Being happy personally is the pathway to help everything else make sense and that is around mental health and I think the key unlock for mental health is just finding a resource to talk to.
And when you first start talking it's going to be just kind of blathery bullshit and it's going to be imprecise and it's going to be super awkward and you're going to feel like what is this?
And then over time it's like anything like when you start to get good at it it's really good.
Welcome to The Knowledge Project Podcast, this is Shane Parrish.
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My guest today is Chamath Palihapatiya.
Chamath is the founder of Social Capital, part owner of The Golden State Warriors, and so much more.
We talk about what it means to be an observer of the present, how to think in first principles, the behavior and psychology of successful investing, and so much more, including the best public company CEOs, get comfortable.
It's time to listen and learn.
Chamath, man, I am so excited to talk to you.
It's been a long time coming.
It has been. We've tried to organize, I think for many months if maybe not a year.
I just think both of our schedules were a little tight.
But then I had to reschedule it once or twice, so I'm sorry about that.
Oh, no worries. Originally we were supposed to do it in Toronto and then all the world changed.
Yeah, the world has changed.
Hey, every time I look around you're on the news, man.
What's up with that?
Well, I think that it's sometimes valuable when you can actually just speak the truth, not sometimes, all the time.
I think that most people are pretty guarded because they have to be.
I don't think they're necessarily always in a position to be as candid as they want to be.
I think that in moments of just clarity I have constantly just tried to say what I feel and I think that resonates with a lot of people.
Definitely, I tweeted out today that you were coming on the show and I think we had over 1 ,000 replies from people, everything from asking what I should do with my life to how should I think about the future to what should I invest in.
You're like everybody's guru, man.
I think Naval is the guru but I'm the brown brother from another brother.
I think that I've gone through a lot of ordinary people shit and I think I talk about it in really simple, plain spoken terms and I think that that's really useful to people because it demystifies a lot of things and just makes it more normal.
That's been a real theme of my life is just realizing that a lot of the things that I went through is normal and feeling part of a pack is really helpful actually.
It's been really helpful for me.
It's helped regulate my sense of self -worth and lift it up in moments where I felt pretty crappy about myself and that's just resulted in better outcomes.
I think a lot of what I talk about, I think folks relate to because I speak to it through that lens and yeah, I just think that's a really good place to be actually.
It's taken me a long time to get to that place but it's a good place to be.
Can we double click on that for a second?
You've got an interesting background, right?
You worked at AOL, you went to Facebook, you're a billionaire at 32, you're a sports team from the outside looking in, you had the most amazing life, but on the inside looking out, you didn't feel that way.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have to do things that are motivated by other people's perceptions of them and also motivated by the pressure that's exerted by the people that are very closely around you that sometimes can be your friends, it can be your family.
I was very much of that category so I was kind of just meandering through life now that meandering turned out to have really good outcomes in some respects.
The problem was that all it was doing was just sort of like avoiding the inevitable and the inevitable is this moment that I think everybody goes through where they're asking themselves whether they've lived a completely fulfilling life the way that they defined it.
What I'll say Shane is that I think that sort of not even necessarily millennials but zoomers underneath them, they're the most honest of any generation about what makes them happy and you see that in the way that they dress, the music that they listen to, the media that they consume, the way that they
push back on a more corporate tone and things and they're willing to be happy in a way that they've defined for themselves.
In my generation on 44, that's not how it goes down.
The way that it goes down is you go to the best school you can, you take on as much debt as you need to, you try to get the most credentialed job after college, you kind of just check the box.
You find a reasonable person that you marry, you have 2 .5 kids, you move by a house in the suburbs, you save for retirement and I just think for a lot of people, they've realized that that's not the path of maximum fulfillment and that being happy actually generates also better outcomes.
You have better artists, you have better engineers, you have better everything if people are ultimately just happier.
And I think that generation of people know that a lot more inherently than people my generation or Boomers in the generation of all do.
What did you come out of that with?
How did you define happiness, the end of this?
You sort of went through this journey.
There's a great article, sorry, it's not even an article, it's The Obituary of Steve Jobs written by his sister and she wrote it, Mona Simpson, she wrote it in The New York Times upon his death and there's just a paragraph in there but I think the phrase that he said was like sort of like oh wow and he
just kept repeating oh wow as he was passing away and I've interpreted what that may have meant, I have no idea obviously because he's not around to tell us that that's what happened but I have this idea, the sensation that he sees his family, he thinks about the totality of his life lived and he was happy.
But think of what that happiness was able to create not just for his family but for the entire world.
And so I do think that on the one hand you could say he was fanatical, he was a tyrant, he was hard to work for, etc.
etc. but on the other hand maybe there's a different way of saying it which is that he was very content, he had a family that loved him, he had a family that he loved and as a result of that happiness he was able to leave that sanctuary, go to work and take that happiness and channel it into doing amazing
things for other people.
That's a pretty cool idea and so I think that what I would like to live through is that version of the truth for me that oh wow, oh wow, oh wow idea and how do I define it.
I didn't even know that that should be a way to live my life earlier on and when you're talking to me today as a 44 year old guy is I've learned that there are things that give me these oh wow sensations that I just absolutely love.
I'll just name a couple and even today this happened.
I'm working a lot these days just really grinding on a lot of stuff and these are high pressure decisions that I'm making a lot of the time for me and so they consume a lot of my mental mind and bandwidth and it's really exhausting and there's pressure and you know sometimes honestly I just feel like
I just need to just like cry, I feel really stressed out these moments and you know I'm fighting a pill I feel like and today I was driving to the office and I was having one of those moments and I turned around and I went back home and I went to see each of my four children and I kissed them and I
went to see my partner and I kissed her and I felt just this moment of just sheer happiness like I felt like that's what I have accomplished.
I built a sanctuary for my family filled with love and then I got into the car and I came to the office and that's an oh wow moment.
Every summer now I have these oh wow moments because my partner's Italian and I had never really spent a lot of time in Europe but in the last four years I spent obviously a lot of time in the summers and my children and I have fallen in love with Italians and what have we learned?
We've learned to like love the food, love the culture, the boisterousness, the loudness, the love, the intensity, the energy.
I think about it now and I just it's like wow I love it.
So I've learned to find things that I really appreciate.
A third one and I'll just stop with that is I have a group of friends and we play poker together and if I think about how happy it meets me there's a thing that we do which is we show up at four o 'clock we play until about six thirty and then we have a dinner together like a family dinner and a vlog
table and then we go back and we play for a few more hours.
That stopped when the coronavirus pandemic started because we couldn't come together.
We've been able to get a bunch of rapid tests and so for the first time this Saturday we're going to come together and play and I think about this and I'm just like oh wow I cannot wait to see them.
So you know and I think about this Shane none of that is about CNBC or a good successful company those are important and those are good demarcations of progress but those aren't my oh wow moments anymore and when I put too much pressure and value in those being the oh wow moments I got distracted and I
became unhappy and as long as I stay centered on these other things I have so much more energy to come and work on those first order set of you know business priorities and get things done and I'm trying to achieve something that is at the very early stages which is not done yet.
Yeah I want to talk about that before we get there there's a couple of rabbit holes that I sort of want to explore there.
You mentioned zoomers were willing to speak truth their truth pretty easily and it was harder for our generation but you're you're also you know you're full of controversy sometimes it doesn't strike me that you have a problem speaking your truth or you you've ever not said what you felt.
Well it's not that I've always not.
I think that I learned to lie at a very young age because lying I think is one of the most simple coping mechanisms that we all have and lying manifests in all kinds of very subtle corrosive ways.
You know when I was growing up I had a I have a family who fundamentally we all love each other but it's a very complicated contorted form of love because it's punctuated with you know some mental health issues you know alcoholism you know depression poverty and so you know when I was a young person the way
that I coped is to lie are you okay.
I'm fine. Did you do that.
I don't do that you know where were you nowhere.
How did you do on that test fine.
I learned to be evasive and what that created was a deep seated pattern of line and avoidance and you know people can say maybe lying is not what that is but at the basic you know kind of just to simplify it you know I learned to lie to cope.
I think that at some point I think almost sort of at a very you know physiological biological level that's not what any of us want to be.
And so I think that I had almost this form of organ rejection and so I had to almost you know go to the other end of the spectrum almost in a way of atoning for all of the years of lies and all of the accumulated mistruths or half truths or evasiveness whether that was in my personal life or my business
life and the first moment of clarity around that was actually when I went to work at Facebook because for the first time I was unbelievably candid and it was such a cathartic release because I could be you know almost curmudgeonly in my candor and so much so that it points probably I was a bit of a caricature
because you know there was this guy me who seems very you know almost acerbic at times just a little rough around the edges and I took it to an extreme there.
And then in the early parts of social capital I actually think I reverted and I was lying more again because I was I was filled with a new level and a new kind of insecurity around you know I felt like an imposter in venture capital I felt like you know I didn't earn the right to start a fund I didn't
and I gave myself all of these hurdles that I put in front of me mentally and my solution was to you know try to be evasive and to lie my way and then in 2016 and 17 again I think I had an even much more cathartic form of organ rejection grounded and I had to sort of recalibrate the life around me so that I
could stop lying and I think in that I think you're finding a person that cries to be truthful as often as I can and oftentimes what that means is saying the uncomfortable thing but it's the thing that needs to be said and I think that there's a lot of people who appreciate that because they themselves
feel like they're sometimes caught in positions where they have to be evasive or they have to lie in order to cope and you know if they themselves aren't in a position to do and I think they appreciate when others can be and I think that a lot of people have a very positive reaction to that and I think
that's in part what what I think people get a sensation when they interact with me sometimes so I'm not sure I'm necessarily controversial I do think that I'm behaving in a way that I think a lot of folks would love to be in a position to do as well right I don't think it's actually correlated to money
I think that it's more correlated to self -worth and the comfort that you have with yourself the limitations that you have and then the ability to love yourself despite those limitations that's a process that too few of us start and it's like I said it's not a money thing it's it's a happiness thing
so closing the loop on how you started I think that you know zoomers in this interesting way see all these generations you know of folks that are older than them you know 30 year old 40 year old 50 year old 60 year olds 70 year olds 80 year olds and we live long enough now where they see multiple generations
of evasiveness and unhappiness really yeah and and they see similarities in all of us that they're smart enough to decide that they don't want to exhibit because you know it would be one thing Shane if you saw an 80 year old well you could say oh I'm not gonna be like that person but then you see a 70
year old and you're like wow that's just a version of the 80 year and then you a 60 year old and you see that and a 50 year old and because we're all alive you know the 20 year old sees eight generations of people ahead of them and they're like wait a minute something here is wrong and they're smart
enough to say what are the commonalities of all these folks and they choose to be different do you still deal with imposter syndrome all the time what do you tell yourself in those moments first of all I talked to my partner she has been my spiritual partner my kind of like co -pilot because she really
has an enormous level of empathy and care around her own mental health and you know the mental health of our family so we talk a lot you know and we talk about nonsense and serious things and everything in between but we just talked and I found that as an man I was taught that talking is weak I also found
that as a immigrant man I was taught that talking about emotions was doubly weak and then I was you know sort of taught as kind of you know like in this industry that you know talking is awkward you put all these things together and you know the biggest thing that I found that has helped me is just
talking and being open and it starts with her my kids I'm really open and you know transparent with my kids they think I'm a you know basically a fucking loser I think that that's really cool you know they just they just roll their eyes every time I start talking because it's like some stupid diet drive
but all of these things helped me stay really connected to the goal of being truthful that helps me stay connected to the goal of being happy to celebrate these oh wow kind of moments in my life that helps me but to be honest with you that has to be an active process for me because the that thing that you
just said is overpowering for me the the sense of being an imposter is overpowering and it's like this dragon that I've been trying to slay my whole life and I haven't been able to and the more I don't even want to say success but yeah I guess like the more like notches up the ladder I go the more severe
it feels and the harder it is for me to fight it back so you know I had this conversation with Matt yesterday and you know I said to her like yeah I feel like this is why so many people just give up because it's easier to do it than to fight and to solve the real root cause of what allows you to get
to the next level of success that's really why you know you have to look at folks that have really overcome this stuff you know however way they've done it and achieved a level of success and really celebrate them because they're they have a level of mental fortitude that is exceptional but yeah I'm
dealing with it right now this imposter syndrome and it's I think it'll be a battle I fight my whole life you know some people other people have different battles but that that is definitely what keeps you going I mean you could just fold up walk away live an amazing life you and generations of your
your heirs what keeps you sort of pushing through this confronting this dragon I do think that I get a level of enjoyment from it you know this idea of like you know can I beat it I like how I feel when I'm more connected to the things that make me happy I like how I feel when I think like when I think
that I am doing things that the younger version of me would be proud of not the older version is it's interesting like a lot of people think like you know like at your deathbed and I think the exact opposite I think like you know with the 22 year old self you know interacting with this person you know
with the 16 year old person like think wow that guy is that's a legit human being like he's you know he's putting himself out there trying so I'm motivated to keep kind of grinding and getting better just seeing what the upper bound is it's interesting a lot of a lot of people are like oh if I just
had like ten million dollars or something I just walk away and I'm like well that's probably the reason you might never have ten million dollars right because the people that achieve that keep pushing and keep struggling and can't actually walk away in some way I think that money accelerates the point
at which you can declare yourself free and feel emancipated like I do think that money is a it liberates people it gives them freedom but going back to what we were saying before it doesn't make you happier and if you are ill -equipped to then run that race the happiness race and you do it with money
it's destructive it's it's more destructive than if you do it without money because you know if you're unhappy and you're unconstructively trying to find your happiness and you have cash you know you'll end up you know gambling broke dead high you know like it's all the typical cliches and they played
themselves out over you know many generations and they'll continue to do so yeah I think that like this is why I think people can separate these two paths and actually work on them concurrently one is the path to freedom and the second is the path to happiness I think the path to happiness is an internal
process but the path to freedom that I can help with you know because I think I've learned an accumulated amount of knowledge here and it's readily transferable the happiness path is not because each of us have our own lived experience which is so different from everybody else's and so all you can do
is kind of listen to other folks and decide you're going to start for yourself but the answers are non -obvious and it's all iteration but the path to freedom is easily copied and I think that that's sort of sort of what what motivates me as well this idea that I can sort of you know all that accumulated
knowledge base I can just hand it off to folks and if they can benefit from it that would be great what is the path to freedom?
Well sort of financial freedom so I think I think I think that if more people believe that they could be economically self -sufficient I think that it would solve a lot of the societal implications of inequity you know today we have kind of like this very polarized body politic really where on one hand there
are folks that have over sort of indexed on what I would call absolute freedom and intent but it has no plan and on the other side it's sort of over indexed on a nanny state with no plan both of them are very much the same and that neither of them have a credible plan and in the middle there's a plurality
of people that are just exhausted and that's a that's a perfect boundary condition for you know a lot of the inequity that that exists today in society and a lot of the frustration that people feel as a result of it so to me if we can give people a more reasonable roadmap where they can execute it they
can learn and they can have a community of other like -minded folks that can put in the time and the work and help each other over you know five ten fifteen twenty years to compound capital no matter how small but just to start I think you'd be surprised at how many people are intellectually capable
of achieving financial freedom on their own and in that I think that there's there's a path out of this kind of like very depressing kind of state that we're in that that I think is the opportunity is so you know I'll give you an example in 2015 I think we started to really pay attention to Tesla and we
bought these convertible bonds and you know we thought they were really great you know risk adjusted because you know we weren't sure whether the shorts were gonna win and drive the company into the ground but we were really sure we wanted to bet on Elon long story short it all kind of worked out and now
you look back and you're like gosh this is incredible but there was so much knowledge that helped us feel like we were making the right decision that existed in this long tale of people who took it upon themselves to build a community of people that wanted to understand the company not necessarily just
to be a blind cheerleader but they would really go and double -click and they were doing a level of work that was incredible and I thought that was so interesting because I thought to myself you know typically what would happen is you would put your money into a bank account you would open up a brokerage
account maybe you would get access to some research from one of the banks you would read it or maybe an advisor would recommend something to you or maybe you'd end up on some random community and read some random form and buy something but instead these were like physicists and you know chemists and you
know financial people all coming together to understand these things they were writing research notes they were putting out you know YouTube video clips and if you took the time to understand it that community was helping you understand something really important that was happening in the world and you
could have financially participated because you could just go and buy that and it would have worked now let's extrapolate that idea forget Tesla for a second there's this incredible thing that's happening which is that we are starting to financialize everything right we're starting to create financial
increments attached anything you could imagine meaning you know it used to be the case that you would only buy sneakers now you buy and sell sneakers and you know the marketplace that that that is the leader in that you know goat today just announced that they raised you know 200 million dollars at an almost
2 billion dollar valuation so is it a is it an e -commerce marketplace maybe I look at it as a financial market they fractionalized shoes essentially and they fractionalized and they wrapped a financial transaction layer around taste and taste making you know there's there's a company called pipe there's
a company called rally road all these folks you know are you know fractionalizing ownership of all kinds of things there's crypto obviously there's stocks there's you know specific bonds so the point is the surface area the investable universe is growing some of it is still very regulated some of it
is really unregulated but the trend is obvious so we're going to financialize everything and we're going to fractionalize ownership of probably everything and so what there is an opportunity now to do is to curate and cultivate a community around that to help people and that's really what I would like
to do I think that it would be a really useful thing to level the playing field so that whether you're you know mom and pop school teacher with five or ten K you're a new grad with you know a thousand K that they had saved up or whether you're an accredited investor I don't judge I would like to treat them
all equally and I would like to say look I've made some mistakes I've had some winners I've really learned how to allocate capital here's how I see the world and here are ways in which I think that you could participate beside me as my partner and if you want to you can and I'll always put you know
my money on the line so that you know that I am NOT trying to surreptitiously become an agent I am a principal and I think that if we can organize that in some useful way I think that we can help a lot of people achieve freedom and if they're concurrently working on happiness I think you'll really fuck
some shit up and fix some stuff really good you said you in a previous I think interviewer may be on Twitter that your job was to be an observer of the present I was wondering if you can double click on that yeah I'll give you something that may you know drive your listeners and viewers crazy let's
look at the 2020 election from first principles that's really look at it from first principles well let's think about foreign policy and foreign policy I think are really four things but it really comes down to three things so number one are sort of like nefarious state actors right let's just let's
just use an example illustrative Russia I think most people feel like you know Russia is pretty sketchy and you know they're generally quote -unquote bad okay well let's uh let's let's think about another state actor you know North Korea I don't think you're gonna see a lot of people jump up on either
side of the aisle supporting North Korea let's think about China I think that we've all realized that you know the bloom is off the road off the rose and that you know we've allowed globalization a strain of globalization that has put America strategically on our back heels and that doesn't make any
sense you know we may not have access to our own semiconductors we don't have access to critical you know rare earth metals to drive electrification we you know have outsourced critical parts of our health care infrastructure to folks that you know can dictate whether we can take care of our own people
that doesn't make any sense right everybody believes that now let's take the Middle East you know the Middle East was incredibly critical because you know a handful of Western countries coming out of World War 2 essentially divvied up and built some artificial maps essentially to make sure that we had
access to this precious resource oil well you know in 2020 we now have you know a 20 or 30 year shot clock where we've decided that we're gonna stop burning oil you know we've essentially already stopped burning coal and it's just a matter of time to stop burning fossil fuels well at that point the strategic
relevance of the Middle East decays significantly so think about that now so from a foreign policy perspective both sides basically see the world in the exact same way Democrats and Republicans they both hate Russia they both hate China and they both think that energy independence means that Middle
East won't matter Wow that's observing the present let's take a different example think about monetary and fiscal policy whether we like it or not we used to be in a world where fiscal policy and monetary policy were separate sometimes they would be along the same lines but they were separate bodies
acting independently now the Treasury and the Fed are inexorably intertwined and it's not just in the United States if you look at it this problem in you know Western democracies in Europe it's the same situation this is crazy right we have inexorably brought together fiscal and monetary policy that's
just the facts now let's look at spending whether you call it the Green New Deal on the left or the infrastructure bill on the right we are going to spend in the next decade tens of trillions of dollars to try to dig ourselves out of this unemployment and GDP hole that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus
pandemic that's gonna happen neither candidate will come to the American people and say we want to spend a trillion dollars on you know digging up coal from the ground and burning coal fired power plants it's not gonna happen one's gonna call it a Green New Deal the other person is gonna call it infrastructure
spending but we're going to you know radically change the face of how America operates as a functional economy okay and it's relatively predictable in my opinion how they're gonna spend that money so if I'm a keen observer of the present if I would put all of that together and I'll say something very
controversial which is we have an election that is now actually of style and not of substance now that doesn't mean it's not important but substantively the positions on critical matters of foreign policy domestic monetary and fiscal policy and spending will roughly be plus or minus the same it takes
a lot of mental fortitude to think through it and look at it that way and not let one's own biases jump in because it will tear you into you know a thousand different mental pieces but that's what I mean by being a keen observer of the present so okay what does this election come down to I think it
comes down to political correctness versus cancel culture if I had to kind of summarize it in a nutshell that's what it is and I think that people will vote on November 3rd about which outcome they want because substantively in action the spending patterns the policy decisions will roughly be the same
and again see it's such a controversial thing and I think people can just go absolutely crazy to hear somebody say that they're gonna go crazy when I don't ask you who you predict will win but what I really want to know is how do you take that and then what do you do with that in the future you said
it okay well this is going to be a predictable path of spending how do you as an investor then take that knowledge that's a fabulous question so this goes back to what I'm trying to do which is if I can observe the present in a reasonably unemotional and detached way to your point I can put a plan together
and when I have a plan you know that plan is specifically for me oriented around how I'm going to make sure that the ideas that I want to see exist in the world win and this is gonna sound maybe turn people off the way I say but at my level of capital that's what I could do I can vote with my dollars
to really make things come to life and I think that that I really take that job seriously and I and I and I aim to do that now which is like okay I'm learning how to be happy you know I've achieved a level of freedom but now it's about change and I want to implement my form of change and I want to see
that in the world so I'm trying to figure out how my ideas have a better chance of succeeding and then I want to make sure that I implement a plan to make that happen and then that adds to my knowledge base and then my hope is to share that with other people so that they can then learn from that as
they will and maybe they can they can also do their version of the of the same thing so you know if I was really yeah I was six years old in 1980 no four years old in 1980 but imagine I was 34 years or 44 years old I would have woken up and I would have said read the paper doesn't matter how much money
okay if I knew then what I know now I would wake up in 1980 and say oh my god the 30 -year rate is that you know 15 -16 percent interest rate man this thing you know if I had to take a guess I really believe in the productivity and the ingenuity of America I'm just gonna be I'm gonna take a guess that 15
% goes to zero before 15 % goes to 50 % and you would have been really right and 80s 90s the 2000s and now the 2010s had you just been levered long equities you know right yeah you would have made a fortune and you would have been right and you would have achieved freedom it doesn't matter whether you
started with a dollar ten dollars thousand ten thousand ten million you would have been unbelievably rich and in many ways you know Buffett's simplicity Warren's elegance of his mental model and I'm not trying to diminish his skill by saying this is is a keen observer of this most important high -level
order idea which is that rates are going to zero productivity is going to go up ingenuity the resourcefulness of America goes up I want to be long back I'm long equities it would have worked now Shane where are we well we're rates at zero right okay so let's take our all cumulative knowledge and look
at today let's just be a keen observer of the present rates are at zero where are they going to go are they going to go to negative five or plus five well now the key question is well probably on the margin you instinctive reaction will be plus five and I would say why I mean what why is zero some artificial
number where everything starts and stops this is not like temperature it's not like we're saying it's absolute zero right it's not like there is no colder temperature than you know 200 and whatever Kelvin 260 something Kelvin or whatever it is it's just zero it's like zero degrees Celsius can you have negative
one degree Celsius of course ask anybody that lives in the Midwest you know or the East Coast so could rates go negative yeah could rates go positive well I don't know I found observing the present what I would say is you know the overwhelming majority of the value in the last ten years has been about educating
billions of people all around the world that things are roughly deflationary meaning as long as you wait tomorrow and delay gratification somebody will and give you more for less right you know I had a I don't know making up a name of a company I had a storage account on Drive calm all of a sudden Dropbox
showed up and said more for less and then I was using Dropbox for a while and then Google Drive showed up and say even more for even less and I'm pretty sure that the next person that figures out how to do storage and scale will come up with even even more for even even less Facebook did the same thing
you know Spotify does the same thing Netflix does the same thing all these things that create so much value are training us psychologically to behave in deflationary ways to delay gratification slightly or to make the cost of switching so low that even if you don't want to delay gratification you can just
change your mind later and cop to the next thing that gives you more for less so it is very conceivable that we are in a deflationary posture for a long time now it's also possible that inflation could go up so my kind of view is well I need to answer this problem in a different way and the way that I
would try to answer this problem is to say to myself well what sectors of the economy will benefit irrespective of whether we go to negative five or plus five because I don't know what the answer to that question is it'll be obvious in hindsight but if it's not obvious today and so I construct an allocation for myself
to try to solve for that well people are going to be buying things so you know they're probably going to be buying things online so you know e -commerce consumption that's a big category that will win whether rates are minus five or plus five people need to care about health care right so they're gonna consume
things and there's probably going to be pressure over time to do you know better and better things and more useful things just because you know we can't keep spending the way we are with the outcomes that we're getting right okay so that's that's the second category you know we probably want to have a reasonable
way of equipping ourselves with skills and education so that's another big category you know we're probably going to need to have clean sustainable energy that's another category we're probably gonna want to eat in ways that are more constructively useful for us that's another category we're probably
going to want to hedge just the chance that none of us knows what we're doing so you know you need some kind of like alternative asset category that's another thing so you can kind of go down the line you know whether you use Maslow's hierarchy or something else as a jumping off point and kind of say
look the answers the high -level answer the framework is obvious healthcare education climate change fintech blah blah blah and then you need to fill in an allocation then you need to figure out the mix of you know early stage versus late stage or public versus you know some of these other things and then
you can construct an answer so you know the way that I answer this is to say well I'm basically going to be log growth because whether rates are minus 5 or plus 5 the thing that overcomes all of that noise is fast growth and CEOs that can invest all the money they make today for the future simply because I
can now lazily let that person work on my behalf because that's less of a problem that I have if you as a company and you said I generate 30 % free cash flow and I'm gonna give you a dividend I would say shame fuck you I don't want that money keep that shit what am I supposed to do with it reinvest it
grow faster please I mean one of the most incredible insights that that we figured out in 2014 I sold all Facebook all my shows there was a new out right into Amazon didn't you but the way we underwrote that investment there's a guy I was working on a team who now runs a hedge fund young guy brilliant
guy who randomly emailed me and I ended up hiring emailing inbox at socialcapital .com this kid Sakya W great great guy he's not a kid he was a kid then and we worked on this analysis and basically you know he said to me I think that Bezos is a better capital allocator than Buffett I was like what the hell
are you talking about and we constructed this really elegant chart which showed basically the P &L of Amazon and it looked at every expense line and he had taken every single expense line created a product around it and made it a revenue line and I thought man this guy is a genius and by the way that deck
is floating around so you can see this chart out there in the wild but that's capital allocation that's really skillful so you want that you want you want a guy that's basically like listen guys I got this we're gonna generate a couple billion dollars I'm gonna put all of it back in the ground for you
and it's gonna grow really well and just trust me and I think that those are the real high quality folks you want to get behind so basically my solution is you got to be long growth higher growth the better in the areas that matter for people and I think that you know in 10 years from now that'll be
a playbook that really works by the way that sounds kind of like he's not saying anything I think it is saying something because like you know the historical model of how you would get freedom is you know 60 % equities 40 % bonds you know the 60 % you would say you know you'd be long ETFs maybe okay well
you know long ETF is basically long fame and I think that you want a little bit more uncorrelated exposure than just fame yeah that's that's kind of like what I'm working through right now is trying to really refine an approach that I think can work for the next decade you know 15, 20 years and then
share it with Google.
So it sounds like part of your process is to go through this and figure out what's not changing and try to allocate there do you also look at what do you where you see massive change and how you could possibly take advantage of that or is that a category you just don't evaluate.
Not in that language I kind of tend to think about things that are just will they be more important and if they're going to be more important how can we accelerate the right outcomes I think climate change is a really good example of that where it doesn't matter whether you believe in climate change
or not I think that what we know to be true we don't like which is that you know the places we use to ski at we can't ski at anymore the places we used to go and bathe on the beach may disappear or not exist and so if nothing else just because of our own selfish desire to be happy we should probably
want a better control at least to the extent that we can our impact on you know taking our own happiness away so you know I don't think people in the world can run where we can observe whether they help we should run them and so you know if you have all these gigatons of carbon being emitted and you
can run an experiment that takes them out we should probably do it and we'll know conclusively whether you know it'll change hurricane season so why not just run the experiment in an unemotional detached way but like you know if you view climate change in that lens it's a multi -decade multi deca trillion dollar
opportunity the the world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change oh that's interesting well as you were saying that I was sort of also thinking there's things that we value today that are going to be massively under or overvalued in the future you know commercial real estate strikes
me as something that maybe maybe that's not going to have the same future as past what do you think of that and what are those industries for you yeah I'll say something that actually makes me a little sad that I think it's true I would not view it I don't view it as commercial real estate versus uh
resi uh residential real estate I would say it this way I think that architecture will unfortunately have a lot less value in the future because of climate change now what does that mean well for example if you look at some of the most progressive countries in the world europe on the climate issue and you
look and you know again start to go back to first principles where is the carbon emitted you know where are the greenhouse gases emitted well it's overwhelmingly in cities and then you start to look at okay well you know what are some of the things that we can do to electrify or to decarbonize and one
thing that you get to is you have all this incredibly beautiful architecture but it's completely dated and the amount of carbon that you know these heating systems these water systems generate you know getting stuck into these very intricate beautiful you know you you walk by these piazzas you think
god these things have been around for 500 years and on the one hand you're like it's on the other hand you're like this is going to be really tough for you know the city of paris or melon or amsterdam to defend historic architecture in the face of also wanting to be carbon neutral and i think in the united
states it's also going to have some direct implications as well so if architecturally you know we unfortunately have to replace some of this old beautiful stuff with more simple modern stuff you know we'll have a more utilitarian landscape or maybe you'll just have a bunch of variations of modern but you
know that's a direct implication of climate change i think that nobody talks about so you know how will that affect people's happiness or people's creativity uh that they're all living in these sort of like i don't know if you've ever been to shanghai but if you cross from you know pudong to shanghai
and you go across this one month bridge it's it sort of looks like this kind of like weird future state where you just have these you know buildings rising up on every single you know to the horizon on each side they all look the same and you think god that's depressing if i had to live in that but we
may have to live in that in a you know climate neutral world do you want that you said successful investing is about behavior in psychology can you expand on that i think that um when push comes to what you're always going to be fighting is yourself panicking overreacting underreacting refusing to observe
the present living too much in the past wanting too much to believe in the future so it's all psychological traps um because the data is there if you want to observe and then just clinically re -underwriting how it sits you know as as part of your risk equation you know how big is that little bet inside
the bucket and so i've tried to really understand how to create an edge and i don't think an edge comes from you know attending conferences or you know writing some crazy algorithmic software maybe a few people can do those things and find an edge but what is a more kind of like mainstream accessible
idea and i think it is that if you define certain behavioral principles that protect you from the worst parts of your own psychology that's a winning strategy um and so you know i have like a handful of these rules that i try to live by and they these behavioral rules around you know trying to think
about things like buying companies versus buying stocks they're trying to think about you know the quality of the ceo the quality of the business trying to think in long duration not looking at the stock price every day you know reading annual reports avoiding quarterly reports you know all these things
that try for me um to solve for my blind spots and um that's allowed me to take bigger and bigger swings because i feel like i'm practicing things that will protect me from myself so i think a lot of what you know you need to do as a person is by the way notice how all these things tie together it's
like you know nobody would have ever told you that focusing on your happiness would make you a great investor but focusing on your happiness in part is saying you know you're exploring who you are as a person you're finding what makes you happy but the other part of that is you're finding out what blind
spots are in your weaknesses right when you're finding ways to deal with them well when you translate that that knowledge of those things into business particularly you know in investing it's enormously helpful um it's a money -making strategy um so i really i really think that spending time understanding
yourself and then translating that into um actionable guardrails that you write down and you stick to um is a really important thing i love the idea of sort of creating these correct automatic behaviors that put you on the path to success by either addressing your blind spots or sort of like showing
you more are there are there sort of personal rules that you have as well or they're like let's let's go deep on that like what do you do to overcome your blind spots in all areas of your life not just investing but personally too i talk and um again i go back to the same thing i just i just talk i
and then when i feel when i find that i revert into a comfort zone where i'm repeating past behaviors that i don't like it's because i've stopped talking to nat to a couple of friends that i rely on to you know two therapists that i talk to on a regular basis it's all about my mental health um the healthier
i am mentally the more i'm able to overcome these natural inclinations to revert to comfortable patterns that have been very well established and well worn they're not healthy but they're just habits you know by talking what happens is people who know me they develop a pattern recognition and then they
start to tell me hey you're being really insecure there hey why are you you know talking in that way or talking about this thing and now what i can do before i would get very defensive and insecure and i would attack the person when they would say that so you know it also needs people who really deeply
at the end of the day love you and care care about you and that's hard to find i mean it's not like those those folks really grow on trees i have two people nat my friend rob and i really talk to them a lot and then i have two therapists and i talk to them weekly and so that's really helpful so yeah
it's just pattern it's just their pattern recognition you know talking is also really good because like it allows you to vent and so you know if you think about sort of like plaque you know flossing it doesn't stop 100 % of the plaque from building up but it does prevent you know 90 95 % so then when the dentist
gets in there you know she's only or he's only cleaning out a little bit of muck and mire versus like all kinds of just random shit and so for me venting is like keeping you know the plaque from building up it's stripping away the plaque it just allows me to get the negative energy out to reframe some
of the things that are happening in my life in a more constructive way and then i can come back to the problem at hand with a health fear mindset and outlook i just i really think the big insight the big unlock is it's not work and personal i don't think these are separate worlds they're deeply subconsciously
intertwined and interconnected and being happy personally is the pathway to help everything else make sense and that is around mental health and i think the key unlock for mental health is just finding a resource to talk to and when you first start talking it's going to be just kind of blathery bullshit
and it's going to be imprecise and it's going to be super awkward and you're going to feel like what is this and then over time it's like anything like when you start to get good at it it's really good you need to exercise that muscle you mentioned pattern recognition i thought that was really interesting
like you've interviewed thousands of ceos over the years what are some of the questions that you asked and the patterns that you recognize and how do you develop that pattern recognition to find the ones that are going to make the biggest difference i've learned that my pattern recognition before was too
brittle it was too superficial i would ask dumb obvious questions for which any good ceo will have very good practiced answers and so now i don't do that anymore i'm trying to solve for something a little bit more elusive which is two things integrity and mental agility the integrity one can't be defined
by a question it's about subtle observations over a long period of time because people take a long time to reveal themselves and going back to how we first started people are very good at lying and being evasive very good and i don't mean to say that in a negative way that you can't trust people you
absolutely can and i actually think the way to overcome all of this stuff is to actually put your trust out there and just trust with reasonable guard rules but to trust and just to assume the best intentions of everybody i think that's a very healthy mindset it just de -escalates a bunch of stress that you
could otherwise have but people reveal themselves in small little ways over long periods of time and when you can observe enough of those observations you can pull them together to get a really good sense of integrity so that you know for me it's like a two three four six month nine month one year journey
and every moment is an opportunity to just re -underwrite my integrity and theirs you know am i being completely whole and honest to them and am i giving them my best you know so am i am i leaning in with 100 of my integrity and then are they giving it back to me and it doesn't have to be in a business
interaction it could be in a personal interaction it could be how they talk to the waiter at a restaurant random conversations you have and their reactions to things their openness to different points of view so that's one thing and then mental agility is just more about what happens when you keep things
open -ended that's not what you would do if you were interviewing someone for a very specific role at a company like you know engineer or something you know there there it's about functional competence and these two things don't matter but when i'm evaluating a ceo those are the only two things that matter
and so it's about a bunch of open -ended conversations where you see how they think and you know when you see how they frame a problem and when you ask kind of seemingly dumb questions and if you're okay to ask what sounds like a dumb question and what they actually hear is a very open -ended question and that's
a great way to sort of figure out uh mental agility because it sparks them in how their mind works and you hear an answer that you wouldn't get otherwise and what you hear is a framework and a process and uh and i really like that you know like meaning like when you frame questions like so what do you
think about and you just say something like random you know just like random you know like jim what do you think about the triangle office and you'd be like what the hell kind of question is that like that has nothing to do with what i know um and then you know you just find people's mental agility
um and i honestly think ceos are incredibly the best ceos are incredibly mentally agile people they're kind of curious they know you know a little bit about a lot you know that's how you have to want to accompany you have to know a little bit about a lot and uh you have to be good at engaging and understanding
things asking questions back you know what what about the triangle offense asks you know makes you want to ask me that question and then i would say well i i just think it's like what do you think about sort of like you know structured approaches that have this sort of like dynamic allocation of like
you know of resources so like you know the triangle offense to me is like this kind of like really cool way where you're like both have rigidity and flexibility and then you know then you may say yeah you know well here's a way that i think about my business that way and all of a sudden you're having
a completely random conversation it required me to say something completely fucking dumb and like what seems like a complete non sequitur to to the average person and then the intellectually mentally agile person you know mostly out of kindness and curiosity engages you and then you end up down a totally
different path that is a great way for me to gut check a ceo i like that a lot i'm glad you didn't put me on the spot with the triangle offense i mean i was just making it up randomly that that's dave's but yeah talk to me like public company ceos who who do you think is the the the sort of like top
five public company ceos not asking for investment advice here just who are the best pure ceos for the next 10 years oh that's a great question okay um elon musk jaff Bezos also really okay you're really putting me on the spot um i love it i get you thinking i'm really thinking to try to answer this in a super
thoughtful way um Toby Toby Toby Lutke i think Toby's really really exceptional he it's phenomenal he's world class on the level of those my gosh it's such a good guy wow i've never been asked it so well jack dorsey exceptional um and i i really owe him actually uh an apology because i had a very dismissive
sensation of jack and i don't really know him that well obviously but it's just just in my observations of sort of his decision making particularly at square um particularly around cash app and you know the decision to you know the the idea of moving to africa is just so smart so genius i mean just
goes to show you the the short -term mind to this of these folks that that we've reacted i think um but dorsey yeah that's four right yeah that's four right elon bezos toby jack dorsey square elon bezos toby jack um uh me which company um i will eventually have something that represents the totality
of my intellectual capital meaning like you're gonna go public i would i would really like to i would like to be under that pressure and um i would really like to work on behalf of everybody uh everybody meaning like you know if i can level the playing field and give folks but i don't know what that is that's
the problem like i don't i don't know like how to answer that question like it's like some amorphous blob like what is it that i do i don't know what i do you could go public tomorrow though why don't you but i think i'm pretty good like i really i really do think i'm good and i think i'm getting better
oh talk to me about that how do you measure the difference between good and like getting better for yourself we all like asymptote at some at some trajectory and i think that i am now one to one and a half orders of magnitude away from my asymptote so you can kind of see it but it's very faint now i
think i have a toolkit to implement a process that can get me close to my asymptote and i would love for me to be able to talk to you in 40 years i'll be 84 and say i'm like within a couple of turns of the asymptote so for me it's it's believing in myself more it's knowing how to take smarter risk being
risk on in larger quantum so i can write you know hundred multi hundred million dollar checks now and feel okay about it i need to be able to do that with billions and tens of billions and this sounds crazy but five or six people in the world really know how to do that well it's not it's not a shot
that a lot of people get a chance to take even if you're running like the largest private equity fund in the world so the wantons of money that people are investing that is that is of their own still relatively limited and small even if the headline numbers are big so i want to learn to do that i want
to learn to feel like less of an imposter the more i do that i think the smarter i can get at distilling and observing the present acting on that and then passing that through to other people so that they can act on it too and so you know i don't have the skill to go deep in one of these things and you
know build one of these platforms i think my skill is slightly different which is sort of to organize a lot of things together in a thematic understanding this is where i think at like i can't be a ceo of a million dollar or a hundred ten million dollar hundred or even billion dollar company because that's
about functional competence but when a company becomes 10 billion dollar plus it's all about capital allocation and i really think um just i'm an outlier in my just maniacal desire to be really good at that so i would want to bet on myself so but that's not an accurate answer to your question because you
said public company ceos and it's not so i'm not i thought you were just gonna break that you're going public right here on the show no no no i have no plans but uh yeah no that whole whatever okay so let's take me out of question that was stupid oh no that's me being feeling like an impostor uh lots
easy i mean like it's like what a it's uh it's you're overthinking this yeah it's a coping what what what is your decision process for when you're making a capital allocation decision i know you've made a few recently like without any specific names so i don't want to get anybody in trouble but what's
that process in your head like like how are you actually what what's what are you talking to yourself about mentally to make sure because it's all on you yeah i uh i i really i really love it like you know we do a lot of work like i i mean i have great partners i have a team that i work with who are just
exceptional people they are the most high integrity people i've ever worked with and they give me enormous energy i have uh some some you know folks that i partnered up with um who have their own organizations as well those folks are super high integrity and so all these people that i spend my day with every
day are just kind good earnest people each of us i don't think are the smartest ones but when we put ourselves together we are really really smart collectively and that's that's awesome and so we all do different things and everybody's bringing different things to the table and then what happens it
allows me to kind of synthesize all kinds of different inputs and learnings and you know variations on a model regulatory research market research you know consumer marketing research all of this stuff and learn about it which is super fun and in my mind what's happening is basically like here's how
this can go right here's how this can go wrong here's how this can go right here's how this can go wrong and i'm bouncing back and forth and all of these things are just oscillating and if i had to characterize it this is going to sound nuts but it's like a and then that oscillation goes faster and faster
and faster and then i find a point of equal agreement.
Is that like the matrix moment for you or like all of this data all of a sudden just sort of like yeah yeah yeah no yeah it is like that it's like you know i i know that leading into something i become a little detached i am a little all over the place my mind's racing my you know so sometimes i'll
be saying non -sequiturs on calls and uh my partners are very patient with me in those processes you've made like public calls you did bitcoin in 2012 you did amazon in 2014 you did tesla in 2015 like you've nailed fairly i would say controversial things at the moment i mean in hindsight they've all
worked out exceptionally well but at the moment they everybody thought you were crazy yeah they really really did and and that's awesome because it's like advantageous divergence right you're diverging from the crowd and you're right yeah and uh and and what it does is it it has given me confidence
in my process it's random you know it's about ingesting a lot of stuff it's allowing yourself to be influenced but then come back home right that's another thing i love meaning um if i'm having a conversation or we're in a sort of a teach -in kind of a situation where i'm learning about something i allow
myself to be seduced i allow myself to sort of fall for the narrative i allow myself to believe the totality of what that other person believes fully and completely because i want to really start to understand the nooks and crannies now that process doesn't work if you want to be intellectually lazy
or if you find yourself being intellectually lazy and you stop when you get you know confirmatory that first confirmatory meeting or that first confirmatory article or you know you could joke but like that first confirmatory google like i'm done you know it doesn't work that way but if you're willing
to bounce around and you know fundamentally be unoffensive in your opinions up front you find that people who have extreme opinions will talk to you in a very unguarded way and i i think i've trained myself to let myself be seduced by those folks so that i can learn from them uh but i always come back
home i come back to the center i come back to no opinion what's the trick for that right like there's this quote from ender's game that i was thinking have you ever watched that movie or read the book where he says there's this moment where i understand my enemy better than they understand themselves
and in that moment i sort of love them and defeat them and it sounds like you're allowing yourself to understand somebody else's opinion like so fully but you don't get caught up in it how do you avoid no i do in the moment um but i know to slow it down and then i also know to come back home so i think
i think maybe the maybe the clarifying question shane would be like what is your process of coming back okay so what i have to do is i have to go and then be it again it takes it none of this is possible without an incredible team that has super high integrity the anchoring principle of which is kindness
so i will come back to my partners i'll be like guys and they're like okay or i'll go to nap she's like okay i got you okay okay got it you know or rob or you know like all these and so it's it's wonderful um and so then i go okay i was getting a little excited there or i come back can you believe this i
can't believe this one this sucks man they're like uh -huh okay yeah got you got you good okay uh and you know i i've learned that i do that and so i can i get back home faster um and it helps me but uh but i do that a lot i allow myself to live in the persona of that person and that opinion because it
allows me to understand where they're coming from that sounds like a superpower man like just to be able to understand at somebody's level without bringing any of yourself into it and just be like i really want to see the world through your eyes i want to see everything i want to feel what you feel
i want to see what's valuable all the variables i want to see how they connect but the way that you see the world and then coming back and then saying now i can see the world through this person's eyes and my eyes i have fewer blind spots and i have a more more accurate view of reality if you will yeah
are you still are you still high on bitcoin yeah really yeah i just think that um you know i think that we are dismantling financial orthodoxy and in that dismantling and in the leveling of the playing field there will be moments of volatility and to have a small amount of insurance that's uncorrelated
to the orthodoxy i think it's just a smart risk management thing i don't i'm not super emotionally caught up in it you know it's not like i'm cheering on the failure of you know central banks and like i'm not decrying all the money getting printed i'm not that emotional about that stuff but i just think
it's a smart thing to have under the mattress just in case how do you think about all this spending i mean we're every western country is about to basically you know spend themselves into i don't know what position but they're going to spend more money in the next you know 10 to 15 years than they've
probably spent in the past hundred and a lot of it on the surface and i haven't looked into this as much as you have but a lot of it on the surface seems like we're going to prop up the status quo instead of investing where things are going in the future right so i know some countries are writing checks
to people to stay at home but they're not requiring them to adapt to new skills that'll be valuable in the future they're sort of just propping up the way the world used to be how do you think about that yeah i i i think that um or chin check me like am i completely wrong um i think in part it's not totally
true what you're saying um meaning like you know if you look at sort of the eu budget um an enormous percentage of that budget is going to uh you know a carbon neutral eu by you know 20 frankly not even 2050 they're trying to pull it forward and do it 2040 in some industries you know 2030 so i think
the spending is actually going in in reasonable places i think that there are there's always waste and the reason is that you know politics and political bodies don't know enough to write specific legislation so they get influenced by all kinds of folks and so that's what creates waste and so you have to
be okay with that it's just a natural dynamic of democracies and you know the waste we we deal with the waste because in return we get freedom you know a different kind of freedom right i mean like you know maybe you can have the most you know efficient thing in country in the world but if it's autocratic
you may not want that you also don't want super efficient countries right like we've learned this we we want resilient companies we want resilient countries we want resilient people and i think this this focus on hyper efficiency also had us you know manufacturing ppe in certain locations and not having
a national stockpile and you know we've done this in in a lot of ways where we've seeded this um redundancy or actually we're taught this in school like business school teaches you right like redundancy is a waste and you can turn that waste into capital and so we become hyper efficient i agree with you
we just put this multi business school as an example has taught you that redundancy is waste and waste can be converted into profit and profit is converted into compensation and i think that is what people have really drank the kool -aid on and so you know when they ran out of waste that they could convert
into profit they had these ultra quote unquote efficient companies and then they just redirected you know the middle part of that equation to generate more compensation which was like you know okay well we've eliminated all the ways we've outsourced everything to china we're generating more money than ever
now what should we do and then people said oh we'll just start to buy back the stock and that'll also drive compensation you know these things these things i think are cycles that that all flow from the incentives around comp unfortunately i just i just wanted to yeah i know i thought that was that was excellent
do you think governments should bail out public companies industries which ones i think that the government should really be plowing money into the next generation of industries and i think that the government should always be on the bleeding edge of not needing to make money in in some critical important
industries for the future and so in the absence of doing that we've lost touch with the things that have really propelled the united states forward for example you know why was the space race so important you know on the one hand it was about you know american determinism right like we are going to
do this this is going to happen but it was also that it created an entire generation of industries that were derivative from the space industry because you were training people with a level of skill and precision and capability that they could then apply to other markets so we always need to be in space
you know we always need to be pushing the boundaries you know we need to go you know not just to the moon but now to mars and beyond um it can't just be Elon's task that's not fair you know you put him against the wall and he's got to raise an enormous amount of capital that you know if we had government
sponsorship for uh we could have we could have done a lot more sooner in many ways you know that this deflationary super cycle really started in 1970 when we basically ended the space program and it's in the early version that saw us get to the moon so i think that you know that's a really big thing
um that's where that's where i think like you know governments should be spending their money they should be making bold bets on other markets too like you know uh climate change or they should be changing incentives around you know healthcare they should be changing incentives around education you
know if you were going to spend money you know why don't you just wipe out all the student debt i don't think that's such a bad thing and in return make people you know join some sort of like american peace corps that kind of like does work and volunteers and you know there's all kinds of ways that that that government
can allocate capital probably a little bit more productive i like that i'm gonna switch gears and start asking some of these twitter questions so you can you can answer rapid fire if you want of all the provocative and controversial things that you've said which ones do you regret none what do you think
future chamath will disagree with that you agree with today anything come to mind that you're sort of on the edge of it no but if i'm if i'm evolving i will have learned so much more that my thoughts today will seem slightly immature in my youth what's the last thing you change your mind about oh my
gosh three or four things just today what do you think of the entire venture capital industry um well -intentioned somewhat misguided somewhat low integrity in certain places misaligned is this work from home thing real and what are some of the implications it's partially real and i think the biggest
implication is belongingness community feeling part of a um a group um and so i think when we can go back to the office will want to i think one thing that we miss on this um is that we like to feel part of something larger than ourselves and that's become harder not only in our communities in some
ways i mean in some ways it's easier because we're all going through this common struggle but we're also it's harder in our community and we don't feel like even though you're working for a company or you're working with people it doesn't feel as much and i've noticed a lot of people have started saying
well it's becoming really transactional now i don't see people at the office and asking but their weekend anymore it's becoming very sort of i think that's really interesting sort of observation i think i think that's well said i think that's a really important thing i completely agree with you how
do you manage risk i mean i have i have a framework uh it's basically a barbell you know a big chunk of the liquid bets a big chunk of very concentrated liquid bets and then a slug in the middle that's just more kind of like random cash or the smp 500 for the next five years you had something about why
men live uh less long do you remember that on twitter yeah i tweeted something out what was that um didn't it have something to do with like we couldn't talk about our emotions or something yeah no no it has to do with mental health and emotion i i really do believe that i mean i think that you know
like well i mean just ask the question like why do women live longer than men why do women live longer why no no why i mean why why i don't know i i think that there's something to the fact that they're able to talk about feelings in a way that uh is unnatural for men 100 i really think people think
this is like a crock of worship i don't but i think that um your physiology is not just how your lower intestine processes blah blah blah like that's not what it means it's like the the body is like a very complicated combination of emotions and you know cells and organs and all of these biological
psychological functions interacting and we've all seen that play out um and so you know it's like it's inconceivable that your mental health doesn't improve your health i mean right yeah you you sound like an idiot if you said that and uh i just think that dudes don't talk and it's a little bit stigmatized
than it is for women and i think that that's a wonderful superpower that women can teach the rest of us my i mean like i said my partners taught me how to talk and i would be eternally grateful for for having taught me that next question what are some of the lessons you learned from the book the adult
children of alcoholics which you recommended a few times the most important one is how i was normal and uh it's again it's pretty obvious or not obvious but may sound bland but like you know to feel so deeply insecure and somewhat of an impostor my whole life and always the outsider you know um that's
the first book that said hey there's an entire group of people that will behave this way based on these inputs and i was like wait a minute i behave in those ways wait you're telling me that i'm not this deficient broken person that i'm a byproduct of this and this is well studied and it's like it's
actually normal and you can improve where you are was it was a profound moment all right last question what's the most miss miss valued asset in the world today either high or low oh wow this is really good question okay um you can pick most undervalued or most overvalued oh my gosh wow see i i really
take these questions seriously like when you ask me that i wanna no but i want to give you like a right answer and uh i don't really know i had you can just say i don't know i mean yeah i don't know okay i don't know i don't know how to answer that question to be honest with you it's a really good question i
love the the video thing we just started doing this but i can see the wheels turning in your head i love it this has been an amazing conversation jamath i want to thank you so much for taking the time thanks man i really uh i really appreciate it thanks for having me hey one more thing before we say
goodbye the knowledge project is produced by the team at fernum street i want to make this the best podcast you listen to and i'd love to get your feedback if you have comments ideas for future shows or topics or just feedback in general you can email me at shane at fs dot blog or follow me on twitter
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until the next episode you
