Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Chamath Palihapitiya – The Major Problems Facing the World – [Invest Like the Best, EP.211]

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Coifin, one of the fastest growing fintech startups. I discovered Coifin earlier this year when I asked Twitter for the best Bloomberg alternative, and the overwhelming winner was an intriguing new product called Coifin. Coiffin is a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other assets all in one place. I now use it daily to track what's going on in the market, and I think if you try it, you will too. Coifin has tons of high-quality data, powerful functionality, and a nice, clean interface. If you're an individual investor, research analyst, portfolio manager, or financial advisor, you should definitely check them out.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Sign up for free at coiffin.com. That's k-o-y-f-n.com. This episode of Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Teegas. I started hearing about Teegas when several of my close professional investor friends sent me passages or ideas they'd found on the Teegas platform. Conducting effective primary research shouldn't take weeks. It should take hours. Searching for answers shouldn't be lengthy, cumbersome process. It should be easy and nearly immediate. Expert calls should not cost $1,000. TIGIS solves these problems and makes primary research faster and better for professional investors. TECS has built the most extensive primary

Starting point is 00:01:07 information platform available for all investors. With TIGAS, you can learn everything you'd want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls allowing others to instantly access more than 10,000 calls on a firm, teledoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Still want to do your own calls, Teegas has a solution. Experts that are just as good or better than what you'd find on other networks for just $300 per call, not the $1,000 or more that others charge. If you're curious about Teegis, call the top performing investment manager you can think of.

Starting point is 00:01:40 They're probably already a Teegas customer and they'll point you in the right direction because customers, myself included, love Teegas. Visit teagis.com slash Patrick to learn more. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfield guide.com.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunsi Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshonosi asset management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest today is Chimoth Polyhapatia, the founder and CEO of Social Capital, whose mission is to advance humanity by solving the world's hardest problems. I didn't know where this conversation would take us, given Chimoth's wide-ranging activities

Starting point is 00:02:50 and interests, but I think it provides an interesting glimpse into some of his core beliefs and the source of his personal drive. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover potential paths to closing the income inequality gap, how to manage one's personal psychology, his perspective on value investing and tackling climate change. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chamath Polyapatia. Jamath, I don't know where to start this conversation. We're going to talk about 50 different things. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Maybe I'll start somewhere completely non-traditional that I don't see you get asked too much about on these podcasts, which is the topic of personal finance. We'll definitely talk about the categories of your investing and capital markets and

Starting point is 00:03:30 the future and all these great topics as well. But maybe we'll begin very small with just individual personal finance. The reason I'm interested in your opinion here is what you've had to say about student debt and the really interesting story about $27,000 of debt that you once had, which I think was a part of your early motivations and thinking about risk. Maybe tell that personal story and then talk a little bit about how you think about personal finance as a topic. Maybe I'll go back even a years earlier, but when I was 14 years old, my first job was at Burger King. I cleaned the toilets and mop the floors. And the greatest part about that, I remember how much I made $4.55 an hour. But the greatest thing about that job was the manager at the Burger King had one of those

Starting point is 00:04:12 university varsity jackets. He had gone to University of Waterloo, which is ultimately where I ended up going. And what I saw up front was there is no guarantee of success by going to school. They don't mean to be pejorative, but he's a very good guy, and he was a really kind to me. But I don't think anybody ever thought of you would go to university and end up necessarily managing a Burger King unless you wanted to. So I worked there, and then there was these riots in Los Angeles related to the Rodney King trial. And in response to that, the government of Ontario created a sponsorship program for minority kids who were growing up on welfare. And so I applied to that. I was accepted, which meant that I could go and get a job at any company I wanted, subsidized by the Ontario government. And most of these kids would go and work at Sears or Zellers. And instead, I took all of my dad's rejection letters because he had been applying for jobs.

Starting point is 00:05:08 My dad unfortunately didn't get onto a good professional cadence in North America. And I got a job at a company called Newbridge Networks, which was run by this entrepreneur, billionaire guy. named Terry Matthews and I went there and I was making $10 an hour. My introduction to personal finance was understanding our rent, $350 a month, my parents' bills because I would go marketing with my mom. And we didn't have a car. So I knew exactly how much cars cost because I would walk by the use car lots. I knew exactly how much all the groceries cost. I knew how much my mom and I would spend on groceries every week. I knew how much the milk was. I knew that once a year, The cheesecake at Loblaws would get discounted as a special from $699 to $499, and we could buy one. And these are the memories that I have.

Starting point is 00:05:58 And so I grew up very aware of personal finance, how to balance the checkbook and how to pay for bills and how to think about budgeting and what you needed to do when you didn't have enough money. And bus passes were $32 a month in Ottawa and $16 for kids. For my parents and myself, it was $100 some odd dollars. And that was the first hundred some odd dollars every month of my paycheck. And then I learned how to side hustle. I ran a little casino during lunch hours, 25 cents to a dollar. And I was the house because I went to a very good high school.

Starting point is 00:06:30 And so these kids had a lot of money. They lived in these very nice areas of Ottawa. So I ran this casino and I would probably make $50 to $100 a week. And then when I wasn't working at Burger King, a friend of mine and I would go to the charity casinos all around Ottawa. and we would play blackjack and I learned how to count cards. And I would take that 100 and I could probably spin it up to 150. So all of a sudden I had a couple thousand dollars.

Starting point is 00:06:53 And I took the couple thousand dollars and then I went to the casino in Montreal and I lost it all. And I had to come back and start all over again. So that was the cycle. So then in university, that was the first time though I ran into debt because despite my ability to give money to my parents and had a little bit of money to do all these things in the school casino that I ran, it wasn't still enough to. pay for school, and even in a country that had subsidized education. I was collecting debt $5,000 to $7,000 a year, and by the time I had graduated, I had almost $30,000 of debt. And my first job was as a derivatives trader. It was right at the peak of the bubble, and I was investing a lot in the sense that I would make these picks for my bosses, and they were making

Starting point is 00:07:34 a lot of money. It was an incredibly transformational moment. My boss, Mike Fisher, who just retired this year, but at the Bank of Montreal, he said to me one day, he's like, Sherman, that was my nickname. He's like, Sherman, how much do you owe student loans? And I was like, oh, Fish, I owe like 27,000. I was picking some pretty deep tech stocks for him. At the time, there's a company, I think it was PMCCCRA and JDS Unifase, like these hip companies. I picked a couple, and Mike had done really well.

Starting point is 00:08:03 And he wrote me a check, and he said, I'm going to pay off your debt. If you go right now, downstairs, pay it off. And I was shocked. And I went downstairs and I paid it off. And it changed my life because all of a sudden I had capital because at the end of the month, I was not necessarily breaking even. Even through all of that, after I graduated, probably half my paycheck went back to my parents, paying for their house, paying for bills, paying for my sisters.

Starting point is 00:08:27 That was sort of my whole life until I'd finally gotten a little liquidity at Facebook. That's all I'd ever known. But that one thing, all of a sudden, gave me $1,000 or $2,000 of free cash flow a month. I could accumulate some savings. I could make some investments. So I was learning the hard way. But to be honest with you, what it really taught me is that personal finance is not taught. Nobody knows how to get ahead.

Starting point is 00:08:49 That being poor is a systemic condition in North America. It is a disease that's equivalent to diabetes and heart disease or depression or any other kind of mental illness, except that it's structural and institutionalized. It's not something that's wrong with your physiology. Poverty is just something that's conditioned into people. in the way that society works in a Western. What do you think are the best ways to attack this problem? Curious how you think about it from every angle.

Starting point is 00:09:18 So from the bottom up for somebody listening or somebody that's in a similar situation to what you were that's listening or somehow hears this, or policy-driven, top-down, or how have you thought about ways in which we might reverse this perpetual problem? I think the biggest risk to our democracy is inequality. I think the best solution is to empower people from the bottoms up to be able to save and to invest. So if I were to break down the simple key insight, which is going to sound very superficial to somebody that's financially savvy like you, is that it took me a long time to understand the difference between labor and capital. If I talk to my friends, and I've been lucky enough now to meet a lot of famous people, if you will, athletes, entertainer. especially minorities like me, the single biggest thing is that we confuse being labor and capital

Starting point is 00:10:14 all the time. If you're getting paid two or three million dollars a year, you think you've made it. You haven't made it. There's somebody above you that's making 20 or 200 million dollars year. They're capital. We're labor. When I made a lot of money at a bank or when I was an employee at Facebook, I was well compensated labor. The biggest transition is one of philosophy, which is for us to understand that that dichotomy exists. And then to ask the question, how does a person who makes their money as labor also start to make money in the form of capital as an owner? And that's a mental shift.

Starting point is 00:10:50 It's this idea of understanding that you can own a piece of a great business, even if you own one share to not look down disparagingly at yourself because of that. It's to understand that if you're an owner, it's that Buffett, quote, it's not timing the market. It's time in market. That's what owners do. They own pieces of things forever. And I think that it's an enormous misunderstanding of the poor. It's enormous misunderstanding amongst minorities.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And I think that the money class, the biggest edge that they have is that very, very simple understanding about the difference between labor. and capital. I think the key to peace and prosperity today, as I see the problems, is to close the inequality gap. And to close the inequality gap is to show people, everyday normal people, how they can earn and save and invest and be a part of capital, not just be a part of labor. Luckily, a lot of the frictions because of technology have come down. There's a lot of companies that make owning at least public stocks, let's say, more accessible than they used to be. But I'm sure that's only a part of the solution here. What do you think are the most effective ideas, no matter how crazy they might sound?

Starting point is 00:12:09 I'm super interested in this topic as well and would certainly use my own time to try to help solve it. What are ways that you've thought about to reach the right people in the right ways to convince them to take action? Because there's a lot of literature on personal finance. It hasn't solved the problem. What do you think are some tangible things that we might do? And this is where we might get into policy, whether that's granting ownership versus cash or something like this as some sort of basic income.

Starting point is 00:12:32 What are your thoughts on solving this? I do think that there are a handful of things that we can do at the top down. I do believe in UBI because I think that there is an enormous amount of money that is wasted structurally by governments and that I think it's better allocated into the hands of individuals. I also believe in an idea that a friend of ours, Brad Gersner, said one day he and I were both doing an interview, but he said there should be a birth dividend. When you're born, the United States government should give a kid $2,000 and have it invested in the market for them, something that they can't access until they're 65. I just thought that was such a glorious idea so that a kid from

Starting point is 00:13:12 an early age can see that they are owners, that they're part of capital, not labor, or at a minimum that they can be a part of both. Those are some structural top-down ideas. But the reality, is that I think that from my perspective, what I have to do is try to do what I do in a radically transparent way. Because at first, I think people are piqued by the curiosity of a chance to also be a part of capital. Sometimes people ask me like, hey, you're a little grotesque on Twitter. People get upset. Why do you publish your returns or why do you do this? And I said, you don't get it. You're losing the bigger picture. You want to open the large. is top of the funnel so that people see a fundamentally flawed human being, i.e. me,

Starting point is 00:13:58 capable of doing it and think, why not me as well? And I really believe in that idea, and I believed in it for a long time. I just think that a big trap that, again, minorities and the poor do to themselves, as they say, I can't do that. First is deconstructing that idea. Of course you can do that. If the person like me can do it, I'm no better or worse than most everybody else, and so they can too. Then they can see a method, and then they can start to figure out how much of that method they can create for themselves, do their own work, find the things that they love, become a part of the ownership class, and let time take care of it. So that's what I think we can do. I think that there needs to be more examples of folks like me who are just out

Starting point is 00:14:40 there swinging. And what that means is sometimes you're going to hit grand slam, sometimes you'll hit doubles and single, sometimes you're going to strike out. But if all of it's visible, it's less under this grand veil and that you can see that there's no huge answer. It's just reps and it's attempts and it's studying and it's getting it right and wrong. And I think that it demystifies the process of being part of capital, being an owner. I've seen you write that cybersecurity and news are two things that maybe we shouldn't be optimizing for free cash flow around. Do you think this is a third? Another way of asking the question is, is there a commercial opportunity here, like the villain test concept that even if you were just doing it for purely selfish reasons, you might solve

Starting point is 00:15:21 this problem with a for-profit business. Have you thought about that angle? I've always thought that social capital needs to be public so that I can just have a one-stop shop, a buffet, if you will, to solve this problem for people. It's not for everybody. I do think that our generation needs a version of Berkshire. I think that our generation has versions of hedge funds. The problem is hedge funds are only available to the rich money class. So again, if you're an average normal person who wants to try to become a part of the ownership class and not just live their life as labor, what do you do and where do you go? There are no ways and the rules are set up against you.

Starting point is 00:16:02 In both Democratic and Republican administrations, they compound inequity. They make it harder and harder. Think of what's happened, Patrick, in the last 20 years. we have literally made every single shred of information available online. We've allowed anybody to have the compute of supercomputers available at their fingertips. But despite all of that, we still think people are stupid. And the rules are set up that we gate people. If you buy the benefit, and I'm sure you know people, I know people, I know so many stupid

Starting point is 00:16:33 fucking morons that were born rich. And I know so many brilliant people who are not rich. These brilliant people can't invest, and the stupid fucking morons, because their daddy or mommy was rich, has access to stay rich. That to me is disgusting. Is that what the intention of these laws were? I've made money for rich people. It's fine, but I would much rather make money for normal folks. And along the way, to the extent that we can do it successfully, I would like to figure out a formula for folks to be able to live a happier life. The other thing that I realize is another trap of poverty. An enormous trick that if you're growing up poor, you tell yourself is that the key to happiness is a bunch of numerical scores. You'll say finance, meaning financial security, and you'll create a score for yourself, like a zero to ten score.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Now, bear with me in this example. Then you'll be like productivity. That'll be a zero to ten score. Then you'll be like fun, zero to ten score. And what happens is you get into this. hamster wheel in trying to give yourself a higher and higher score at each of these things. Oh, I have $100,000 of savings. Instead of viewing that as a checkbox, all of a sudden, you re-rate yourself from a nine back down to a one. And you're like, now I need to get to a

Starting point is 00:17:52 million. In terms of productivity, instead of saying, well, wow, look, I went to college. I paid off my debt. I have kids. I'm living a good life with good friends. You're trying to trade up and do more. So instead of feeling you're really productive, you're like, oh, my neighbor's doing more or XYZ entrepreneur is doing more. So now instead of a nine, I'm a one or fun. Oh, I took this really nice vacation. It was a road trip. I took my kids around. You're like, oh, wait, I wasn't on a yacht. So now instead of a nine, I'm back down to a one. But that's the psychology of poverty. It's this scarcity mindset where you're constantly re-rating yourself and finding inadequacy. Whereas if you could tell yourself that it's a binary score. And if you really forced yourself to say it's a

Starting point is 00:18:35 one or zero. At any number where you feel like you had some savings, you could cover some gaps, if things went bad, whatever, and you gave yourself a one, whether you had a billion, a million, or $100,000, and then same for productivity, and then same for fun, you would all of a sudden unshackle yourself from all of these things that keep you trapped. That's another thing that I think I would love to show people, and I struggle with it. Don't get me wrong. Like, I'm living through this every day, trying to tell myself it's a binary score, not a numerical score. Now, my problem is it's beyond even a zero out of ten. I'm at like, fucking nine decimal places trying to figure out. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm obsessed with the minutiae of the score

Starting point is 00:19:15 that I lose sight of it all. And I trap myself. If you think about these as like psychological boss battles that you have to fight, get to the next level of the game, so to speak, and change that North Star for your own motivation, not chase some of these resets. What have you beaten and what bosses have you not yet beaten in your own psychology? My biggest trap is that I've complexified measurement as opposed to simplified measurement. So all of a sudden, my measure of productivity became in my mind measured to two and three decimal places or my measure of financial success. And I'm like, wait a minute, I actually have to be going to fewer decimal places and to a

Starting point is 00:19:53 binary score of a one or a zero. What does it take to do that? to move from more precision to less precision. To be honest, I'm just pretty riddled with insecurity, a lot of anxiety, just a sense that I don't deserve it. That comes from a feeling of inadequacy where I was never praised as a kid. So what do you do if you've never been praised as a kid? You have to find your own way of telling you that you're not worthless. So how do you do that?

Starting point is 00:20:22 In my case, I took the path more travel. which is that I just became very insecure. And that insecure would bubble up as motivation. So if I was working on a project or developing a model or thinking about a product or iterating on some technology, it would be motivated out of anxiety and insecurity because that well was very deep. And it gave me infinite motivation. But there could have been a different way, which is to kind of say, hey, you know what, why don't you just tell people, here's how I feel. And here's where this emotion is coming from. And here's why I'm reacting this way. And it probably would lead to better outcomes because you wouldn't feel as much of an imposter all the time. And then

Starting point is 00:21:06 it wouldn't compound this loop of seeking more and more thinking that there was a solution to it. That's the biggest battle that I fight is just the sense that I'm worthless, that I'm unworthy. And it has really pernicious impacts. Like one thing that I'm realizing is that what that causes in my personal life is for me to always be a risk manager. Now, that skill set is incredibly valuable in my professional life. That is my job. I am a capital allocator. I'm a builder. I'm allocating risk. I'm judging risk constantly, making bets, sizing bets. That's not how you manage your personal life. That's not how you manage relationships. I'm going to have one unit of intimacy with you, but six units of intimacy with this guy. And, oh, hold on, this guy did something wrong to me. So I'm going to deduct four

Starting point is 00:21:52 units over here. What is that? That's a life of being a sociopath. I have to learn to do the exact opposite of it, which is to constantly be all in and lead with my vulnerability. If I can master that battle or at least get better with it, I can get to the next level of both professional and personal capability. That's the battle that I'm facing now that I deal with every day. This may be related about five years ago. You wrote this interesting kind of four point score card is probably the wrong word given how we've been talking about it. But focusing on family, friends, memories, and legacy that you calculated your actuarial table. You had 15,000 days or something to live. And we're a couple thousand days into that period since you last wrote that.

Starting point is 00:22:33 What have you learned about those four categories and how would you grade yourself five years in? I wrote that in a moment where I was right at the precipice of a profound amount of change. My father died October 30th of 2014. My best friend died of May 1st, 2015. I had a lot of changes in my personal life. My professional life was coming undone. I tried to give myself an anchor, a little lighthouse, if you will. I really did feel like I was lost at sea. I just need to see something off in the distance that kind of says, hey, everything's going to be okay. The most profound thing is I started a relationship with somebody who has fundamentally become my partner in all things. She's a successful business person, but she's also in a incredibly emotionally intelligent person. She's my partner. And I didn't understand what that was. She is the person that is my sounding board for everything. Here's this investment. Here's this HR decision. Here's that issue. Here's this problem. Here's this opportunity. And also, here's this thing that I noticed with one of the kids or this or that. It is the totality.

Starting point is 00:23:43 And what I realized is if I can be vulnerable and if I can be authentically insecure, I can really only do it around her. Even then, I don't do it all the time. I'm at my best, my fucking absolute best. That's really the biggest thing I've learned. And then all these other things do slot into place. If I look back, I'm like, I've reset my friendships in a way where I've up-selected a few that I really could see them in a way I never saw them before.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Like, I see them in 360 degrees and I really cherish them. I've also been able to see that some people were unhealthy in my life and separate myself from them, that they were coping mechanisms for me at times where I didn't know how to cope myself. I think I'm in a much better place with my family. But it was because I had a partner, basically. She kind of like dropped it on the boat. She was like, what the fuck is going on here? And I'm like, I don't know. It's a mess. She's like, okay, calm down. Step by step. Let's figure this out slowly. See that lighthouse over there. We're going to slowly row over there. And I game into the process. I love that concept. And I wonder how much of this boils down to like the pernicious or

Starting point is 00:24:50 negative side of goals. Always a moving goalpost. And once you reach one, often it's not as exciting as you anticipated it to be. And it's much more about that process. Thinking of that process, I wonder we talked about personal finance. What in your mind are the other major issues of our time? I want to dig into each of them and talk details, capital allocation and business, et cetera, we'll get to all these great topics. But let's just set the groundwork. What do you think the other big issues of our time are? I would say number one is inequality. We've kind of talked about that. How do we allow ourselves to break the systemic shackles of institutionalized poverty that we have in America?

Starting point is 00:25:29 The second is climate change. The way that we live our life and our desire for progress has fundamental implications to how every other country also wants to live and frankly has a right to live. And that creates an unsustainable earth. And then the third is skills and education, which is that we've been lying to a lot of people for a really long time about what it takes to be productive. This is what I mean by, again, talk about systemic institutionalized lies. We created a grandiose, highly defined scale of four decimal places on productivity and education. This is why people go to school. They get into $120,000 of debt. Then they're upsold a master's degree. Then they're upsold some other degree.

Starting point is 00:26:18 then they're upsold the certificate. And all of a sudden, they have $250,000 of debt, no chance to get out and no meaningful chance of employment because it never mapped to what the world needs. If you can, number one, just allow people to understand how to be a part of land capital. Number two, create environmental security so that we have food security, resource security.

Starting point is 00:26:42 And then number three, allow people to move towards a binary definition of productivity. I think that you solve the three high-order issues of our modern society. So let me give you a more practical example. You have a kid who's growing up, lower middle class, and let's talk about the future state. She grows up. Let's say she's born with this birth dividend. From the age of one, she has $2,000 compounding in an ETF that just owns the S&P 500.

Starting point is 00:27:11 So she's just tracking global GDP. As goes the world, so does she. Let's think about that. What do we grow at? We grow at 8% a year. So she'll have almost $300,000 just from that. That doesn't include any dividends reinvested. That doesn't count more that she could theoretically invest because she gets a taste of ownership. So that's piece number one. So now we're breaking the classic definition of labor and capital, even if it's in a small way. The second thing is that she lives in a world where she has access to food and water. She's able to move if she wants to, to a reasonable,

Starting point is 00:27:44 cost-affordable plant-based diet if she wants so that it diminishes her impact and toll on the earth. She's able to get access to transportation on a fleet of Bev cars that doesn't basically spew carbon into the atmosphere. She doesn't have to worry about all kinds of other populations invading where she lives because of food insecurity or water insecurity or rising sea levels. So she can live a predictable life. And then she goes to boot camp to learn to be a nurse or a coder. She's able to sign up for an ISA as opposed to student debt. She realizes that she doesn't need to be $200,000 in debt. And she graduates and she's able to pay off her ISA in three or four years. And she has 100% employment because as a nurse right now, there's 100% employment. Now, think of that for any kid

Starting point is 00:28:29 living in the middle class or the lower middle class today. Take a different example where a kid becomes part of the green revolution and instead joins a marketplace where he can become an expert in installing solar panels or hydropanels or artificial church. Now, think of a different example where a kid decides that she wants to become a coder. Again, all of these things are structurally constructive for GDP, which means that the 8% could actually go up higher. So bucket number one wins. Bucket number two wins because the environment gets better.

Starting point is 00:28:57 And then bucket number three wins because these people have now moved to a binary definition of productivity and they're that much closer to being happy. We have to understand that most people, given economic security, just want to be left the fuck alone. I mean, they just want to have a nice life, raise kids, have some memories, have some fun, drink some beers, watch some football. Like, people are good, normal, ordinary folks living ordinary lives. And we complicate their life because we have all these unintended consequences that we need to undo now. I love the big ideas that I'm going to try to now weave into your own progression as a capital allocator across your career, maybe beginning right at the start of,

Starting point is 00:29:37 I'll call it social capital 1.0. You said something earlier, which is that you've made money for rich people and that that was a part of the first iteration of what you were doing. Talk me through what you learned through social capital 1.0, investing a substantial portion. I think you were a huge percentage of the original capital. So certainly had big skin in the game, but other skin in the game too. What did you learn about capital allocation done well or poorly while managing money for yourself, but also for others? I learned a couple things. I really did like the pressure of having to work on behalf of others. So I think that was an enormous positive. Being held accountable to produce monthly and quarterly reports, having an annual report, being benchmarked to at the time they were all early stage private funds, Patrick. So like the Cambridge indices. I love that. I love being able to see ways of looking at the health of our portfolio. I loved figuring out better and innovative ways of doing diligence. So I loved the game. I was the largest LP in all of our funds. I felt an immense responsibility to do right by them because I felt an immense responsibility to do right by myself. I don't think that's how every GP operates. I think many other people would say, I feel much more freedom and intellectual capability in managing other people's money. I understand that. In fact, I worked with people for whom that dynamic is true. What I know about myself is that's not true.

Starting point is 00:31:04 for me. Because again, now going back to what I said earlier, the minute my money is on the line, it touches this somewhat broken part of my personality that goes to this immensely insecure, anxious well of unworthiness. I feel consumed by a desire to be worthy. And it clarifies my thinking in a way that if I was just managing money for other people and being just a GP, I don't think I would do as well. So I know that about myself, but I learned all of these other extremely positive characteristics. Leaving that 1.0 model, I also learned that I had made some mistakes in team selection that I never wanted to make again. And specifically, I had, of all the people, there was 80 or 90 people, they were all overwhelmingly incredible people. And I would highly

Starting point is 00:31:57 recommend them. But there were three people who were scumbags. And these three scumbags, fundamentally were dishonest people. In my insecurity, I tolerated them. They've also landed on their feet, and I won't say who they are, but I think they know who they are. I would never work with them again. I would never support them in any way, just because at the end of the day, they took advantage of everybody that was working there, even if they didn't realize it.

Starting point is 00:32:26 I learned to optimize for integrity over capability. And that was a huge learning because I didn't think that that's how great teams were built. Having met a few of the alumni from Social Capital 1.0, who basically to a person have been extremely impressive, I know that there was this state-of-the-art system at the time, what I'll call a quantitative system for evaluating businesses, and that when you look at your recent track record and investing activity, there's this also just tremendous qualitative thrust to it, meaning something behind it is one of these big ideas that we've talked about. There's a big picture understanding that at the stage the businesses are at would be impossible to capture purely in data.

Starting point is 00:33:05 What have you learned about that yin and yang of respecting data and quantitative analysis, but not, I guess, using it entirely and focusing also on the qualitative big picture? I think it's very hard to explain the process. I feel like a vet, like a veteran baseball player or a veteran golfer. You just learn after infinite reps how to hit the shot or how to see the specific pitch come out of the pitcher's hand. The way that I would describe it is that what I've learned is how to dial up the volume on the numerical analysis, but then very importantly, how to dial it way, way back and to dial up these thematic understanding so that I can appreciate tailwinds. And the problem with that last statement is that

Starting point is 00:33:52 it's psychologically befuddling to a lot of us. Why? Because what you're essentially doing is you're giving up control of the outcome to the people and the business you're picking, and you're kind of saying the rising tide will lift all boats here. And the tide is just so enormous that it will not be clear for 10 or 20 years who the true captain of the winning ship is. But along the way, you are going to participate in a level of asset appreciation that's just so profound you have to be there. It's so easy to say, but in the process of making a decision, there are things that you're not comfortable with. There are things that don't look as good.

Starting point is 00:34:31 How do you quiet that down? How do you dial down the volume without dialing down the sizing, without letting the reptilian part of the risk management equation get too involved because you know it's going to work for the period of time until which you can get more data in the three to five year period and re-underwrite? That's not something I was capable of before. And as a result, I lost out on, in my early, social 1.0 investing activity, social capital 1.0. There was just an enormous number of

Starting point is 00:35:01 opportunities I lost out on because I didn't understand that. There is a numeric competence to a company, but then sometimes you need to say, okay, that's an important thing, but I'm going to take the volume from a 7 to a 2. And the strategic framing I'm going to take from a 2 to a 6, and that's really hard. What unites some of that strategic framing? Maybe this is too hard a question because it's like asking, what do you see in the pitch coming out of the pitcher's hand? But if anything, You've made some large public calls on Bitcoin and Amazon and Tesla very, very early that have proven to be more than right. Is there anything that unites on the strategic side, the insights that you might have behind the investments you're making? Let me talk about what I didn't realize

Starting point is 00:35:42 before. What I didn't realize before is that companies don't exist in a vacuum. I would meet a company, private or public, and I would look at the product, and I would meet the CEO, then meet the team, and then talk to the customers. And my biggest mistake was thinking about it in a vacuum. And instantly, what people are probably thinking is, well, what does that mean? Do you mean their competitors? That's probably what most people would say, oh, okay, well, then talk to the competitors, and now it's no longer in a vacuum.

Starting point is 00:36:10 And that has nothing to do with it. It goes back to this other thing, which is, how would you underwrite the sector? How would you write a one-pager about a thematic trend that is just so ginormous, that it's just so obvious that you could look at it every year and say this is consistently true. I tried to go out and do this for nine areas. And then subsequently, in a couple, I've double-clicked even deeper. So the nine, if you had to start from the beginning. So number one is e-commerce.

Starting point is 00:36:43 And as I say this, everybody's thinking, God, is he a fucking moron? This is some stupid shit, this guy is saying. I get that it sounds stupid. But this is what I mean by it's so counterintuitive. I'm like, well, e-commerce seems like a really big trend. And yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, when all the numerics didn't really back up my Amazon investment thesis, the huge turn of my model, which the model is public now and the slides are public when I presented it in 2015 was you have to look at the IRA of everything that sits in the other line items for Amazon and how every expense was becoming a revenue line. What that explained was a predictability of the IRA in the future because it's the tailwind of e-commerce.

Starting point is 00:37:28 So as an example, okay, so number one was e-commerce. I was like, this is going to be a huge, ginormous category. Then number two, I was like, okay, in deep tech, there is just some clearly transformative things where we are rewriting in some ways, not to get too grandiose, but the laws of physics or our expectations. It just looks magical. And if it looks magic, something underneath in material science or thermodynamics, or whatever is happening in a way that we couldn't do before. Okay, that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:37:55 Healthcare, there's an enormous move afoot, either in biotechnology or digital therapeutics. Subsequently, I broken biotech out into its own category because of things like proteomics, what we're doing with DNA and sequencing and CRISPR and whatnot. Then there's FinTech, another obvious one where you're basically framing trillions of dollars of legacy market cap against tens of billions of dollars, at best, of emergent market cap that replaces functionality, feature for feature. And maybe you say 100 billion plus if you add stripe into the equation, but even then, it's just such a massive tradeoff. Then there was enterprise. Then there was consumer subscription. Then there was climate change and sustainability. I had these areas where I was

Starting point is 00:38:39 just like, I could write a one pager and I'm pretty sure every year I could revisit these things and it probably wouldn't change. The trend line's just going to keep going. Keep going. I learned to not be egotistical and judgmental at that kind of a simple framing. I thought that being smart required complexity. And I think Bezos's brilliance is,

Starting point is 00:39:05 and Musk's brilliance is in their simplicity. You can write a master plan and publish it. It's so simple as to sound functionally, idiotic and stupid. But actually, it's just brilliant. because it's just so simple. So what I do now is I think about how does the business look, but then I zoom out and I think about,

Starting point is 00:39:25 is it in one of these big spaces? And if it is, and it's a leader early on, will it win in 30 years? Probably not. Maybe not. Possibly not. But it doesn't matter because it's going to win today. And in it, you will figure out the rest of the breadcrumbs

Starting point is 00:39:42 to get to the right place over time if you need to. By being early, you actually give it, again, with capital and now with awareness, I find that I can also accelerate that event horizon where they do become the winner. So that's the positive feedback loop I find myself in now, which is like, wow, okay, I can think about this. I can do all this diligence. For example, like in our SPAC process, I can walk across 50 other investors who are also really smart. Between myself and the CEO, if we can convince them of what we see, then they're going to support us. They're going to tell 50 other guys to look at this company. They're going to watch the investor presentation.

Starting point is 00:40:17 They're going to look at our deck. They're going to read my one-pager. Retail can also be a part of it. So now they can make the jump from just being labor into being capital as well. And the whole thing is a positive feedback week. One of the most interesting thing that's happened in markets in your professional career is this shift away from what I'll call value investing towards what I'll call growth investing. As a capital allocator, I'm just curious how this has looked from your seat. What to you looks absurd about the value investing style? Obviously, I would characterize you as a growth investor just based on how fast the companies that you've invested in tend to be growing. What concerns you or worries you about growth? Can there be too much of a good thing?

Starting point is 00:40:59 What are the excesses that would cause you to be concerned? Just talk me through these styles because you've been an exemplar of the change. Let me answer this by asking you a question. Do you have two or three kids? Two. Okay, two. Are your kids valuable? Do they have value? Of course. How much value do they have? Infinite value. Fair?

Starting point is 00:41:19 Sure. You wouldn't say that they're valuable because they cost $4. Right? I think that the biggest fallacy of value investing is that people are not willing to revisit that word from first principles. Valuable means a thing that is of great worth. It's worth a great deal of money. Those are two different definitions of the word. I tend to think about value that way as well, which is, I think the biggest problem that people get wrong is they look at a cheap PE or lots of free cash flow and they confuse it with that old Charlie Munger Buffettism of a used cigar with two puffs left or a used cigarette with two puffs left. That's not what value is. I've never thought about it that way. I think that if you re-underwrote what value investing is from first principles, the first thing you do is go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and define it.

Starting point is 00:42:12 the word value, and what it's not going to say is it costs $4. So that's what all these fucking people get wrong. So I just think they're being a martyr for something that is going to turn out to be fundamentally stupid and easily fixable. This is the other problem, which is that one thing that I definitely have gotten lucky psychologically is, again, this is more, it's a benefit in business, but it came from my personal life growing up is compartmentalizing and moving on quickly. I don't think that's a healthy psychological dynamic for personal relationships, but in business,

Starting point is 00:42:46 it's great. If I make a mistake, I say, what did I do wrong? I look at it, I deal with it, and I move to the next thing. I think that if you were a value investor, what's wrong with saying, well, maybe the definition of value is something that I've gotten misconstrued. Maybe I listen too much to a style or a second or thirdhand way of defining value or an article or a book, and I took it too much as gospel, and I'm not going back to first principles. I consider myself a value investor. I know that sounds crazy to you, but I really do. I think, like,

Starting point is 00:43:15 okay, what will be worth a great deal of money in the future? What is valuable? What is something of great worth? I think climate security will be of great worth to people. I think reasonable access to financial capital will be of great worth to people. I think value-based care and health care will be of great worth to people. How do you think about the, I'll call it a platform that you've been building around capital markets platform, especially around that fulcrum point of having companies go public. And I know you're not just a SPAC investor. You've done all kinds of investing. But what in your mind are the top benefits of yours, of Gersner, of other people that are saying, wait a minute, let's create more options for late stage entrepreneurs? What have you learned there? What's exciting

Starting point is 00:43:59 there? What might all of this movement mean where there's big, serious, reputable, strong track record investors that are rebuilding this platform from what was basically like a duopoly for decades. I'll tell you why I do it. It is the single most powerful way to allow normal, ordinary folks to cross the chasm between labor and capital. If you fundamentally can underwrite the quality of the sponsor up front and you're willing to have patience, although it turns out you don't need to have that much patience because these deals get done pretty quickly, you can be an owner of some fantastic businesses, and it's effectively as if you're a huge family office that got an allocation in a hot IPO. That to me just seems like an incredible unlock in the market.

Starting point is 00:44:44 Now, it creates a different dynamic because if these things trade up too much in advance of a deal, then that becomes complicated. There has to be better and more nuanced ways for retail to participate. But the biggest thing about SPACs that I love is that it really does give folks who can do the diligence themselves just as well as anybody else a chance to get into it. an IPO book, which they otherwise would never get the call. What unites the managers or founders of the businesses that you've backed, if anything? Are there common traits of the people behind the businesses that matter to you? Just, I think they're moral and ethical starting point I deeply resonate with. I think that to a one, all of these guys are just incredible

Starting point is 00:45:29 human beings. We've all had our own struggles, but I see them just live with integrity. And then they've all chosen to work on businesses that are hard. I just think it speaks to could they have gotten to big tech and just sat there and gotten a big fat job. Sure, they all could have done that. These guys were grinding for years, trying to do something that's really hard and go up against incumbents that have no reason to make things easier for normal people. So I'm really aligned by their character. I'm kind of a David versus Goliath kind of guy. I love that. I love this idea of the little guy. I remember the first stock I bought, Patrick was a gold stock on the Vancouver Stock Exchange called DMR. Let me tell you this story just very quickly. Again, this was when I was in high school

Starting point is 00:46:15 and I had four or five grand saved. I was working in the IT group and the guy told me about the stock. Can you believe it? I'm like, fuck it. I yolode all my money into this thing. Penny gold stock on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. I mean, yeah, I got decapitated, obviously, and I completely deserved to lose all of my money. I was devastated. But I love the David and Goliath story that he told me about the founder and about this gold deposit in like Borneo. I mean, I felt for it. I am that guy. I really love fighting for the little guy kind of a thing. For example, people give me a lot of crap about changing my stance on Facebook. And I'm like, well, I wanted to support them until I couldn't support them.

Starting point is 00:46:57 them because there's just a lot of people getting unwittingly duped. That doesn't seem right. I never went there to unwittingly dupe anybody. I don't think I was building things to unwittingly dupe. That wasn't part of our stated product strategy. So it governs a lot of my thinking and my decisions and it creates noise. I love that David versus Goliath thing. I mean, oh, how intoxicating. That's glorious. Climate kind of seems like a Goliath. Seems like it's going to be a bitch to slay this problem. You've probably studied this or thought about this, especially through the capital allocation and investment angle as much as anybody. What have you learned about climate, just generally speaking? What are the major, if there's a taxonomy of this problem, what are the major areas, whether it's batteries or the

Starting point is 00:47:37 hard science, you know, materials and mining, I think you mentioned earlier, walk it through the dimensions of the climate problem. I tweeted out an investing framework. So that's on Twitter, but let me not go over that verbatim, but instead give you exactly what you said more of my mental model, if it's helpful. I think the way to think about this is from mine to home. So let's think about it the following way. The first thing that we have to realize about climate change is that it's dependent on two very critical inputs for different sets of solutions. Number one is minerals and resources. So those are things like lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, copper. So the point is, there's a basket of resources, minerals and resources that are required for the inputs into the

Starting point is 00:48:20 solutions for climate change. They go into one of two things. Number one is they go into making permanent magnets that go into electric motors. And number two is that they go into batteries and specifically to construct the cathode of the battery that is really the critical linchpin for how we actually drive energy density and dollar-pricle-o-an-r. That's one thing. And then the second, our next generation forms of material science, polymers and ceramics. Those are required. So there's all kinds of ceramics and polymers and material science that consumers will interface with directly or indirectly for the end stage of carbon. So that's, one critical area, which is just materials. So I think a lot about materials because it's at either

Starting point is 00:49:01 end of the bar belt. Then I think a lot about the manufacturing. So meaning, let's just go back to the minerals for a second. Getting these things out of the ground, if you went and saw how a mine works, you'd be like, holy shit, this looks like the 1800s. I mean, it's like dudes like sticking sticks a dynamite with like a long fuse. I mean, it looks like a bad movie. There's a lot of things that we can do to more efficiently and more thoughtfully extract what we need from the environment without completely screwing up the environment. There are these things that we do that are incredibly grotesque. You pour sulfuric acid over lithium to leach the lithium and other minerals. I mean, just it's nuts, okay? So there's extraction, then there's manufacturing, then there's

Starting point is 00:49:43 the process of creating the materials themselves. Then there's the actual supply chains that it goes into to actually produce the windmill, to produce the car, to produce the batteries. to produce the engine, whatever. And then there's all of the distribution that happens. And in the distribution, there's marketplaces, there's financing companies, there's end-user consumer products and solar panels and hydro panels. And then there's the actual abatement capabilities itself for the consumer or for the enterprise. That could be a carbon exchange.

Starting point is 00:50:14 It could be credit buying. So the point is that I'm trying to understand cradle to grave how climate change works, all of the sources and sinks, all the incentives. Some areas are very much wrapped up in very, very intricate IP. So for example, one area people talk a lot about Patrick is we need to make more batteries, but in order to make more batteries, we need to make more cathodes. And underneath that cathode problem is a lot of critical IP that is owned by a couple of companies. We have very serious and significant supply chain issues in China that could really derail our national security interest around climate change. Over here, there's all kinds of amazing companies that are deregulating the utility

Starting point is 00:50:55 and completely reinterfacing how consumers access and deal with their power. I'm trying to work and know each one. If you actually look at the pipes that I've done, the pipes are actually relatively representative of some of these points along the way. MP material, desktop metal, which is sort of on more on the manufacturing, sunlight financial, which is more on the solar financing piece, pertera, which is on the OEM manufacturing side. So a lot of my pipe activity has actually been around climate and just making sure that I can push some of these companies along. Of course, I would love to do a couple directly through our SPAC platform, but they would have

Starting point is 00:51:32 to address, in my opinion, a couple of very specific issues that basically obsessed by. I'm obsessed with batteries and Catholics. You mentioned resiliency a few times of supply chains. An interesting part of this where the world has been going a certain direction for a long time. And I think COVID has exposed weak points in global supply chain. When you think about it through the lens of an American, let's say, in terms of what's onshore, what's offshore, where there are reliances and dependencies? What are your thoughts here?

Starting point is 00:51:59 Does maybe supply chain belong in some of those huge categories that we started with of climate and education and things like that? Yeah, I think that this is where governments can be incredibly valuable because they can subsidize a resurgence of American manufacturing capability and middle class jobs largely related to the Green Movement, and it'll allow us to optimize for exactly what you said, resiliency over just in time. The reality is whether you like it or not, and whether it's politically correct or not to say it, we need to completely dismantle the stranglehold that China has on US GDP. It just must happen. So that doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat

Starting point is 00:52:35 and however xenophobic or non- xenophobic it sounds, it's not meant to. This is a practical assessment of what's happening. We have zero resiliency in our economy. We are overly reliant on one country. That country will advantage itself over all others. That country is proving that you can't necessarily trust the rule of law, that your IP is not safe. We have to realize that we have a responsibility to onshore much of this capability. I think what the government could do is create credits and tax offsets that make locally produced goods dollar cost equivalent to Chinese produced alternatives. And I think in that, we could have a much more resilient value chain. I'll give you an example. Today, all of the battery manufacturing, some amount of production

Starting point is 00:53:24 and assembly does happen domestically in the United States. Tesla Gigafactory is an example. But overwhelmingly, when MP, for example, takes our rare earths out of the ground, we send that slurry to China. We shouldn't have to send it to China. There should be an ecosystem that can accept that NDPR, that can refine the rare earth, produce the permanent magnets domestically onshore, shipped to the factories where these electric motors are being assembled all in the United States. A different example would be that if we had a battery facility inside the United States that made cathodes, that should be happening inside the U.S. with the IP that's required to actually decouple ourselves from reliance on China. Now all of a sudden, our climate goals are at hand. It will create a boon of jobs, well-paying, jobs. And the reality is carbon taxes are coming. I think we all know this, but I think that we have to just internalize that it is. And whenever those taxes get introduced, offsets will also be created. And now the U.S. domestic supply chain will be on an equal footing to China. I think we just have to prepare for resiliency. And yeah, I do think that it has to be a little bit quote unquote

Starting point is 00:54:29 nonprofit. But again, the profit lever comes with the government giving us the right tax credits to make it I'll balance out. I'd love to talk about the concept of innovation, probably my favorite topic. All these things are just innovation by other names or other examples. I've seen you talk before about how when something gets easy or when something is just working, you sort of start to turn off. You start to get bored. We kind of want to move to the next potential innovation and on and on. What have you learned about company-specific life cycles and innovation? And do the current batch of big companies, technology, mostly American companies, do they belie that trend, meaning are they better at continuing to innovate your experts on a few of them in a way that hasn't been true before

Starting point is 00:55:10 because betting on innovation has been the best trade of the last decade. I guess my question is, can big companies continue to do this in a way that they historically have typically run up against that sort of innovation wall? I think that big companies will not be able to do it as well as they have been. They've generally had unfettered access to both capital and a deregulated ability and freedom to operate. And I think that that's going to change. So I think that's going to slow them down. But I think an innovation writ large will continue to compound.

Starting point is 00:55:42 I think the thing that we have to do is create better incentives for people to take these kinds of risks. I think that there's been an enormous green mailing by big tech of a large swath of very, very talented STEM graduates, sadly. How do you turn down? I mean, look, if I was in that situation graduating with 27K of debt and I got an offer from one of these big tech companies to make $250,000 a year, $180 salary and $70K of $1,000. I mean, I would have taken it. Let's be honest. And then if I had done well in my job,

Starting point is 00:56:16 all of a sudden, I'm making $500,000, then $750,000, then a million, I become that guy in office space that's hiding downstairs. And I think there's a lot, there's thousands and thousands of these people. I don't think they're going to do as well. I think the markets are showing that to us. When you look at the free cash flow yields of these big companies, the markets have voted that that free cash flow is going away, either through a combination of new innovation or through a combination of regulation, these excess profits are not predictably going to be there in the next five to 10 years. I think the company that that's the least true for, interestingly, I think is Microsoft because I think that they are like the quietest and the most boring.

Starting point is 00:56:56 You know what I mean? Like they learn the hard way. And so they just make shitty software quietly. I think Facebook and Google will not go quietly into the night, so they'll make the most noise. And Amazon is sort of in a catch-22, but I think that they're the best setup to actually split up AWS in retail and just move on. If you think across the entire capital market spectrum from very early stage VC all the way through public equities, what is most broken still in the capital market system?

Starting point is 00:57:25 Like if you could snap your fingers and change something about how capital's flow, how the whole system works, what would you change? Liquidity. It's still very hard for companies to get funded. I think that there's, again, we talked earlier at the beginning about how society has these rules that institutionalize and make poverty systemic. Early stage capital markets act like a cartel. And the way that this cartel works is that you have venture capital firms that you have

Starting point is 00:57:51 to go to. You have to go and stand in line and convince them to do it. And they all have these rough terms. And even if there's price inflation, it's always kept market. moderate. It's like OPEC, minus the meetings. What does that do? If you don't pattern match to what they're used to funding, you're not going to get funded. That speaks to why blacks, women's and minorities are basically railroaded. They're never going to be a part of the ruling class. And then the amount of companies that get funded will never have a broad surface area enough

Starting point is 00:58:18 where the crazy outlier outcomes are possible. I mean, if you think about how difficult it was for SpaceX and Tesla to get funded, in hindsight, it's like, wow, what a no-brainer bet. but the fact that Elon had to tin cup for so long, and he's spoken about this, it's kind of ludicrous. My thinking about this is that we need to figure out a way to make these capital markets hyper-transparent and more accessible to anybody who thinks a company is good, to any company who thinks they're building a good company, and to anybody who wants to put their money to work, so that it can't just be Harvard and MIT and Stanford funding, Sequoia and Andreson and Graylock. That's just fucking boring. Any thoughts on health care and education? I'm going to couple

Starting point is 00:59:01 them together as we close out this big theme discussion that we've been having, that you think about it in a different way than it is typical? I really think there needs to be a state-sponsored alternative to health care. I think it's ludicrous that the richest country in the world doesn't guarantee every single citizen and permanent residence of its country guaranteed health care. I just think that's ludicrous. And I think the idea that there isn't enough market forces that can create a better ROI is also ludicrous. This is like another perfect example of the level of regulatory capture that we've had happened to us while we weren't looking. And even if some of these rules have the best of intentions, to be honest, and this is going to sound very harsh, they were written by

Starting point is 00:59:42 stupid people. And when smart laws are written by stupid people, you get bad outcomes. The most predictable thing in the world has been health care inflation over the last 20 years. And then what's been equally predictable is the decaying quality of life and life expectancy as costs have gone up. The inflation part is because of regulatory capture. The life expectancy declines is because of the lack of R.O.Y. That's nuts. I think that we need to go and we need to have three or four competitive solutions in market at all times, including a government alternative, where market forces drive performance. And I think it's the same in education. There is a cartel that creates this assumed branding. And if I were president for a day, I would decouple the foundations of private universities

Starting point is 01:00:29 from the universities themselves. I would force every single university to create an ISA program. And I would really revamp the teaching of STEM and other capabilities at the high school and elementary school level, probably with school vouchers so that you could have more choice so that you could have different forms of schooling when you're young. younger so that kids could learn that vocational trades are productive can still allow you to be a part of capital and will make you happy. Anything that you would prescribe, I guess maybe again, if you're a president for a day, thinking all the way back to the start of our conversation, I'll remember this conversation as being about how can we address not just the big problems

Starting point is 01:01:11 of the earth, let's say, but of inequity. Is there anything else that you would prescribe in addition to the birth dividend, which I'm going to start talking about a lot now? It's a great idea. in president for a day that you think could significantly change or address this problem? I would introduce a carbon tax. I would cut personal taxes massively. I would raise the corporate tax rate and I would create massive incentives to basically onshore and rebuild an entire economy that's focused on climate change, technology, and biotechnology. And as part of that, what that will require is trillions of dollars of investment into factories, infrastructure, roads, tunnels, buildings, it will touch everything. If we're going to be 50 trillion dollars of debt in 25 years,

Starting point is 01:01:59 let's do it the right way. I mean, shit, shit. If we're going to get shitfaced, let's get shitfaced. Let's drink some good wine. I mean, man. You've been among the people that I think have done the best job, even if some people tell you it's grotesque sometimes, of using public platforms to tell a story and a point of view. What have you learned good and bad about using the direct to consumer, I guess is the way to think about it, messaging style rather than the traditional institutional structures or ways of messaging? It can only work if you're willing to be yourself. Being authentic is the only sustainable way to have such a platform, because otherwise it'll come back and bite you in the ass. Have you had times when you weren't authentic? Earlier on,

Starting point is 01:02:45 Yeah. And to be honest, for me right now is not that I'm inauthentic on Twitter. For me, it's just that there are parts of my personality that are deeply authentic that I'm still afraid to share. See, to be honest, like, I feel like I'm just talking to you. So I can say things that are quite discomforting to me, but I'm okay with it in these forums. I think Twitter, for example, is a very bad forum for stuff like that. It's impossible to share that. So the balance is important, I think. The kids on TikTok have a term that they call main character, which, you know, in a given part of the world or industry or trend or whatever else is, like the person that sort of embodies that trend. Do you feel like a main character in the investment world? Is that a role

Starting point is 01:03:28 that you like wearing? And do you cultivate that? Investing not yet. I think I still have an enormous amount to prove. But to the extent that there is something that I would call it's going to be okay, I would like to be a main character of that. And what that means is just to show people, there are examples of kids who found a way out and are still working on fixing themselves and that there's just an enormous amount of imperfection that we all have to deal with, but it's possible.

Starting point is 01:04:01 So if that is a thing, I would love to be a character of that, the main character of that. What caused you to send out that tweet with a picture of yourself as a kid? I started crying. I mean, I'll cry now if I think about it. I started crying because, again, I go back to like my partner.

Starting point is 01:04:15 She's really changed my life professionally, personally. And I guess maybe it's just like I feel really loved by her. And then I feel less worthless. And then she saw it and she started to cry. And she's like, I just love this kid's eyes. Yeah, I don't know. I just like, I was filled with like, hey, it's just going to be okay. So that's why I just wanted to just say everything's going to be all right.

Starting point is 01:04:38 I think if a lot of people just know that everything's going to be all right. It'll be all right. Good excuse to ask you my traditional closing question, which I ask of everybody, which is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Well, I kind of believe in the butterfly effect. I would like to thank a guy who was in my sister's class so younger than me. His name is Brian Marks. He's a teacher.

Starting point is 01:05:00 He's in Ottawa. When my parents filed for refugee status, we had been living in a small house. and my dad's salary was paid for at the time by the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada. And then we moved to this little apartment, literally right beside that house, and we had nothing because everything was furnished by the High Commission. And this family gave us some clothes, and they gave us a mattress. So I'm very thankful to him. Unbelievable.

Starting point is 01:05:33 What an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for making it a little different than lots of the ones you've John, I learned so much, had so much fun. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. If you enjoyed this episode, you can sign up for a new email newsletter sent out each week called Inside the Episode. Each week, I condensed that week's episode to my favorite big ideas, quotations, and more. I've been recommending books to members of this email list for years, and we'll keep doing so in this weekly email. You can sign up at investorfieldguide.com

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Chamath Palihapitiya – The Major Problems Facing the World – [Invest Like the Best, EP.211]

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.