causing this the whole thing to
miscompile so I just got to go in there
and boom and it's all done that's a
crazy idea that was a C plus plus c c
throwback for people that don't know
there's two people who are two people
there everybody
it's perfect sense um but but um so that
couldn't that be a truly a source of uh
the competition biology unlocks I mean
obviously medicine is begging for the
thing with energy though is that the
groundwork is well laid
um
and talking about sort of like the upper
bound is well defined
the upper Bound in medicine is not well
defined because it is not
the sum total of the market cap of the
Pharma Industries it is actually the sum
total of the value of human life
and that's an extremely ethical and
moral question isn't there special
interests that are resisting uh moving
making progress on the energy side so
like uh governments and how do you break
through that I mean you have to
acknowledge the reality of that I think
it's less governments in fact like I
said I think President Biden has done a
really incredible job while Chuck
Schumer really is done a really
incredible job because
so just to give you the math on this
right like back to this so three percent
of everything is of a market or zealots
but when you get past five percent
things tend to just go nuclear to 50 60
percent
the way that they wrote this last bill
the cost I'll just use cars as an
example the cost of an average car is 22
and a half thousand the cost of the
cheapest battery car is thirty thousand
and lo and behold there's a seventy five
hundred dollar credit and it's like to
think the Invisible Hand didn't know
that that math was right I think is kind
of a little bit malarkey
and so the battery EV car is going to be
the same price as the thing and it's
going to go to 40 50 percent
um so we're already at this Tipping
Point so we're kind of ready to go
um in these other markets it's a little
bit more complicated because there's a
lot of infrastructure that needs to get
built so you know the the gene editing
thing as an example you know we have to
build a tool chain
that looks more like
um code that you can write to Facebook
is written in I think PHP originally HBO
which is I'm still a big fan of
sometimes you have to use the ugly
solution and make it look good versus
trying to come up with a good solution
um which will be too late let me ask you
you consider a run for governor of
California then decided against it what
went into each of these decisions and
broadly I should have maybe a selfish
question about Silicon Valley
is it over as a world leader for new
tech companies
as a this Beacon of Promise of young
minds stepping in and creating something
that changes the world
I don't know if those two questions are
connected so it's not it's not over but
I think it's definitely
we're in a challenging moment
because
so back to that analogy of the
demographics if you think about the like
if you bucketed forget like our relative
successes
but there's a bunch of us in this
mid 50s to mid 30s cohort of people that
have now been around you know for 20
years 15 years to 25 years that have
done stuff right
from Andreessen to zoc to Jack Dorsey
Etc Elon you know whatever maybe you
throw me in the mix David sacks whatever
okay
none of us have done a really good job
of becoming a Statesman
um or a States woman you know
um
and really showing a broad empathy and
awareness for the broader systems
so Silicon Valley is to survive as a
system
we need to know that we've transitioned
from move fast and break things to get
to the right answer and take your time
if that's what it means
and so we have to be a participant of
the system
and I believe that and I think that it's
important to not be a dilettante and not
be thumbing your face to Washington or
not push the boundaries and say you know
we'll deal with it after the fact but to
work with folks that are trying to do
the best again
Steel Man their point of view
you know work with them potentially run
for office so potentially like be you
know understand the system it makes me
sad that there's no
tech people or not many tech people in
Congress and certainly not in the
presidential level not many Governors or
Senators well I think that we also have
roughly you know our rules will never
allow some of the best and brightest
folks to run for president because of
just the rules against it but you know
if if Oh you mean yeah yeah I mean like
more than this I think David sacks would
be an incredible presidential candidate
now I also think he'd be a great
governor no he was born in South Africa
you know I think he'd be a great
Governor I think he'd be a great
um Secretary of State I mean he'd be
great at whatever he wanted to do
um you know Friedberg you know wasn't
born here
um so there's there's a lot of people
that could contribute at different
levels and I hope that
by the way the other thing I like about
the Pod is like I also think it helps
normalize Tech a little bit because you
just see like normal people dealing with
normal situations
um and I think that that's good you know
it is a really normative place it's not
the caricature that it's made out to be
but there is a small virul and strain of
people that make it caricature-like
with this in One Direction what do you
think about the whole
uh culture of
um I don't know if better turns but woke
activism so sort of activism
which in some contexts is a powerful and
important thing but infiltrating
companies I'll answer this in the
context of Renee Gerard so like he says
that people tend to copy each other
and then when they're copying each other
they're really what they're fighting
what they're doing is they're fighting
over some scarce resource
and then you find a way to organize
against you know the group of you
against a person or a thing that you
think is the actual cause of all of this
conflict and you try to expel them
the thing that wokeism doesn't
understand
is that unless that person is truly to
blame
the cycle just continues
and you know that was a that was a
framework that he developed that you
know he's really conclusively proven to
be true and it's observable in humanity
in life
so these movements I think the extreme
left and the extreme right
are trying to interpret away
to allow people to compete for some
scarce resource
but I also think that in all of that
what they don't realize is that they can
scapegoat whoever they want but it's not
going to work because the the Bull Work
of people in the middle realize that
it's just not true
yeah they realize but they're still
because in leadership positions there's
still momentum and they still scapegoat
and they continue
and it seems to hurt the actual ability
is more successful In fairness though if
you had to graph the effectiveness of
that function it's decaying rapidly it's
the least effective it's ever been
you're absolutely right being canceled
five years ago was a huge deal
today I think it was Jordan Peterson on
your podcast he said I've been canceled
and it was amazing he said 38 times or
40 he said some number which was a
ginormous number a that he kept account
of it and B was able to classify it yeah
I'm like what classifier is going on in
his mind where he's like Ah that's an
attempt to cancel me but this one is not
but my point is was clearly not working
and so the guy is still there and the
guy is you know putting his view out
into the world
um and so it's not what not to judge
whether what he says is right or wrong
it's just to observe that this mechanism
mechanism of action is now weakened but
it's weakened because it's not the thing
that people think is really to blame
yeah you've been canceled on a small
scale a few times so let's not I'm sure
it didn't feel small actually it wasn't
small I'm trying to minimize
uh did that did that psychologically
hurt you yeah it was tough I mean in the
moment you don't know what's going on
but I would like to thank a certain CEO
of a certain well-known company
and he sent me
basically like uh a step-by-step manual
uh and uh does it involve mushrooms no
no and uh and he was right
you know the storm passed and life went
on is it uh I don't know if you can
share the the list of steps but is the
fundamental core idea is that just life
goes on
the the core fundamental idea is like
you need to be willing
and able to apologize
for what is in your control but not for
other people's mistakes
your mistakes yes and if you feel like
there's something then you should take
accountability of that
but to apologize for somebody else for
something that they want to hear
isn't going to solve anything
yeah there's something about apologies
if you do them they should be authentic
to what you actually want to say versus
what somebody else needs to wants to
hear
otherwise it doesn't ring true yeah and
people can see through that and people
can see through it and also what people
see through is not just the fact that
you know your apology was somewhat
Hollow but also that this entire
majority of people now walked away the
mob was like okay thanks
yeah and then people are like
also you didn't care at all this is like
and so then it reflects more broadly on
them yeah
I know you said you don't like to give
advice but what advice would you give to
a young person you've lived an
incredible life from very humble
beginnings difficult childhood and
you're one of the most successful people
in the world so what advice I mean a lot
of people look to you for inspiration
kids in high school or early college
they're not doing good or
um are trying to figure out
basically uh what to do when they have
complete doubt in themselves
what advice would you give them
it is really important that if somebody
that you respect and I'm gonna just for
the purpose of this put myself in that
bucket and if you're listening to this
um I wish somebody had told this to me
um we are all equal
and you will fight this demon inside you
that says you are less than a lot of
other people
for reasons that will be hard to see
until you're much much older
and so you have to find
either a set of people far far away like
what I did
or one or two people really really close
to you
or maybe it's both
that will remind you in key moments of
your life that that is true otherwise
you will give in to that Beast
and it's not the end of the world and
you'll recover from it I've made a lot
of mistakes
but it requires a lot of energy
and sometimes it's just easier to just
stop and give up
so I think that if you're starting out
in the world if you've been lucky to
have a wonderful life and you had
wonderful parents
man you should go and give them a huge
hug because they did use such a service
that most folks don't do to most kids
unfortunately and it's not the fault of
these parents
but it's just tough life is tough
so give him a kiss
and then figure out a way where you can
just do work that validates you and
where you feel like you're developing
some kind of Mastery who cares what
anybody else thinks about it
just do it because it feels good do it
because you like to get good at
something
but if you're not one of those lucky
people
um you can believe in your friends or
you can just believe in me
I'm telling you preserve optionality
how you do that is by regulating
um your reactions to things
and your reactions are going to be
largely guided in moments where you
think that you are not the same as
everybody else and specifically that you
are less than those people and you're
not so just save this part of this
podcast and just play it on a loop if
you need to
um but that is my biggest learning is I
am equal I'm the same as all these other
people and you can imagine what that
means to me to go out in the world to
see people and think okay I'm the same
as this person I'm I'm as good as them
and you could imagine what you're
probably thinking of what I'm thinking
is not that thing
right you're probably thinking man this
guy yeah this guy I'm so much better no
I am fighting this thing
all the time
well I've also met a bunch of folks who
I think is a counter reaction to that
once they become successful they start
developing a philosophy then they are
better or even some people are better
than others
I understand you know there's LeBron
James versus other people and so on but
I always really resisted that thought
because I feel like it's a slightly
better
they have Mastery in a thing that they
fall in love with yeah I'm trying to
develop Mastery in a thing that I love
you know I love the art I love investing
it's like solving puzzles
and I love that I love trying to develop
Mastery and poker
I really love that
um I'm learning how to be a parent to a
teenager because I have finally have one
it's all new stuff to me and I'm
learning
um
that's what it's all about
yeah so you don't want to think you're
lesser than and you don't want to think
you're better than because those both
Lead You astray I've never thought I was
better than I manifested better than
because I was trying to compensate for
feeling less then
my goal is just to feel like everybody
else feels on the presumption that
everybody had like a normal life
given your nickname is the dictator do
you trust yourself with power like if I
if the world gave you absolute power for
a month
no
no because I think that you know I'm
still riddled with bias I I don't I
don't deserve that position I don't and
I would not want that weight on my
shoulders
I had a I had a spot naturally where
it was a very
important and big poker game
and it was a spot where I was in the pot
and it was a really large pot it was
like a million dollar pot
and uh I had to make a ruling and the
ruling was in in my favor and
okay
I was just beside myself
because I don't play I play for the
challenge I like to get pushed to the
limit of my capabilities I want to see
can I think at the same level of these
folks you know because these guys are
all experts they're all Pros
and I get enormous Joy from that
challenge
and I like to win but I like to win just
a small amount
you know what I mean and then I never
wanted to win in that way
but because it was you know my game I
had to make this call
on a million dollar pot and I wanted to
just
shoot myself I just was like this is
gross and disgusting and and he was a
complete gentleman
which made it even worse
so I do not want absolute power well
those are the people you do want to have
power is the ones that don't want it
which is a a weird system to have
because then you in that kind of system
don't get the leaders
that you should have because the ones
that one power aren't the ones that
should have power it's a weird weird
system what do you think let me sneak
this question in there what do you think
is the meaning of life
I don't well why are we here
look up at the stars and think about
like the big
why question
I think that it's a chance to just
enjoy the ride
I don't think it really like
I don't believe in this idea of Legacy
that much
I think it's a real trap
so do you think you'll be forgotten by
history I hope so I really really hope
so because if you think about it there
are two or three people that are
remembered for positive things and
everybody else it's all negative things
and the the likelihood that you'll be
remembered for a positive thing is
harder and harder and harder and so the
surface area of being remembered is
negative and then the second what will
it matter I'll be gone
I really just want to like have fun do
my thing
learn
get better
but I want I want to reward myself
by feeling like
oh that was awesome like I've told this
story many times and I have put again my
own narrative fallacy on top of this but
you know Steve Jobs's sister wrote this
you know obit in the New York Times when
he died and she ends it by saying his
last words were oh wow oh wow oh wow
that seems like an awesome way to die
you're surrounded by your friends and
family not the fact that he died
obviously but in a moment where what I
read into it was your family was there
maybe you thought about
all the cool shit that you were able to
do
and then you know you just started the
simulation all over again and so yeah
just on the off chance that that's true
I don't want to take this thing too
seriously
you know what I mean just enjoy it so
you're not afraid of it the end
good in tomorrow get in right now
so every day you can go and you're happy
you're happy with the things you've done
yeah
you know there there are obviously
things I want to do that I haven't done
um but there are no gaping things
I've really really been in love
total gift
there have been moments where I've
really really felt
like everybody else
there have been moments where I have
deep deep deep Joy
and connection with my children
there are moments where I've had
incredible giggling fun with my friends
there's moments where I've been able to
enjoy really incredible experiences wine
food all that stuff
great I mean what more do you want like
I I could keep asking for more
I would just be a really
crappy human being at some point
you know what I mean it's enough yeah
yeah it's enough it's enough this life
this life is pretty beautiful if you
allow yourself to see it yeah it's
really great and it's better than it's
ever been
um for most of us actually yeah it's
pretty nice you know and all of the like
you know Millennials and gen Z's
you're about to get
a boatload of money from your parents
and you better figure out
how to be happy before you get that
money yeah because otherwise you will be
miserable
get a lot of Dairy Queen
no that would that only worked the first
time it worked two times in grade five
and grade six my God that next year Flex
I worked my ass off I'm like but I could
never bring myself to ask her yeah and
then she did it and I was like man she's
This Woman's Miss Bruni the room is a
gem yeah but the third time it faded
isn't that the sad thing in my life
you know the finiteness of it the
scarcity of it
without that we perhaps wouldn't uh ice
cream wouldn't be so damn Delicious
you're an incredible human
um I definitely recommend that people
listen to on all all platforms just
we're very lucky to be able to get your
wisdom I enjoy I agree with um I've
talked a lot about you with the Audrey
capothy who's somebody I really respect
and he just loves the shit out of you
you know in in how much you uh How
Deeply you understand the world it's a
huge honor he's an incredible human
being so that's on a different yeah
speaking of semicolons there's some
human beings that understand everything
at the very low level and at the very
high level and those people are also
um very rare so it's it's a huge honor
and also a huge honor that you would be
so kind to me just like in subtle ways
Offline that you would uh make me feel
like I'm worthwhile well can I just say
something as just a Layman listener
um what you do just so I could give you
my version
is that you take things
and people so ideas and people
that are mostly behind a rope
and you demystify it
and what that does for all of us is it
makes me feel
like
I can be a part of that
and that's a really inspiring thing
because you're not giving advice you're
not telling us how to solve the problem
but you're allowing it to be understood
in a way that's really
accessible
and then you're intellectually curious
in ways that you know some of us would
never expect that we were and then you
kind of end up in this rabbit hole
um and then you have the courage to go
and talk to people that are really all
over the map
um like for example like I when I saw
your
uh Jordan Peterson example like you went
there like you talked about Nazism and I
was just like man this is a complicated
argument these guys are going to tackle
and it's just it's really
um really impressive so I have an
enormous amount of respect for what you
do I think it's very hard to do what you
do so consistently
um and so I I look at you as somebody I
I respect because it's um
it just shows like
somebody who's immersed in something and
who's
very special so thank you for including
me in this I'm going to play that clip
to myself privately over and over just
when I feel
low and self-critical about myself thank
you so much brother thank you incredible
thanks man
thank you for listening to this
conversation with your mouth
to support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description and now
let me leave you with some words from
Jonathan Swift
a wise person should have money in their
head but not in their heart
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time