We spoke about pain. I wouldn't like to say a prerequisite to success in the capitalistic world, but it helps if you've been pained. What is your story? Where did the hunger come from?
Well, the hunger and the pain are two different things. I've been fascinated with the idea of building a social media outfit out of India. Give me advice from your experience of building allin being at Facebook and also having a personal brand which is quite big now. What should I look for? Is there a opportunity to build a social media outfit that could appeal to young people in India?
This is a tough question.
When do we start recording?
Okay, perfect.
Do you monetize your pod?
No ads, no sponsorship, nothing. In fact, I make my guests give money to a charity I like and I donate with them and we match it. Yeah.
So we have a grant program.
I'll tell you what kind of charity.
It is giving money directly to young kids in India who want to start a business but don't have startup capital. You know there are that initial capital even if it's like 50 grand or 100 grand in India is very very hard to get.
How do you choose though who to give it to? That seems like a complicated problem.
Because if you just give it, you know, you're making it harder for that person that actually shouldn't probably have it.
But nobody has it there. I mean, you're talking a different ecosystem with no risk capital whatsoever available.
And do you do like YC? You take 7%.
No, no equity, nothing. It's just a grant.
Oh, it's just a grant. And then and they don't have to pay you back.
They don't have to pay us back.
Wow. But that's great that you do that. How many people do you put through this program?
A dozen kids every couple of months.
And anything interesting come out of it like commercially successful?
Yes, couple like there's a pet protein company called Posible which is now worth maybe 40 50 million. There have been like three four 50 million kind of outcomes which is not bad.
And does it kind of pay itself back so that you can kind of make it or no it's just you funding it?
Yeah, me and then whenever my friends want to join they come along.
Does it give you a sense of fulfillment?
Not particularly. I think it gives me access to a lot of talent that I work with in other ways in the future.
Yeah. Cuz even when things don't work out and they shut down, it's tough to find these people with.
And are they generally technical or no?
Yeah. They're generally technical and they're all under the age of 25.
Yeah, that's like honestly probably my single biggest filter. If you're young, it's great. If you're not, it's harder.
You know, another thing I found with these young kids are the docile, subservient people never turn out to be good. The arrogant pricks are the ones who do better.
I totally agree with that too.
Yeah. I think you need to have some kind of like grit or pain in your past. Pain is a fantastic amplifier of capability. Some sort of like grudge, pain, anger. But you know the child that had a wonderful upbringing is a wonderful human being and not a great entrepreneur in many cases at least at scale at mega scale because it just requires a level of self-flagellation almost you know and pain and people who aren't used to pain don't want to incur pain. People who are used to pain don't think anything of it and they just keep going through it. People who are used to pain almost want pain.
I think it's like a weird way in which we feel normal.
I find that when somebody's used to drama growing up, they seek out drama later in life as well.
I think that I can see that. Yeah, I can see that. Maybe we should start today with telling our audience who Chamath is in Chamath's words.
Uh yeah, I am a... This is a tough question. I'm just a guy. And I like games. I like risk. I like learning. And I like growing. And none of it matters. None of it.
What you like is part of who you are. Maybe what you dislike is the other half. What do you dislike?
Honestly, not much of anything. I don't like staying still. And actually, yeah, I probably dislike that the most. I don't think there's much value in just kind of like the status quo of anything. Now, that's not always a good thing, but I think the status quo in many cases is actually quite structurally important, but generally it's better to try things and change things.
We spoke about pain. I wouldn't like to say a prerequisite to success in the capitalistic world, but it helps if you've been pained. What is your story? Where did the hunger come from?
Well, the hunger and the pain are two different things. The pain came from my parents and just, you know, I think it's just the neglect that comes from a home in crisis. And I don't think that that's a particularly unique story to me. And I've and I think I've learned to forgive my parents, but that's what it is. You know, there was alcoholism, there's abuse, there's all of these things that are the byproduct of just dealing with a life unfulfilled in at least, you know, from my dad's side. And then there was a lot of codependency and complacency that my mom lived out. And then the byproduct of that was, you know, I was a curious, loud, sometimes and generally overachieving kid, not in school, but in every other realm. And I think that it touched a lot of my father's insecurities. And so, you know, the way that he dealt with it was painful for me, but also for him probably. And then, you know, my mom just kind of didn't really do much to intervene. So that's where it all started.
What in the eyes of a young Chamath would make it look like your parents had a life that was fulfilled? Is it just the absence of conflict?
I think my father was an incredibly smart, capable man who just didn't get a chance to live out his potential. And then he made, you know, the greatest sacrifice possible. I can say this now as a almost 50-year-old, which is he just gave everything up. And could you imagine that, you know, your life isn't going the way that you thought it would? You feel you have this potential, so you're frustrated. And then you say, you know what? I'm just going to completely give up on my life and I'm going to live it through these three kids. How do you do that? Because you have no idea what these kids are capable of. These kids could be idiots. He did that and so you know when you what by immigrating to Canada he did that you know you give up everything and so I gave him a lot of respect and obviously appreciation but that's probably the memory that I hold the strongest because it forgives all the other stuff. All the other stuff is kind of just noise. It's all just kind of gets in the way because again I go back to none of it really matters.
Like let's pick a random year. Pick any year.
2020. Who was the 87th richest person in the world in 2020?
Okay. Pick another random year.
Who was the 14th richest person then?
Okay. Pick a different year.
2005. Who is the ninth most followed human being then?
Okay, this is just to point out that none of it matters. It's all contrived and in your own mind. And in that moment, it feels like it's a matter of life and death. External validation becomes this thing that is like the crucible. But I try to remind myself none of it matters. It's just a complete game. And if you can do that, you can have a very interesting life.
It's interesting that the parameters you used to form your questions were the richest and the most influential. Is that what matters today?
No, but I think that that's what we are conditioned to think matters by society. And I think the overwhelming majority of people will use that as the two simplest ways of determining the value of a human being, which is wrong. I would say that the real thing is from where you started to where you are, how have you evolved as a human being. There's no quantity or metric that you can share and it's your own internal sense of whether that journey has been well-lived. Unfortunately, most people don't appreciate that because you can't share that in a language that's easily understood by everybody else. So, society has developed simple frameworks to say whether you've had a life that has been well-lived and it reduces down to these two things. Some combination of fame, influence, and capital.
Fame, influence, and capital. All of those things are sort of like byproducts of those things because it allows society to organize itself. The problem is that it kind of misses the point. But that's why I try to remind myself well okay if those are the external validated measures of success the true reality though is it doesn't matter. And so it takes a lot of courage to decide that it doesn't matter.
So what matters outside of change or the rate of change?
I think that that's for me that's probably the thing that matters the most. And then after that how that manifests for me is my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my children, and then my relationship with my friends. What gets cluttered along the way is all of the things that I do in business and then all of these other ways that people try to tell me that things are going well if I don't feel that it is or they try to tell me that things aren't going well when I think that they actually are. And the way that they do that is again they go back to these externally validated but very fragile and brittle measures. And the whole goal that I try to do for myself is to break that chain of dependency where I hear it and it just kind of dings off me. And that's a very liberating thing. I don't get that all the time, but when I can do it, I feel very very grounded and happy. Like it's not like an effusive happy. It's just like a kind of a warm grounded sense that I'm right where I need to be.
Procreation and legacy have always mattered for centuries. Maybe capitalism defined that winning this game helps in order to achieve that end. The wealthier you are, more people want to have children with you. So in a way they're both the same thing or one is a conduit to the other.
Well, I can tell you that having kids for me is a completely selfless desire to be around these little humans that I just like love. I have five kids. If I could have had five more, I would have had five.
Do you think it could also be ego? Like when you see a child, you see a reflection of yourself?
No, my kids are well, my boys are pretty stupid, so no. My girls are just superb. Oh my god. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, they're all great and I love them equally, mostly. But yeah, kids are just amazing. They're a really great way of reminding me that these external measures are these traps that society lays for you. They don't have a perception of how many followers you have or how much money you have, whether you won or you lost, whether you had a good deal or a bad deal.
Maybe not yet, but soon they will cuz they live in the same world that we do.
But then they're not children anymore. And they're adults, you know? I can see my oldest child getting into that transitionary phase. Then it's less about me being a parent and them being a child. It's less about being peers. And there's a good chance that, you know, like with all things, I don't know what the relationship will be like in the future. You know, it's not the case that all siblings are really close. You know, you don't choose those people, right? It's not the case that you're close to your parents. You don't choose that relationship. It's given to you and then it's your choice how you deal with it. So and I would hope that they are less reductive than everybody else, but you're right, there is that risk and then I think our relationship may suffer, but hopefully it doesn't.
I mean, I think I've tried to surround myself with the kind of influence that makes me feel like I'm on a good path. And so if my children...
Can you elaborate on that when you say you've surrounded yourself with influence that makes you think you're on a good path? The good path to change, the good path to capitalistic success, the good path to influence?
The good path to a structural sense of being an evolved human being. It's independent of...
You mean emotionally? Yeah, being reliable, being thoughtful, being self-aware.
I think maybe that's the key word. Being very self-aware, like where am I in my evolution? Where am I in this moment? Am I grounded? Am I insecure? Am I egotistical?
Are you able to catch that?
Yeah. A lot more than I used to. Not all the time, but a lot more than I used to. Why? Because of the influence of my wife predominantly. But then the reaction of my children and my friends and I've been able. So this is what I mean. They don't treat me better or worse because of something that happens in the traditional way in which society tells you you had a good day. They treat me better or worse based on how I'm treating them and how I am treating myself. And that's very powerful if you listen to that signal. And it takes a lot of time to sort that out. But then if you can do that and you can foster that, it's a superpower. It's a huge unlock.
I'm trying to learn how to do this myself. Can you give me an example of how you've caught yourself changing in say the last 5 years?
Well, I was still, you know...
What did you believe in 5 years ago that you think now was a stupid thing to believe in? Don't say socialism or the Democrats because I think that's too binary. Something more evolved than that.
I don't know. I don't want to give you some try to answer what have I changed my mind about? I'm just much I think I'm much more circumspect about the games that I play and that they are games. Meaning I thought that business success was a matter of life and death. And so the whole goal was you run up the score and you get the highest score and you have the most chips. And now I see it just as a game. It's like playing poker. There's like hands you win, there's hands you lose. Sometimes you're on a heater and you're just like everything works. And sometimes, no matter flawless execution, nothing works. And I can step away from it now and be normal. I can also be around my friends and it doesn't like I'm not a different person based on that. Not all the time, but most of the time. That's been a huge change in the last five years. Five years ago, I was still so much part of like I was just grist for the mill. I was like everybody else just kind of walking around, you know, trying to get the attaboy, trying to get this tap on the shoulder, saying you did a great job. And the problem is again, other people are telling you superficial stuff when they tell you that.
Nobody sits you down and says, 'You know what, Chamath, you just seem so self-aware. I really,' and it's really changed over the last years. Who's ever told you that? Whoever that person is has ever told you that don't ever lose that person. Everybody else is like, 'Wow, dude, great investment. Oh my gosh, you're so great. Wow, look at how many views you got for this video. Wow, you must feel so awesome.'
And I'm like, 'No, I feel nothing. Nothing. Nothing.' Do you understand like what it means? Like I told you this story last night. I did a deal at the end of 2025. Helped start this business 10 years ago. Chip company, AI chip company. We sold it to Nvidia for $20 billion. Huge win for me. And you know woke up on a Tuesday and I remember getting a screenshot and Nvidia had wired you know the first big payment 13 billion in the account in the company's account not mine. And I was just like okay and I thought to myself this has like zero impact like I almost feel like a little depressed because I was like now I'm going to have to spend the next three weeks with all these people giving you these attaboys and I haven't thought about this in years because it's been a 10-year journey and I've already moved on to other problems that I'm working on that captivate my energy that people probably think is a stupid waste of time now. And so now I'm going to have to fight all these people telling me, 'Oh, why are you doing it? What's the point? You've already just take a break, relax.' And they don't get it. And so I was like, 'Gh, these next two months are just going to be a pain.'
All prophecies are self-fulfilling in a way because you said what you said now. People will say you're self-aware a lot more than they did up until now cuz you put it out there, right?
Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I launched a I started a company 18 months ago and we launched a product these last couple of days that I've been here in Dubai. And so I'm with the team and we're like just working on it.
What is this? Andy was telling me about this last night that you're busy in the product launch before you came for dinner. What was it?
I think the best way to describe it is in the industrial revolution, what was the key unit of change? It was a factory, right? So what assembly line? What did Henry Ford really bring to the world? Assembly line, not a car. But the assembly line, it's the machine that makes the machine. I've been obsessed with that idea. 9 years ago or 10 years ago, Elon sent an email to a bunch of us and said, 'Hey, I'm opening the Gigafactory. Let's have a party.' So, we all go to Nevada, like somewhere outside of Reno, Nevada. And it's an incredible I just remembered I still have the video on my phone. You start to drive and you turn the corner and it's the beginning of the Gigafactory and you just keep driving and driving and driving and driving and this building is there and it just keeps going and going and going forever and then you pull in and literally raw material was coming in the front and like the Model 3 was coming out the back and he said, 'Timoth, I want to show you something.' And he shows me this like schematic and I'm like, 'Wow, what is this? Is this like your next chip or something?' He's like, 'No, dummy. This is the machine that makes the machine.' And it just seared in my mind. The machine that makes the machine. So when this AI thing started and you know, I had been kind of more toiling around in the silicon layer. This is in mid 2024. I was like, 'Okay, well, if all of this stuff is real and we have silicon and we have models, what is the machine that makes the machines? What is that?' Well, it's a software factory. It's a factory, but that can make the software because software is what runs the world. It runs everything. And so, we made one. Not sure it's the right one. Not sure it'll be the ultimate one. Not sure if it's a good one, but we made one. And so, what does a software factory do? It gives and imparts control to humans to be able to be a part of whatever this productivity loop is that we're about to embark on. So it allows people to collaborate in an assembly line to make software, whatever software you want. You want it to run a plane, great. You want it to operate a hospital, fantastic. You want it to use it for accounting, sure. But you don't need to care about the intent. We can build tooling that allows all of that intent to manifest. I think it's a very potentially big idea. So, we built it. We launched it. We've been using it. We've been deploying it with a lot of customers. So, I know that it works. But I launch it. And the first comment is, 'Hey, goofball. Why are you wasting your time?' The guy said it in a really condescending way, too. Honest question. But as a billionaire, why would you be doing this? And I'm like, first of all, that's a stupid label. Second of all, you know, this is not how I measure myself. And third of all, I'm there to make things.
Because it makes me feel like I have to justify myself. Now, the reason is that even if you care, the reason is that I have this duality in my personality. The thing that drives me to work 20 hours a day sometimes is this deep sense of something is unaccomplished. And then the other part of my life is to try to put that at rest so that I can be aware enough and enjoy this moment and say, 'Wow, what a fun game and this is great and this is awesome. My wife's awesome. My kids are awesome. My friends are awesome.' But for me, it is a challenge. It is the structural challenge of my personality is to balance that duality. This gives me an enormous well of creativity and energy to work. This gives me enjoyment and fulfillment. But I vacillate between the two. And so when I read it, my instinctual reaction is I'm worthless and I'm wasting my time. I need to justify to this random person why it's not a waste of time. Then I try to catch myself and I compose myself and I go back to work because I actually believe in the work. But it is a challenge for me. I'm self-aware about it. It doesn't mean I've solved it. But that's the back and forth.
It's a big contradiction to kind of live with.
Probably makes you less productive than you could be if you didn't care at all.
Oh yeah. I mean, if I had a little touch of autism or aspergers, I'd be 10 times more successful.
Like some friends of yours.
I mean, my friends have the tism in just the right quantity to be unstoppable.
Are you talking about the older friend or the younger friend?
I have a few friends with tism and they are all off the charts productive.
Yeah, we were planning to play poker last night and we didn't and we had dinner. But you know game theory, there's something called prisoners dilemma. It teaches you through a lot of back testing what is a good way to negotiate. It talks about tit for tat works as long as you're willing to reprimand the person quickly enough in a clear concise nice manner. The direction in which the politics of the country where you reside is moving. Don't you think you as a country are allowing or fostering a lot of tats for the tits of today?
It's a little too abstract for me to answer that question. Love tits, love tats, don't exactly know. Here's what I'll say. I think that COVID was a real wakeup call for me and a lot of others in America.
What was that wakeup call?
I think there are two dimensions of it. At a conceptual level, I think it exposed that there is an externally validated way of organizing the world based on this notion of expertise and credential that was a lot more brittle and fragile than we gave it credit for. In the end, what do we know about COVID? None of us knew what was going on. Everything was a guess. Most of the guesses were shoddy even by the quote unquote experts. But the downstream implications to those are severe and have been severe. So that's number one. We exposed the fragility of these externally validated systems. And the second is that we demonstrated our economic and national sovereignty fragility. There was nothing that we could do to take control of our own destiny. We needed almost the charity of others. I think from that what I would say is we needed somebody a vessel that allowed us to make the structural change which is hard. I think it can be very bursty but necessary. And I've said this before. I think the best way to think about our current political climate in the United States is we are led by a transcendent political athlete.
Donald Trump is the most effective and capable political athlete we have ever seen. Why? He understands how to connect at the one-on-one level. He understands retail politics better than frankly anybody. And you can just see this if you go to a rally. The way that he can connect with individual people. He has an affability that's very disarming. And yet because of his business acumen, he has a way of negotiating that I think is just very hard for the learned non-business person to compete with. You know, there's that very famous Mike Tyson quote, 'Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.' I think the president has an incredible ability to negotiate. Howard Lutnick has an incredible ability to negotiate. Scott Bessent has an ability to negotiate because of their grounding in business and when you apply it to the realm of politics, I think it has some very consequential outcomes. And in this specific case, what they are doing is they are allowing us to question these two sets of beliefs. What should the organizational model of the world be?
Well, it's of the world because the consequences of America are for the world.
Is it a bunch of... What if the world doesn't believe that America has that right to decide?
I think America only has the right to decide for itself. And I think that that is what it does. But the ripple effects of that are very clear. And I think that that's a very important decision that other countries can make like AI is actually a perfect and emblematic example of this decision. And I think in the microcosm of AI, you can see this kind of duality. There's open source, mostly Chinese, some American alternatives, Nvidia being the biggest one, and then there's closed source, which is like, you know, these large foundational models. If you believe that AI is the cornerstone of productivity and GDP, there is an argument to be made that every country has a sovereign responsibility to determine what they should do. There is no path dependency where the only path is America. And I think that that's true militarily. I think that that's true in every which way. So I think what America has done has said here are the boundary conditions that we are going to now change in order to partner with us. Historic trade deficits are no more. The sovereignty of our supply chain is now a critical dependency. We will make sure American resilience is the number one focus of the administration. Those are huge changes and it has broad ramifications. But we needed somebody who was willing to break the norms in order to say that. And I personally believe that America needed that wakeup call because we were all subsuming ourselves to a monocultural global elite that wasn't necessarily making decisions from first principles anymore. And I think it's important to have an opportunity to rewrite those decisions every few decades.
I hear you. I don't know how far I can debate this line of politics without getting into trouble. But sure the deficit numbers are down. The debt is not going to go down. It's only going to increase with time. Sure, maybe you depreciate the currency to a point where it becomes more feasible or you grow your way out of it or you have an alternate currency of exchange which helps you pay for it. All of that could happen. But when I look from the outside, like I was telling you last night at Davos, I was seeing how the Europeans were reacting to what the Americans were saying. It feels like you are in a way creating a block. The world had many blocks. It wouldn't be too far-fetched today to extrapolate that there might be one block which is America and another block which is the rest of the world which I don't think would be a good thing for America.
I don't think it's going to be like that. And the reason is that at the end of the day, America is still the heartbeat of so many really important innovative technologies, medicines, capabilities, culture, and I don't think any of that changes. Will there be other forms of it over time? Yeah. And I think that that's okay. So I don't think that this is something where, you know, should the Europeans have done? I suspect if I was a European leader and I was sitting there in Davos, I would be really upset with some of the decisions that I have made. I would think to myself, hm, was it smart of me to have turned off all my nuclear generation because a 16-year-old girl told me to? Probably not. Was it smart of me to have a single source supply of an overwhelming supply of energy from two pipelines that could, you know, that don't have redundancy? Probably not. Should I have maybe reconsidered how I think about migration and immigration and how do I balance asylum versus relocation versus, you know, productivity based immigration. And I think that if I was in Europe, I would be like, man, I think I made a couple of these decisions really wrong. But again, if you're being really intellectually honest, then why don't we go back and ask why were those decisions made?
No, I agree with you 100%. I don't think they...
I think it's hard to litigate the fact that they may not be self-aware enough to actually be honest.
I agree. They might not have been, but them not having been might have been beneficial to another state because they weren't, but now they seem to be coming together.
Again, I think the Europeans are brilliant people. They're smart. They're thoughtful. They're capable. If from here in first principles, one cannot underwrite who to be long-term partners with, I think that we should hold out some small amount of percentage that they could just be emotionally overreacting.
