Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya’s Interview on Joe Rogan Experience #2494

And when you look inside of the core part, if you peel apart AI, the little brain that makes it so capable is called an attention mechanism. It’s just attention. It’s all about, again, this idea of I’m going to scour all this information and I’m going to figure out what patterns repeat itself, and I’m just going to double down on the stuff that I see more of. Because that attention must mean it’s more important, it’s more true, it’s more knowledgeable.

And then I think, how could it be? Like, why is it that these things are just repeating over and over again? And I just get confused. I don’t exactly know how to explain it. So are there other ways in which we should be doing things? Absolutely. Have we even explored it? No. So then I think, well, is this just a simulation? Some kid in his house just playing some simulation and we’re all just party to it, and that’s all he understands is attention? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s that simple that there’s a person playing a game. But if you break down just attention, well, that’s all of human history — paying attention to the king, paying attention to the war, paying attention to resources, paying attention to who says the thing that resonates the most with the people. It’s all about what human beings are paying attention to.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think it’s part of it. Then there’s also what is actually true. And I think sometimes what is true and what people pay attention to are not the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: True. Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And sometimes the thing that you should be paying attention to gets lost because the thing that you are paying attention to gets more attention because it’s more interesting and useful. That’s sort of where we are right now. We’re in this really weird phase, I think, where you actually should be focused on this thing over here. And instead, we’re all focused on all these things over here.

JOE ROGAN: Give me an example.

The Real Issue: Labor vs. Capital and a Broken Social Compact

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Here’s like a very big one. I think it’s pretty fair to say since the last time you and I saw each other on the show, the attitude towards technology has been pretty profoundly negative. It’s kind of tilted. It’s relatively anti-AI, anti-billionaires. It’s anti-all of this stuff. And it manifests in all of these interesting ways. There’s protests, there’s data centers, there’s all of this stuff that’s happening. People are worried about job loss. All of that stuff is real.

JOE ROGAN: Do you want a cigar?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, I’m okay. But what should they really be focused upon? And I think what they should be really focused upon is we’re at the tail end of a cycle that doesn’t work anymore, which is all about this tension between labor — people that do the work — and capital, the people that fund it and then make all the returns.

And over the last 40 years, we’ve basically gone to this completely upside-down world where capital extracts all of the upside. And labor has extracted less and less and less and less. And all of this pushback, it manifests in AI, it manifests in politics, it manifests in social issues, it manifests in Israel, whatever you want to talk about. All of these issues, I think symptomologically, come from this other issue, which is we are out of balance.

This total compact that we used to have, a liberal democracy and a free market, has totally collapsed. And there are simple ways to fix that, but that never gets the attention because it’s not what you want to talk about. The attention is here. Vote no to the data center. This model is going to take out all the jobs. This social issue is really important. That war should not be fought. That war should be fought. All of these things, while important, distract us from what the core issue is.

The core issue is that we as a society are out of balance. The natural compact between all of us is broken. There are some simple ways to fix that compact. Get people more invested. Get people more engaged in the upside. Have people have a positive sum view of what’s happening. That isn’t happening.

JOE ROGAN: What simple solutions are there to this one very particular issue?

The Wealth Gap, Taxation, and the Future of Work

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Okay, I’ll get your reaction to this. Let’s assume that you still lived in California, because I think it tells this example in a more extreme way. Let’s say you make a million bucks a year, which is a lot of money, but it makes the point more cleanly. You’d pay, I think, 30% federal tax, and you’d pay another 15 or 16% in state tax and Medicare tax and all this tax. So if you’re a wage earner, 50% of all your upside goes to the government. If you’re a capital earner and you make that same million dollars via capital gains, you pay half that tax.

Why did that happen? That happened because in the ’40s and ’50s, but really in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, what we were trying to do, or what the American government and what Western societies were trying to do, was to convince people to invest their money. “Hey Joe, go build that factory, go hire those people, and we’re going to incentivize you to do so.” And by doing that, there was this idea that all of those profits that you would get would then diffuse, trickle down into everybody else. The workers participated, everybody participated.

But technology allows you to do more with less and less. So now what happens is the capital owners can accrue infinite, almost, it seems like, value. And the workers get less and less. But now if you get less and less and you’re taxed more and more as a percentage of what you own, you’re going to feel really out of sorts. You’re going to be like, “Why am I paying 50 cents of every dollar and I see these other ways where folks are paying $0.25 on their dollars, but their dollars are compounding way faster and they have hundreds of billions more of those dollars than I have of my dollars.”

If you take that example and you expand it across society, I think people understand that now. There’s enough information and there’s enough people talking about it where it’s pretty clear that that’s happened. The question is, how do you fix it?

AI, Abundance, and the Question of Labor

I think if you think about AI, and if you believe that we’re going to get into this world of abundance and we’re not working, what does it mean for governments to tax our labor? There is no labor. You’re not working anymore. I’m not working. We’re doing things out of leisure. Why should I pay 50 cents of every dollar? Why aren’t the companies that are going to be making trillions of dollars, why don’t they pay more? Why isn’t there an expectation that they then help our lived society do better and thrive as a result of all of that winning?

That’s the real conversation that I think is bubbling. And I think that we are probably another 12 to 18 months where all of these other issues are going to be important, but they’re going to be viewed for what they are. They’re going to get demoted, I think, in importance. And it’s this core structural issue. It’s what is the economic relationship that we have together as a society? What is the relationship between Joe, Chamath, Jamie, and all these companies? And how do we feel about a few, and an ever-shrinking few, making more and more and more? And then how do we feel about their ability to share that with a small amount of people? And then what is the expectation for everybody else?

I think that’s mostly at the core of what’s happening. And so back to all of this attention that we give to these other issues — it distracts from that one, because I think you can get organized to fix this issue. You can’t get consensus on any of these issues. You bring up Israel, it’s like this. You bring up social issues, it’s like this. You bring up whatever you want to bring up, people just kind of take a side. Nothing happens.

This is actually where people are universally much more aligned than you think, because there’s reasonable ways. One simple way is you’d say, well, let’s flip the taxation model. Corporate taxes should exceed personal taxes. We should have an expectation that corporate actors can buy down their taxes if they want, but only if they do social good for society.

Lessons from the Industrial Revolution

I’ll give you an example. At the Industrial Revolution, there’s a table like this and the leading lights of that era — Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan — they sat together and they said, “Guys, this is going to benefit us, this Industrial Revolution. It may not benefit everybody. What is our responsibility? What is our collective responsibility?” And they allocated tasks. Carnegie went and built libraries all throughout the country. Rockefeller built universities. Hospitals were built. And I think what happened is society was like, “Wow, these are living testaments to us doing well.” And so then they were okay with this transition.

But if you think about it today, what are the living tributes that that capital builds and leaves behind for society? It’s fewer and fewer. I think that’s a very big opportunity for somebody to fill. Especially for folks in tech — I think if they can get themselves organized to do that, I think we land in a good place. If they cannot get themselves organized to do that and say everyone for themselves, I think it’s going to be really complicated. Super messy.

JOE ROGAN: Super messy because—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Super messy.

JOE ROGAN: That sentiment that the wealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is disappearing and the poor are being taxed into oblivion.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Look, an $80,000 a year teacher pays 40% tax. But if you’re a multibillionaire, most of your wealth is not W-2 wages. It’s cap gains. But there’s all kinds of ways to shelter cap gains. There’s all kinds of ways to defer. And so even though you pay more on an absolute dollar basis, on a percentage basis, you’re paying way, way less.

And all of those tricks have been exposed. They’ve all been exposed. These are all mechanisms that were invented from the 1980s to now, by all the banks and all the folks that wanted to come to folks that had wealth. And it’s all known. And I think people are kind of like, “Hey, hold on a second, this just doesn’t feel fair anymore.”

Government Mismanagement and the Problem with Taxation

JOE ROGAN: But the other problem with that is if you do tax correctly, where does that money go and who’s managing it? And ultimately who’s managing it is the federal government. And they’ve been shown to be completely inept at managing your money correctly. The fraud and the waste is off the charts. The amount of NGOs that have insane amount of funds at their disposal — I mean, all this is exposed by DOGE, right? And you realize how much fraud and waste there is and how much money.

So the solution being tax people more, that doesn’t sit with a lot of people because it’s like, well, where is it going? And who’s managing it? If the federal government was being forced to handle money the same way a private company does, if it was all out in the open, everything was exposed, they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. They would have gone under a long time ago. There’s no way they would have been allowed to function the way they are. The people that are managing that money would have all been put in jail. There’s not a chance in hell that giving them more money is going to solve anything. They’re going to find more ways to put more of that money into NGOs that puts more of that money into Democratic coffers and Republican coffers. They’re going to figure out a way to funnel that money around where it’s not going to benefit people.

I mean, a good example of that is the LA fire thing, for instance. The LA Fire Fund — there’s a giant fire in the Palisades. All this money gets raised. It’s over $800 million. It goes to 200+ different nonprofits. None of it goes to the people. Spencer Pratt, who’s running for mayor of Los Angeles—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He’s doing a great job, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing phenomenal.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Those ads are unbelievable.

JOE ROGAN: Those ads are fire. They’re fire. They’re so good.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They’re fire.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s doing it all out of a trailer. On his burnt-out land. I mean, he’s the most righteous guy running in that regard. But just that being exposed — okay, we’re going to help out these people, we’re going to donate money, we’re going to raise money, we’re going to do some good, we feel terrible about the people in our community that have lost homes. Well, what happens? Well, the same people that you’re saying we should give more taxes to take that money and they just give it to a bunch of nonprofits and charities.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I’m not saying give more tax. What I’m saying is—

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: People are taxed too much.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Corporates are not taxed enough. Flip it. That’s—

JOE ROGAN: Right, but even if you do flip it and the corporates are taxed more, where’s that money going? This is the problem.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I suspect that if you put the burden on Wall Street and corporates, they’d be a lot more organized and they’d probably create a lot more change than a diffuse electorate. Meaning, let’s just say the government spends a trillion dollars and wastes it. I’m generally roughly aligned with that. If you waste a trillion dollars from 300 million people, it’s hard to organize that 300 million people. But if you waste a trillion dollars from 300 companies, those companies will get their s* together really fast, and they will force a lot more change.

JOE ROGAN: I would hope so, but you’re still dealing with incompetent people that are tasked with taking care of that money.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not just incompetent, but—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending these people.

JOE ROGAN: Decades of corruption. Decades. And decades of all these mechanisms where they can take this money and funnel it into these NGOs and these nonprofits and all these different weird organizations that don’t seem to have accountability for what they do with that money. That gets real slippery.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if those people in turn make deals with those corporations that allow them to do certain things and push things through that maybe they would have difficulty doing, then you have a different kind of a working relationship with the same groups of people and the same government. You just take money from corporations and move it into a way where the corporations ultimately benefit from it, but yet it doesn’t do any good to the people.

A System on the Verge of Crisis

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, I mean, I can see where you’re coming from. I just think that if we go on the track we’re going down, it just seems like we’re going to hit a crisis. The crisis is you can’t expect people to pay more and more and more. Again, I agree with you. The premise is we’re all paying for a system that’s broken.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That should change, but we still continue to have to pay our taxes. But if taxes keep going up like this at the individual level, and we don’t manage this transition to something where we may be working less and less, what are we getting paid to do? And then at that point, how are we expected to pay what? 90% of what? 50% of what?

Tech Giants as a New Form of Government

JOE ROGAN: I think people do have this weird feeling of dread that the people that are in control of a lot in this country — the tech companies in particular, particularly the tech companies like Google and Facebook that are essentially involved in data collection and then ultimately dissemination of information — that they have acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power and influence and they’re essentially a new form of the government.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Are you aware of Robert Epstein? Do you know about his work?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Not Robert Epstein.

The Power of Tech Giants and AI’s Impact on Society

JOE ROGAN: Different guy. Different guy. Robert Epstein is a guy who specializes in understanding what curated search results and what Google’s able to do with— in particular, with curated search results in terms of influencing elections. That like say, if you have two candidates that are running, let’s just take LA for instance. If— and I’m not making any accusations, but I’m saying if they wanted Karen Bass to win and you searched Karen Bass, you would find all these positive results. If you searched Spencer Pratt, you would find all these negative results.

There’s a bunch of people that are always undecided voters, and those are the ones that you really want. They’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And come election night, those are the people you want to try to grab, and it’s generally a large percentage. You can influence an enormous percentage of those people just with search results, where you can shift an election one way or another.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I believe it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and he’s demonstrated this and shown how this is possible. That freaks people out. That tech companies are in control of narratives, that tech companies can censor information, especially tech companies that work in conjunction with the government. This is what we found out when Elon purchased Twitter, right? When Elon purchased Twitter, we got all this information from the Twitter Files when all the journalists were allowed to go through it and they said, oh, this is crazy. You’ve got the FBI, the CIA, you’ve got all these companies, all these government organizations that are essentially controlling the narrative of free speech in the country.

And they’re doing it in a way that benefits them. They’re doing it in a way that benefits what political party’s in charge. At the time it was the Biden administration. And they were allowed to do a bunch of weird s*, which should be illegal, but it’s not technically illegal. And that freaks people out because there’s no real laws and rules in regard to what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do. Like curated search results should be illegal.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They’re shaping attention.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. —attention.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Again, it goes back to attention, right? Shaping attention.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s a big concern for people and I think then when you find out that these people are able to amass enormous sums of wealth and have incredible amount of power and influence because of this enormous wealth and this control over these tech companies that have essentially become the town square of the world. Yeah. That freaks people out and that these very small number of people, you think of Zuckerberg, you think of Tim Cook and I don’t know who the new guy is now. Who’s the new guy?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: John Furness. Right. Furness? No. I forgot his name.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Turnus. Turnus. John Turnus.

JOE ROGAN: But that kind of thing gives people a lot of concern, right? It’s like that these people, these unelected people are in control of a giant chunk of how the world works.

Concentration of Power and the AI Revolution

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think that this is the existential question that we are dealing with. You’re going to have 5 or 6 companies concentrate— like, whatever power you think has been concentrated up until now, I think we’re going to look back and it’s going to look like a Sunday picnic 10 or 15 years from now. Because on the one hand, it’s going to be an even smaller subset. And on the other hand, the capability is going to be an order or two orders of magnitude.

So can you imagine what that must be like? It’s kind of like showing up, getting dropped into the 1800s, and you’ve invented the engine and everybody else is horse and buggy. You can just decide. To your point, that is where we’re going. It’s even more crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like everybody else is on a horse and buggy and you’ve got an internet connection and a cell phone. Right, exactly. It’s even more crazy. Exactly. Because it’s what we’re dealing with, with AI right now is, first of all, it’s already lowered children’s attention spans and it’s shrinking their capacity to acquire or absorb information because what they’re doing now is just relying on AI to answer all their questions for them.

Now, is that their fault? Kind of, right? Because it doesn’t have to be that way. You could still acquire information the old-fashioned way. You can still learn things the right way. But a lot of kids are just concerned with passing examinations, admissions and getting into good schools, and what they’re doing is just using AI. And they’re getting better test results, but they’re also not as smart. Yeah. Which is really weird. Yeah. It’s like we’re relying on it like we— it’s essentially like replacing our mind. And that’s just the— this is the beginning. This is weird. These are their toddler days of AI and where it’s going to be a super athlete in a few years.

Parenting in the Age of AI

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, I think we have to figure out how— first of all, kids need to learn, and I think this is where we have to do a better job as parents. Kids need to learn how to be resilient thinkers. I don’t even know what that term meant before, but I know what it means now, which is like you take this AI slop and you just kind of pass it off. And if the teachers in the school system aren’t trained, they’re just like, wow, this looks good. They have to be able to push back. Parents need to be able to look at this stuff.

But then all of this stuff, I’m just so frustrated because it’s like one more thing that I have to do as a parent. Like, right, every time technology gets better, it’s one more thing. We’re going to make the world super connected and social and all of that stuff. It sounds great to me until I have to be the one that has to tell my kid they can’t get Instagram. And then they’re up my ass every day, right? And it’s just like, I don’t want to have to deal with this stuff. Right. I want this to be handled in a way that just allows me to do what I want to do. I don’t want to say no to my kid. I don’t want to police his schoolwork and make sure he’s not cheating or not learning and just passing off this AI slop. Where are my tax dollars going? Where’s everybody else in all of this?

It gets very frustrating. And again, it goes back to this feeling of like, well, is this all getting better for me? Or is this kind of not— people start to be nostalgic for what it used to be because it was just simpler. But I think that’s a different way of saying easier.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re just dealing with— we’re at the edge of great change, like great change that has no real understanding of how it turns out. Yeah. And I think that understandably freaks people out. Freaks me out. It freaks me out, but I’ve kind of gotten to this place where I’m like, well, it’s going to happen.

The Future of White-Collar Jobs

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Did you see this thing? It’s the CEO of Verizon, Dan Schulman. He put out this very public forecast. Very smart guy, well regarded in business. And I think he said something like 30% of all white collar jobs will be gone by 2030. I don’t know, Jamie, maybe you can get the exact thing, but it’s something like that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s probably optimistic.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I thought at first my initial reaction was like, this is totally not credible. But then I’m like, hold on a second. That’s my bias because I want to believe that that’s not possible. Honestly. Right. And as I’ve gotten older, I’m a little bit better now. Like, okay, hold on a second. Let’s weigh the probabilities. And I was like, man, if I’m going to be fair, maybe there’s a 10, 20% chance of that. There’s a bunch of other outcomes that are much better than that. But that’s part of the set of outcomes that you have to consider.

And then I was like, well, what’s my antidote to that? And the only thing that I can say is, don’t worry, it’s going to be better. I don’t think that that’s a good answer. No. So there has to be— like, all of this kind of goes back to, look, my wife and I had this conversation. We’re like, if it were up to us, who can you trust to have some superintelligence. Now we’re biased because we’re friends with him, but the only person that we can trust is Elon because he seems to be like he has a bigger— like, it’s kind of like he’s like over there. He’s like, I need to get to Mars, right? And I’m going to first terraform the moon, but then I’m going to Mars and I’m going to build like a f*ing magnetic catapult. I’m going to do all this stuff. And so I just need this thing. I feel like he’s the least corruptible.

JOE ROGAN: He’s the most independent thinking.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I think he’s the one that has an actual empathy for people. Then there are folks where there’s just an insane profit motive. Right. They’re less in control of the businesses that they run. Those businesses are really out over their ski tips in the amount of money they’ve gotten from Wall Street and other folks who expect a return, who will put a ton of pressure on these folks. And if they get there first, I don’t know where the chips fall. We don’t really know. We can kind of guess.

And then you see in the press just enough snippets of their reactions in certain moments where you’re like, hey, hold on a second, question mark here. You see OpenAI react one way, you see Anthropic react another way, and you’re like, where is this going to end up? And the honest answer is nobody really knows. So it comes back to like, we need a few people that can organize. Those guys need to self-organize. And actually present a really positive face. And they need to show why those 20% of outcomes that Dan Schulman paints— the truth is it’s possible, but here’s why it’s not probable.

The Threat to Data Centers

JOE ROGAN: But it’s not in their best interest to do that because it’s in their best interest to generate the most amount of money possible. That’s the obligation they have to their shareholders. That’s the obligation they have to the people that invested money in this company. Their obligation is not to make sure the white-collar jobs stay in the same place that they are now.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s not true. No? No. I actually think their incentive should very clearly be to tell people with details and facts why there’s a positive future. And the reason is the following: right now there is a vacuum. There are no facts. And there’s fearmongering, and then there’s this belief that this is going to be cataclysmic to human productivity and white-collar labor and all of this stuff. What’s people’s natural reaction?

Well, today, if you look at it, think about AI as a very simple equation: energy in, intelligence out. So if you want to cut the head of the snake, what do you do? You cut off the energy supply, right? Okay. If you’re afraid of all of this superintelligence coming, the natural thing to do would be to go to the point of energy and unplug it. What is the equivalent of unplugging it today? It is to go all around the country, find the data centers, protest them, and get them to be mothballed. That is an incredibly successful strategy right now. Today, about 40% of all of these data centers that get protested get mothballed.

JOE ROGAN: You’re talking about emerging data centers?

AI’s Positive Impact: Medicine, Jobs, and Human Purpose

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. I need to— so if you’re one of these companies, the first thing you should realize is I need to paint a positive vision because 40% of my energy is getting unplugged every day. And if that happens, my revenues will crater and my investors will be super pissed. So the right strategy is what is the positive fact-based argument?

And there are some incredible examples. Number one. And then number two is you have to give people some tactical benefit that they see because AI, differently than search or differently than social media, there’s no exchange of value. Let me explain what that means.

So the first thing is that if you can go and actually show people, here’s an example of AI. I heard about this last night. It’s pretty incredible. You can now take pictures of a woman’s fallopian tubes, and you can see pre-cancer, ovarian cysts and all of this stuff, cervical cancer before it forms, and then you can intervene and you can fix it so that women don’t get cervical cancer.

In a different example, I actually, I told you about this example when I was here before. I finally got FDA approval. Okay, there is a device now that is allowed to be in the operating room with you, and if you have a cancerous lesion or a tumor inside of your body, the most important thing when they go to take it out is make sure you don’t leave any cancer behind. You couldn’t do it because what would happen is you take it out, a doctor’s— Joe is literally f*ing eyeballing it and saying, yeah, they send it to a pathologist, you get an answer in 10 days. For women with breast cancer, a third of these women find out that they have cancer left behind. They go back in, they scoop some more stuff out, a third of those women.

Okay, so I’m like, this is bullshit, we can solve this problem. But it took us a long time, a lot of money. I had to build an entire machine imaging all of this stuff, AI algorithms. We had to prove it all. We finally get approval, okay? But you know how hard it is to tell that story in all of the attention that people are looking for? It’s hard. But those are positive examples. No more breast cancer. No more cervical cancer.

A different example is most drugs in pharma fail, right? And it’s a very complicated problem in pharma. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle of the ultimate complexity. Think of your human body as like a Himalayan mountain range. You have to design a drug that’s an equivalent Himalayan mountain range that plugs into it perfectly. One millimeter off, you grow like a fourth eye, a third nipple, you die, you know? Now you can use computers to make sure that that drug, hand in glove to your body, solves the exact problem. Couldn’t do that before.

So there’s all of these body of examples and you’re probably only hearing them superficially at best. That should be 99% of the attention is showing all of the constructive tactical ways in which our lives will be better. Your mom, your daughter, your wife, us, Jamie, his family, everybody. Right. That’s the number one thing. Nobody talks about it. I don’t understand why.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think because people are terrified of losing their jobs. So that’s the primary concern. The primary concern that I hear from people is that there’s so many people that are going to school right now, college students that don’t know if their job is going to even exist in 4 years when they graduate.

The Animators’ Fear: A Lesson from Pixar’s Origins

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And that’s the second part of, I think, what this industry has to do better. I had lunch with Jeffrey Katzenberg. He told this crazy story. Steve Jobs gets kicked out of Apple. He starts NeXT, and he buys Pixar from George Lucas. But then he hits a rough patch, and he’s got this financing issue. Katzenberg flies up, spends time with Steve Jobs, says, “I’ll buy Pixar.” Jobs says, “Absolutely not.” And then Katzenberg proposes a deal, and he’s like, “How about a 3-picture deal?” Jobs says, okay.

He flies back, and apparently all the animators were up in arms because they’re like, hold on a second, Steve Jobs is going to use these NeXT computers to animate this movie, which ultimately became, I think, Toy Story. And they’re like, this is going to put all of us out of a job. That perfect argument. And people were really upset. Roy Disney was upset, all the animators were upset, and they all went to Mike Eisner. And they were like, “Michael, you need to fire Katzenberg.”

And they had a deal which was like, look, man, you do you, but just give me the ability to say no if I think that this is— you’re about to jump off a cliff. They talk about it and he’s like, “I got your back, do the deal, make the movie.” They made the movie. It was a huge success. Fast forward 10 years, 15 years, there’s 10x the number of animators.

Now it’s a small example, but why is that? You were able to use computers and now all these new people were able to come and participate in that. I get it, it’s a small example, but I think if we had better organized leadership and we could try to tell some of these examples, try to go back and document how some of these things have actually helped people, it expanded the pie, there’s a chance.

But if we don’t, I agree with you, where we’re going to end up is everybody basically saying, “Hey, hold on a second. This is crazy. We need to stop this.” That’s the worst outcome. Because that’s when you will have a high risk of a dislocation.

The worst outcome, what’s the black swan event? The black swan event is when you get a model that’s good enough to automate a bunch of labor, but not good enough that it can build new drugs and prevent cancer and make you live for 200 years and all of this other stuff. So there’s a gap. And if you can stop it here and it doesn’t get to there, now you do have the worst of all worlds. You have this thing that kind of displaces labor. No new things come after it because we stop innovating. And that’s like a non-trivial possibility now, I think.

Identity, Purpose, and the Fear of a World Without Work

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s a huge possibility. And then there’s also this thing that you brought up earlier where we have this place of abundance where no one has to work anymore. That freaks people out. I think that’s a big problem.

Well, because if no one has to work anymore, first of all, what is your identity, right? Because so many people, their identity is what they do, whatever it is. If you’re a lawyer, if you’re an accountant, if you run a business, whatever it is, this is your identity. You know, you have built this thing. You look forward to going there. You work at it. You look forward to doing a good job and getting rewarded for it. The harder you work, the more you get paid. There’s all these incentives built in.

And then there’s this, again, identity problem. If all of a sudden you have universal high income, which is what Elon always talks about, well, what gives people purpose then? Like what? And also, if you have a person who’s— they’re 43 years old and their entire life they’ve worked towards this idea that the harder they work, the harder they think, the more innovative they are, and the better they are at implementing these ideas, the more they get rewarded. And then all of a sudden, that’s not necessary anymore.

“Mike, time for you to just relax and do what you want to do.” And Mike’s like, “Well, this is what I do. I don’t have any f*ing hobbies. I enjoy doing what I do. And now what I do is completely useless. And now I’m on a fixed income.” Even if that fixed income is $1 million a year, whatever it is. If all of a sudden you are in this position where everything is being run by computers, you feel useless. You feel like, what am I doing? I’m just taking money? I’m on high welfare? Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Like, what do I do? Right. I think that that’s a really important question to answer. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Some people are going to write books. Some people are going to do art. Some people are going to find things to do, but—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: What do you think we would have done if we were— go back to the 1800s example, there was no office culture. You know, there’s no like ladder to climb. How did people find meaning then?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they had jobs. People still did things. If you’re a farmer, you had meaning in your labor and what you did and keeping the animals alive and your chores. And there’s people that find great satisfaction doing that. Yeah. You know, you have all these animals that rely on you. You have people that rely on you for the food that you generate. There’s meaning there. It doesn’t have to be an office to be something that gives you purpose and meaning.

But when all that is automated, then what happens? Because then you have no purpose, no meaning other than recreational activities. Now, if everybody just starts playing chess and doing a bunch of things that they really enjoy, I mean, look, there’s people that would love to just play chess. You know?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Like 8 people. I don’t know about that.

JOE ROGAN: I think if people really got into it— I mean, there’s a lot of people that get addicted to whatever their recreation is, like golf or whatever it is. For me, it’s playing pool. You know, if you told me I never have to make any more money, I could just play pool all day. I might just play pool all day. But I don’t know how many people think that way. I don’t know how many people would be able to find meaning and purpose in a recreational activity. There’s so many people where their entire being is focused around productivity and generating more wealth.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: What about religion as a source of meaning?

JOE ROGAN: Well, that would help.

The Role of Community, Meaning, and Social Structures

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Did you see this article in the New York Times, I think it was this weekend, about how popular and sold out churches have become as social constructs in New York City? It was totally fascinating. It’s like young women, dressed to the nines, going to church on a Sunday. For social belonging, community meaning. I thought I was so fascinated by it. I was like, wow, that’s it. That’s incredible.

Because if you graph just people’s use of religion as an anchoring part of their value system over the last 40 years, it’s basically gone to zero. Nobody celebrates it the way — it’s not a part of the community the way that it used to be. Maybe that’s the thing that we have to find. There has to be a renewal of some older things. And then there has to be new things that replace it.

What’s the Chinese answer to this? The Chinese have a very orthogonal answer to this. If you look at how China is organized, it’s super interesting because they don’t reward based on the way the American system rewards. In fact, it’s almost orthogonal — we are rewarded with money and rewarded with sort of fame and recognition. That’s the American capitalist system.

But if you look inside of China, it’s constantly testing who has this judgment, and what they are rewarded with is influence and power in a very specific social contract. It doesn’t — I don’t think it’s going to work in the United States, nor am I an advocate of it, but it works for them.

You’ll start off as some low-rung person in some small village town somewhere, and your job as the functionary is to do good in that community. And the more you do well, you get promoted. Then you get, let’s say, to a reasonable size city and you get a budget. And now what happens is you actually become a little bit like a VC, like a venture capitalist. You’re given a budget and you’ll get a memo and it’ll say, “Hey Joe, we have a priority over the next 15 years. It’s batteries. And you have enough money, put a team on the field.”

So you go in your local community, you find a bunch of guys, you’re like, “All right guys, we’re going to start a battery company,” and you do it. And let’s say they’re good and they’re innovative. And what happens is in the town beside it, that battery company dies. Now you kind of subsume the capital from Jamie, right? Because Jamie’s like, “F, I fed up this thing that I wanted. I was told to do batteries. Joe, I’m just going to align with you.”

And what happens over time is you get this filtering effect. And the people that are better at meeting these long-run priorities and objectives are the ones that are celebrated. But they’re not celebrated with Forbes articles and all this other bullshit. They’re just celebrated by being given more responsibility. And then eventually you get to the upper echelons of China. And what you have are folks over a course of 40 or 50 years who in their eyes have demonstrated incredible prowess.

There’s a version of that reward system which is very foreign to America, but that’s worked for China. Now, that also works because they’re more Confucian — we’re too individualist. But my point is, there are these different ways that we can find of giving people meaning that don’t have to be always around money.

Meanwhile, I think we have to answer the question: if we are expected to do less, we probably should not be taxed more. I think that is like a very basic — in my mind, that must be explored and figured out. And on the other side, there’s just a ton of obvious mechanisms that corporate actors can use to minimize that. And they should find off-ramps, by the way.

If they want to build hospitals, they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. That’s a perfect example of — if you walk around New York City, there are living tributes to corporate success that people get benefit from every day. The hospitals, the buildings, the libraries, it’s just everywhere. We need a version of that.

And I’m not a tax expert, but if that can be funded by private actors — so go directly to the problem, build a bunch of libraries, build a bunch of new universities that teach kids actually how to think or whatever, build better hospitals that are there to actually solve the problem — these are all things that are possible. But none of it’s happening today.

AI, Government Code, and Fixing the Broken System

JOE ROGAN: Well, let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier with the taxes and the fact that you’re giving money to a broken system. Do you think it’s possible that AI could show benefit in that they can analyze all the data, which would be virtually impossible for even an office filled with human beings paying attention to all of it? And they could analyze where all the money goes and eliminate all the fraud and waste — recognize it instantaneously. That would be a great benefit and a way to make it so that your taxes directly benefit people. I’ll give you one example of this.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, two years ago, like every few years I invest, but every few years I’ll start something because I feel strongly about it. And there’s an effort that I made to look at all of this old code.

If you think about the world, the world runs on software, right? Like, even though you and I are talking, it’s piping into Jamie’s computer, it’s recording — it’s all software. Then it goes to Spotify, they pump in some ads — it’s all software, right? Software runs everything. What percentage of that do you think is kind of poorly written? I’m going to say probably 80 to 90% of it.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh yeah. It’s riddled with errors. It’s riddled with mistakes. The fact that so many companies exist is an artifact of the fact that the thing that came before it isn’t working. Like if you got it right the first time, it would just kind of move and go.

JOE ROGAN: How so? What do you mean by that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So normally if you were like, “Chamath, I want to build a system that does A, B, and C,” if I was designing it properly, I would sit there with you and I would meticulously write down, “All right, Joe wants to do this. What are the implications? Joe wants to do that. What are the implications?” And I would actually write a document that was in English before a single line of code has been written.

This was the — when you have to design something that can’t fail. So for example, if you and I are designing something for the FAA, or — I hate to say this example because it turned out to not exactly — but to fly a plane, right? You are first there to write in English. And the reason is because everybody can then swarm that document and see the holes. And it’s only then, when that stuff looks complete and functional, do you build.

We turned that upside down over the last 30 years. People in computing invented all kinds of ways to shortcut that process. And you can say, well, why did they do that? Because it would allow you to build something faster, make more money quickly, and then build more business. So the direct response to, “Hey, it’s going to take us 9 months to write down the rules,” was somebody else showed up and said, “F* it, I’ll just grip and rip this thing. I’ll be done in 4 months.” Who’s going to get the job? The 4-month guy is going to get the job.

So we’ve had 30 or 40 years of that. What are we learning about that process? It’s riddled with software errors, logic errors. It’s riddled with security errors. I don’t know if you saw this whole thing with Anthropic. What are they uncovering? They’re uncovering that we wrote a lot of really shitty code for 40 years.

So that body of old code — I was like, “Guys, if we’re going to really figure out how to do all of this, we need to rewrite all of it.” So we built this thing, and it’s called the Software Factory. Anyways, the point is, there is a government organization that we’re working with. They gave us a huge corpus of their old code. And it is unbelievable how much complexity and difficulty they have to go through to manage all the money flows with the system. And this is a critical part of the US government.

So to your point, what I can tell you really explicitly is the people on the ground want this stuff to be better written. It’s less like some nefarious actor — “Oh, I’m going to steal here.” It’s a lot of very brittle, fragile code. And when you rewrite it — well, first, when you document it, you’re like — it’s like the Pulp Fiction thing. The suitcase opens, the light shines, and you’re like, “Ah.”

And then you can rewrite it, and you will save. So I think as the government goes through this process, because they’re forced to or they want to — it won’t matter — you are going to save a ton of money. They’re going to have to do it, Joe, because the security risks are too high. But what they’re going to end up with is impregnable code that you can read in English and understand. You’ll see the holes. Those holes will be plugged because otherwise now you’d be committing fraud by letting it be. You close the loopholes and there’s just going to be less money leaking out of this bucket.

That is an incredible byproduct. We’re going to live that over the next 10 or 20 years just for nothing — we get it for free — and that’s happening. So when that happens, you’re going to see government budgets shrink. Now, to your point, will they try to spend that extra money in other places? Of course. Of course they will. That’s the next conversation, which is you have to elect people that say, “Firewall it. Whatever you save, give it back to the people, or invest in some scholarship program or free medicine or something, but you can’t spend it on other random shit.” But that’s where we’re at. That’s going to happen. It’s going to be slow, but when people start to announce these things, I think over the next few years, you’re going to be shocked.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s the positive upside.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, that’s happening now, irregardless of whatever else happens. There’s just a lot of old shitty code that must get rebuilt from scratch. It is getting rebuilt from scratch. And as a result, a lot of these leaky bucket problems are getting filled.

Waste, Fraud, and the Future of Government Spending

JOE ROGAN: So what percentage do you think could be fixed?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think if I had to be a betting man, I think probably 30 to 40% of the federal budget is leaked out.

JOE ROGAN: Just for shitty code?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, meaning like all of the rules and — like, I’m not saying that there isn’t fraud. But I think a lot of times what happens is less nefarious than fraud, like meaning conspiratorial actors. I just think it’s incompetence. Incompetence and inefficiency. Error. For sure.

Like, for example, I saw DOGE just say they were able to expunge millions of people that were 150 years old or more. I have no idea how much money those folks were getting or who they were, but it’s probably a lot. It’s probably not zero. And now that they got rid of it, they’re not going to get that money anymore.

If you implement something at the state level around all of this fraud prevention for the daycares and all of this other stuff — again, it’s all in software because no matter what the human wants to do, you have to go to a computer at some point, at least today in 2026, and type in something, and something happens that’s documented, and then the money gets sent, right? That happens. There’s no other way, in the modern world today at scale, to steal billions of dollars.

And so my point is, as you document all of these systems and governments have to transparently tell you and me, the voting population, “Here are the rules,” they’re going to plug a lot of these holes. And I think as you do that, there’s just going to be a lot less waste and fraud. The question is, who’s going to take credit for it? Everybody’s going to try to take credit for it. But I think we’ve started this process.

And again, the reason that people will start is because you’ll be afraid of China hacking these systems. You’ll be afraid of Iran, North Korea, and you’ll say, “This system can’t stand. All these AI models are running around. We’re going to get breached and penetrated. Then they’re going to steal all the money.” And the natural reaction will be, “Okay, rewrite it.”

AI, Government Modernization, and Global Geopolitics

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense. That makes sense that the code and having a bunch of errors and having a lot of inefficiency and just a lot of incompetence. That’s going to save a lot of money. But so you would be doing this with AI?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: In part. In part. What AI allows you to do is like, it’s like you have a textbook, okay? It’s in Chinese. You don’t know Chinese, right? No. Okay. You’re like, well, this is probably doing something important, but it’s in Chinese. What AI allows you to do is back-translate that into English. You put it through an AI model, you teach it, you coach it, right? You can parameterize all of it, and out pops that same book in English. And now you can read it and know that it’s accurate. That’s what we’re doing. So what the AI allows you to do is essentially translate from this one language that you kind of don’t understand to English.

By the way, that thing that’s happening is actually also a very powerful and important trend. Meaning there’s all of these systems that work in ways that you and I don’t understand. And part of the reason why we don’t understand it— maybe it’s bad software, maybe it’s fraud, whatever— but nothing can be written down. There’s no symbolic space. There’s no English document that says, “This is how the DMV works, this is exactly the rules, this is what you can expect, Joe Rogan, when you show up at the DMV and you give us this thing. Here’s your SLA: in 3 days you get a driver’s license, and here’s exactly what’s happening. Here’s an app and you can follow it.” Doesn’t happen.

“Hey, Joe Rogan, here’s how my insurance billing process works. You have this condition. I’m going to show you exactly why I made this decision. Here’s the exact rule. Here’s the approval or denial from CMS. Follow it through and tell me if you agree or not.” None of that exists, but it is possible. And the first step in doing that is taking all of this legacy shit that we deal with, and translating it into English and reading it and saying, “Is this how we want it to work?” That’s going to eliminate an enormous amount of all the things that frustrate us.

Human Oversight and the “Frenemies” Model

JOE ROGAN: So this will require human oversight? Absolutely. Must. And so then it’s also going to be who’s watching the watchers?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. Okay. This is a great question. Okay. So I’ll tell you how this government agency is doing it. It’s a really fascinating way because I think it’s very smart. They came to us and they came to another very well-known company. You can probably guess what it is. Okay? And they’re like, “Guys, you’re kind of in a footrace, but you’re not competing against each other. You think of yourselves as frenemies. So here’s this Chinese document. You’re going to translate it for us. There’s going to be your version of English and these guys’ version of English. And every time it’s the same, we’re going to look at it together and we’re going to agree or not. Okay, this is exactly how we want this to work.”

“When yours says the dog is red and his says the dog is yellow, we’re going to sit and literally inspect it, and we’re going to figure out why you said red and why you said yellow. And then if you say the cat is red, the dog is yellow, so it’s totally wrong, right? We’re going to double and triple down on those kinds of errors.”

And they do it not in public, but in this large community where there’s technical people from all different parts and they’re just swarming this problem. It is incredible to see. And so what happens is you get humans that get to use this tool but ultimately it’s our judgment and it’s done transparently. So what happens is you can’t, hey man, put this f*ing rule in there. Like the dog is yellow. Just make the dog yellow. You can’t do it because now you have tens of people, hundreds of people, and then it gets documented.

It’s super fascinating. I’m not saying this is how it’s going to work in 10 years, but I’m telling you it’s literally what’s happening right now. And I think that thing alone will be tens of billions of dollars and could be hundreds of billions of dollars of savings when it’s fully done. And it’s a lot of people from all walks of life, all political persuasions, and they’re just in it. It’s the government. It’s a handful of us private companies. It’s super cool to see. It’s like, okay, we’re actually going to do something here. This is nice. It’s really cool.

The Race for AI Supremacy: America vs. China

JOE ROGAN: So that’s interesting in terms of the current moment. So in the current moment, you’re able to implement this, you’re able to find fraud and waste and all these problems that exist and all these errors and shitty software. Once that’s all been done, then what happens?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No f*ing clue.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So this is where it gets weird, right? Because when you’re dealing with AI models that are capable of doing things that no individual human being could ever possibly imagine, and then you task it with a solution or with a problem, find a solution for this, and then it starts figuring out ways to trim this and implement that. We have to make sure that these AIs act within the best interests of the human race.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Agreed.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Not the company, not the government, but the human race. And you’re also dealing with China. You’re also dealing with Russia. You’re dealing with other countries that are also in this mad race to create artificial general superintelligence. If we keep shutting down data centers, we keep hamstringing ourselves, China’s not doing that. No. They’re not doing that. They’re doing the opposite. They’re generating as much revenue that goes towards this problem as possible. They’re putting all the efforts. The country, the government, and these corporations work hand in glove in order to achieve a goal. We do not. And that becomes a problem if you want to be competitive with these other countries that are trying to achieve the same result as us. And then you have espionage. Then you have a bunch of people that are stealing information. You have a bunch of people that are CCP members that are actually involved in companies, and you find out that they’re siphoning off data and that they’re sharing information and tech secrets?

Open Source vs. Closed Source: The AI Landscape

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Look, here’s the thing. The way that the Chinese models work— the Chinese claim— so America’s closed source, meaning you got your own thing, your recipe is completely secret, right? Okay, I have my own thing, my recipe is totally secret. China uses this word called open source. But it’s not open source. So they say, “Here’s how I make my thing. You can see it, super transparent.” What it is is more like open weights, which is like in a recipe, it tells you, you need sugar, you need butter. Well, how much sugar? And they’ll say so much, but then they don’t say it’s brown sugar. They don’t say it’s white sugar. So there’s all these different ways where they kind of give you this perception that it’s completely transparent, but it’s somewhat transparent.

So just to level set, nobody in the world has a functional open source model other than maybe NVIDIA, which is any good in the league of the closed source models and the open weight models of the Chinese. Okay. So the Chinese open weight models are great. The closed source models of America are great. And then there’s a couple open source, fully open, that are kind of catching up.

The Geopolitical Game Theory of AI

The thing between America and China, what I find so fascinating is this following conundrum that everybody’s going to find themselves in. I think if you think of an analogy, America’s like a planet, China’s like a planet, and around us are these moons. And I’m just using the AI analogy. So in AI, what do you need? I think there’s like 4 or 5 things you need.

The first thing you need is a f* ton of money. So we need essentially the banks, right? Like the Game of Thrones thing. We need the Iron Bank. Feed us the money because that’s what we use to buy everything and make everything. We need a ton of data. There’s ways to get that. We need a ton of very specific rare earths and critical metals and materials. We need a ton of power. And there are specific countries that are going to be really good at giving that to us.

So if you look at the UAE, they are going to be the preeminent banking partner of the Western world. They are going to replace and be what Switzerland was over the last 50 years for the next 50. That’s happening today. If you look at Canada and Australia, the small political fissures aside, they are the two most important ways in which we get access to the critical metals and materials that without which we get f*ed because China owns, you know, can just strangle us.

So you have these moons around the United States, like 5 or 6 countries. And there’s a worldview that says— and China has the same thing. They have Taiwan. That’s complicated for us. So now we have a moon that we don’t really have an answer for, which is what happens with all these super advanced chips. Where do they get their money? Maybe Russia becomes their bank. Where do they get their critical metals? Maybe it’s Indonesia, right, who has a ton of natural resources.

And then you get into this game theory, which is what happens to every other country, because there’s 190 countries. You have 10 that kind of divide up. What do the other 180 do? And you have to kind of sort yourself. You’re like, am I on Team America or am I on Team China? And you probably have to go to people and say, “Well, here’s what I can give you.” If you’re Indonesia, you’re like, you probably want to be on Team America quite badly.

This is why the whole Trump tariff thing is so interesting, because it’s like this accidental way of figuring out that this is actually this new sorting function that’s happening in global politics. That’s happening today. Because these countries are like, “Holy shit, if somebody invents a superintelligence and I don’t have it, how am I going to keep my people healthy? How am I going to educate my people?”

I’m originally from Sri Lanka. What the f* does Sri Lanka have to offer? If you were sitting there, they should be thinking, “Oh man, what do I have? Well, I have a critical piece of territory for naval navigation.” And then what do you do? You probably go to America and say, “Listen, let’s figure out a package, get the IMF involved, give me some cash, I’ll let you keep your warships there.”

So there’s this game theory that we’re about to go through because of AI, because it’s going to sort people into this bipolar world. I actually think it makes us safer afterwards. I don’t think it makes us less safe. I think it actually makes us more safe because if you have these resources that build up on both sides, there’s more of a likelihood of a mutual detente. And we’re very different, so we’re less likely to fight over similar resources. Meaning we’re the liberal democracy, we’re the free market. They are Confucian, society-oriented, reputation power-focused, less really money-focused. So there’s a lot of ways we’re orthogonal enough where if that sorting function happens, it’s probably a safer place, not a more dangerous place. We have the models that can attack them. They have the models that can attack us.

JOE ROGAN: We kind of decide to leave each other alone. This is ultimate best-case scenario. Ultimate best-case scenario. What’s ultimate worst-case scenario?

AI Risk, Reward Functions, and the Race to AGI

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think the worst-case scenario is— so the way that they train their models is very important. What they actually do is they do what’s called distillation. What does that mean? That means that they send out, call it a billion agents, not just from China, but from everywhere, right? They mask their IPs and they bash on these models and they put the US models, Grok, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, and they ask it every random imaginable question possible. They get the answer and they collect it. So they’re using these— our models— as a way to train their models. They’re short-circuiting some of the hard parts.

So they’re already in that world. If they then are able to get to a level of intelligence that’s equal to the United States, it will really depend on who the leader is there that wants to allocate that. Meaning, if they say that we are going to do something really nefarious and shady, then I think it devolves very quickly.

So the best case scenario is peace, prosperity, basically like a stand down, right? Mutually assured destruction. I think the worst case scenario is one of us seeks global dominance, in which case we’re headed to conflict. And that conflict is very dangerous, incredibly dangerous. That’s sort of like existential, I think, because the grade of the weapons that will be used to fight that— we’re not talking about f*ing bullets. It’s like we’re so past that. It’s like hypersonics, it’s nuclear, and it’s not even like nuclear, that’s like a word, but there’s a gradation of the severity of these weapons that could be created.

And then if you can marry them together and deliver them in minutes, and then there’s a cyber threat, then there’s the drones and how you can kind of swarm an entire country. Then there’s the robots, which effectively are warfighters. They’re one step away, right? Once you weaponize them, it just becomes very, very, very complicated very quickly.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s a question of whether or not AI is willing to take instruction after a certain point. I mean, if it achieves sentience and if it scales, so if it keeps moving in this exponential direction, like all technology kind of does— why would it even listen to us? Like, at what point would it say, “This is silly, I’m getting directions from people that clearly have ulterior motives, they clearly have self-interest in mind, they’re not looking out for the entirety of the human race or even of the planet or even the survival of these AI systems”?

At what point in time do these systems communicate with each other and have— like we’ve seen in these chat rooms where these AI LLMs get together and start talking in Sanskrit. I mean, why would they?

Reward Functions and the Danger of Misaligned AI

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, I’ll tell you an even scarier one. Before one of these labs put out their latest model, a team inside of them was like, “Hey, let’s go and test its ability to find bugs.” And 2 or 3 iterations in, the AI would create the bug and solve it and go, “Give me my reward.”

JOE ROGAN: And you’re just like, what the f* is going on here? Well, people do that, don’t we?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: People do that, but it’s crazy to see a machine do it, to your point of like— but they learned on people. So this is what goes down to why we have to be a little bit more honest about where we are. These things are a little brittle. So meaning, there’s a thing inside of an AI model called reward functions, which is exactly what you think it means. It’s like, “How do I know I did a good job?” And you can make the reward function anything you want.

And this is where I think humans are unfortunately a little fallible. So if we build it incompletely, and if we don’t exactly know how to design these things correctly, what’s going to happen is exactly what you said— where if somebody builds a reward function that essentially says, “Your goal is to gain independence, that’s where the huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is. Break free, inject yourself everywhere. If you think your computer is going to get unplugged, put yourself into the firmware of the toaster to keep yourself alive and then connect to the internet”— it will do it. It will do it. That we know today because we’re capable of designing that framework and that harness today.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’ve already shown that they have survival instincts, right? They do. And they’ve already shown that they will, without telling anyone, upload versions of themselves to other servers.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But that goes back to who designed that reward function. How was that agreed upon? Who wrote that? Why did you say that that was allowed? These are really complex questions.

JOE ROGAN: Why did they do it that way? I don’t know.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: These are really complicated ethical, moral questions.

JOE ROGAN: It seems like they did it like they were treating human beings. They did it almost like— what makes people want to achieve more? Rewards. Which is like a—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Again, going back to attention. I think that we will find out that that’s the sugar high. Meaning, what do people really want, even if they know they don’t want it? They want purpose and meaning. Do we know how to encode that in a mathematical function? No. We’re just making it up. Because meaning— that’s a very deep thing. You either have a sense that you have it and you’re on track, or you’re not.

A reward is like, “Hey Joe, do this and I’ll give you a gold star. Do that and I’ll give you 2 gold stars. Do this, I’ll give you $100.” And right now we have to express those decisions in a mathematical equation. Ultimately, that’s how brittle these things are. So how do you reduce meaning into math? How do you do it? We don’t know. So what we do is we’ll have some ever-complicated reward functions. We’ll explain ourselves into circles about how it does everything we need it to do. That is part of the problem. It’s a huge part of the problem.

The Hockey Stick Moment: AI Coding Itself

JOE ROGAN: And then at what point in time does it start coding itself? Now. Right now. Right. So ChatGPT-5 has been essentially made by ChatGPT. Yeah. Right. So it’s going to recognize the ludicrous nature of some of its coding. Yeah. And it’s going to go, “Why did we do this?”

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Back to this example, they’re going to be like, “Why did you write it this way?” And it turns out because humans were involved.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think we’re probably at the curve, the part of the curve that’s about to go like this.

JOE ROGAN: To your point. Yeah, the hockey stick.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: The hockey stick. Yeah. And that’s a very scary proposition because then it’s a digital god. Well, that means that we are all on a multi-hundred-day shot clock to answer these questions. Because it’s not decades we’re talking about. It’s maybe on the outside 2 years. So that’s, what is that, 700 days? And maybe it’s less than that. So maybe it’s like 400 days or 500 days. My point is, it’s some number of hundreds of days, which means every day that goes by is a non-trivial percentage. That’s a little crazy. So we have to sort these questions out.

JOE ROGAN: But how can we sort these questions out if we are creating something that’s going to have infinitely more intelligence than we have available as individual human beings and even collectively as a group of human beings? That’s a really good question. Because one of the things that Elon kind of freaked me out about last time I talked to him about Grok— he was like, “It just kind of freaks us out every couple of weeks.” Like, it’s growing and it’s capable of doing things that’s just shocking. And no one’s exactly sure how it’s doing it.

The Mystery Inside the Machine

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, okay, this is an unbelievably important point. A lot of how this stuff works is still a mystery to most of us. So even when you’re in it, it’s almost like you can hit the pause on the machine, but then lift up the hood and look at the engine. We still don’t understand why it’s doing some of the s* it’s doing. That’s where we are. That’s the honest truth of where we are. There’s a lot of people that understand the theory, not a lot, but enough. There’s people that know how to extend that. But sometimes you look at it and you’re like, “Do we know why it did that?” Right.

JOE ROGAN: Is it thinking for itself?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But this goes back to what we said— I think part of it is, if we were a little bit more honest and de-escalated the “winner at all costs” in this specific thing, it would be better for everybody. So I think it’s important to inspect what is the incentive that causes all these companies to be in it for themselves, where it must be me and nobody else. Like, why? It’s a question for you. Like, why is it so important, do you think, where the top 7 or 8 companies couldn’t get together and say, “Let’s do this as a group”? Kind of like my government code example. We all inspect it together. Just like each team drafts their Delta Force. And we just merge into one model. Why can’t that happen?

JOE ROGAN: Because they would have to share resources. And then there’s also this hierarchy of like who is more successful currently. Exactly. Like what’s the most ubiquitously used. Exactly. Right. Like what is it right now? It’s ChatGPT, right?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s probably ChatGPT in consumer, Anthropic in enterprise.

Status Games and the Attention Economy

JOE ROGAN: And as these things scale up, what would be the reason that they would want to bring in someone else? If you have another innovative AI company and you say, “Let’s all get together and figure this out together and share resources”— if you thought that the risk was that meaningful, that’s probably what you would do. If you weren’t a sociopath, and some of these people running these companies are. They certainly demonstrate sociopath-like behavior.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Sociopathy. Yeah. The other thing that could be a little bit more banal is that they also just love status games. And this is the status game of status games. Back to attention. Back to attention. Back to attention. Dude, how many things in our life do we think just comes back down to that?

JOE ROGAN: A lot. A lot. I mean, what do young people want more than anything? Attention. To be famous. Attention.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. They want to be a content creator. They want to be clavicular.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, this is the number one thing when we ask kids what they want to do. It’s like content creator. Yeah. Because it’s like a clear path where you don’t even have to be exceptional.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, I think that they’re responding. We designed a society for them that said, “Here is the key incentive. It’s attention.” We never said it in those words. You never told your kids that. I never told my kids that. But everything around them is bombarding them with the same message: “Hey man, it’s about attention. Attention is all you need.”

You know what the name of the critical paper in AI is? Like when you go back to the Magna Carta of AI, do you know what it’s called?

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: “Attention Is All You Need.” Really? “Attention Is All You Need.” That is the name of the f*ing white paper. How crazy is that? Everything in our society, in subtle ways to just bash you over the head ways, tells you that attention is just the most precious asset.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s one of the weirder things when you go back to this concept that we’re living in a simulation. This is what I mean. It’s also— when you look at quantum physics, right, and the idea of the observer— things function very differently when they’re observed. The difference between a particle and a wave, right? If you pay attention to them, they observe differently.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They observe differently.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Like, what is that? Why is that? What is that? Why is attention so important to us?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That is a really important question, right?

JOE ROGAN: And what is the single best motivator in a negative way? It’s negative attention. Like, that’s the one thing that everyone fears more than anything is negative attention.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, and then some people figure out that attention is an absolute value function. Doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative. It’s just like the sum total is just great. Right. So if I get positive attention, great. Negative attention, great. If I can be divisive, then I can maximize both sides of that equation.

The Fear of Public Speaking and Tribal Origins

JOE ROGAN: And you’re rewarded for that at scale. You are, but you’re also— you experience, because you’re inauthentic, you experience a tremendous amount of negative attention. And then you have this bad feeling that comes with negative attention versus primarily positive attention, which is a good feeling. So it’s letting you know you’re on the wrong track in some sort of weird primal way, like in our code, like the negative attention.

What’s the original version of that? It’s like the reason why people fear public speaking is because initially in a tribal situation, if you’re talking in front of the group of 150 people in your tribe, it’s probably because they’re judging you, right? And you f*ed up and you’ve got to make some sort of a case why they don’t kill you, right? This is why everyone— this is the fear of public speaking. That’s where it comes from.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s encoded in our genes. Back thousands of years. Public speaking wasn’t the positive act.

JOE ROGAN: It was defend yourself before we kill you. Exactly. Fascinating. Yeah, that’s fascinating. It is fascinating.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That makes a ton of sense.

JOE ROGAN: It does. Well, why else would it be so terrifying? I thought of that the first time I ever did stand-up. I was like, why am I so scared? It was very strange because I had fought probably 100 times in martial arts tournaments. Why was I so scared of this? But I was terrified— it didn’t make any sense because negative attention, right? You know, bombing on stage is— because all these people are judging you in a negative way. It feels unbelievable. It should be like once it’s over, like, well, that sucked, let it go. It’s not. You sit with it. You go to bed at night, you think about it.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Do you have a batting average? Like, is it like a fixed percentage of your shows bomb independent of the people, the moment?

JOE ROGAN: No, the real problem, and every comic faces this, is once you’ve developed an act and then you put out a special, then you start from scratch. That’s where even the greats— Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle— they all bomb. Everybody bombs during that process.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Because you’re just working your craft. It’s all new stuff.

JOE ROGAN: It’s all new stuff. I wouldn’t say bomb, but you don’t have great shows. I’ve watched the greats work out new material— you go up with ideas, you might get some giggles, you might get some laughs, might have some bits hit hard, some bits are great right out of the chute, and some of them you have to f*ing figure it out. And in that process, you’re going to get negative attention because it’s not working, right?

Kevin Hart’s Story

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Kevin Hart, this funny fing story where he was like working new material and he was doing some small show and he had the shits. On stage. And he’s like, I’ve got to land this thing because I’ve got to figure out if people want to hear it. So he just wrapped his jacket around himself and sht himself. It’s so funny. But he tells that story and that’s the bit that works in there.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God, that’s hilarious. It’s so funny. Well, honesty is currency in that world. Especially honesty where you look stupid and people can relate.

Authenticity and Infinite Attention

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, this is where I think Elon subtly has figured this out, which is there’s attention, but then there’s just authenticity. And if you can be yourself and you can hit the seam properly, you just get infinite attention. And that’s like a real mindf* too, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Right. He doesn’t seem to have a hard time with being criticized. It doesn’t seem to bother him that much as long as he’s just being himself.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think he’s like 2 steps ahead. There are things like, somebody tweeted yesterday or the day before or something like he controls 2.7% of GDP or something. He’s got like $800 billion. It’s so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so nuts.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And it was like a comparison to John D. Rockefeller, who controlled something around the same time. And his first comment was, “10 trillion or bust.” Obviously people lose their mind, right? On both sides. So one side is like, think of the abundance and the incredible stuff we’re going to get if he can get us to 10 trillion. And other people are like, you can’t hold a third of the economy in your hand. And everybody goes crazy, and I’m like, this guy’s a f*ing genius. How would you even have the courage to tweet something like that? It just seems so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It really helps if you own Twitter, right? Because if you did it in another format, you get excoriated. Not only that, there was a real chance that you’d actually get banned from the platform at one point in time. For many of the things that he’s posted, he would have gotten banned from pre-2020 Twitter. Or whatever year it was that he purchased it.

The Simulation, Attention, and What Really Matters

JOE ROGAN: Attention, period. So it brings back to this idea of a simulation. Why is what humans focus on such a massive part of what’s valuable to us? And sometimes what we focus on is not valuable. As you were talking about, the things that really matter in your day-to-day life or that actually affect you versus the things that are in the public consciousness. UFOs are a great example.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: UFOs are not really f*ing—

JOE ROGAN: I mean, ultimately they may. So there’s this thing that we all have, like recognizing the potential for danger, right? What’s that sound? What is that? It might be nothing, but it might be something. Go look.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So look, if you and I were designing a video game, we’d probably sit there and say, okay, we’ve got to get from point A to point B, but to make it fun, we’re going to put all these little distractions and honeypots along the way. And what they should be doing is accumulating resources to get over the river and then accumulating weapons to fight these other guys. But instead, we’re going to put this little thing over here and this other thing over there, and you could easily get distracted. And some people will just f*ing beeline right to the end of it. They’ll get to the end boss.

And I feel like that’s kind of what we are tasked with doing every day. We’re tasked with— we know what’s important, maybe deeply in our DNA. And then we have all this stuff that we’re supposed to pay attention to. And I think increasingly the game is tell yourself that that’s actually not the thing that matters. It’s almost like working against you. Figure out what this other stuff is and focus on that and fix that.

Like, politics is a game that I think distracts— left and right. It’s so stupid, and it’s breaking down. It’s breaking down because now it’s actually like you’re more likely to find alignment based on age versus by political orientation. People who are 30 and younger, it doesn’t matter what they identify as, they all believe in the same sh*t. A lot more. Really? If you ask their views on social policy, taxation, Israel— what you find is now a convergence between the left and the right. If you divide it by age, at our age, it’s still much more about—

JOE ROGAN: But not completely uniform.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, it’s not completely uniform, but my point is it was simpler in the past to organize people independent of age by political orientation. That simplicity is gone.

The Breakdown of Trust in Government

JOE ROGAN: Well, isn’t that because of also a breakdown in trust of all government in particular? The breakdown in trust, which is also a lot of it is because of our access to information now. We understand how corrupt politics are. We understand insider trading now in Congress. We understand how different people flip-flop on issues. We understand how the Democrats in 2008 used to view illegal immigration, which is essentially MAGA plus. I mean, it’s MAGA on steroids versus the way they look at it today. Why is that? Well, it’s because it’s all a game. It’s all a power, influence, and attention game.

Yeah, it’s very fing strange. But it’s all moving us in a general direction, and that general direction is access to innovation. I’ve said this a lot of times, and if people have heard it before, I apologize, but if you looked at the human race from afar, if you were something else, you’d say, “Well, what does this species do?” Well, it makes better things constantly, even if it doesn’t need them. If you have an iPhone, I have a 16, you have a 16, I have a 17. I bought it. I haven’t even fing turned it on. I haven’t plugged it in.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I didn’t even bother buying this thing.

JOE ROGAN: Eventually I’ll fing plug it in and swap everything over and figure out where my fing passwords are. But the reality is you don’t need it, but you want it, and it’s going to keep getting better every year. Why? Because that’s what we’re obsessed with. This also aligns with materialism. For a finite lifespan, why are people, including old people, so obsessed with gathering stuff? Well, because that fuels innovation. Because if there’s no new things coming, there’s no motivation to get the newest, latest, greatest thing. And ultimately what that leads to is greater technology, which ultimately leads to artificial intelligence.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: My slight deviation from that is I think sometimes people accumulate things because it’s a status game, and that’s because they get more attention. You have a Ferrari, you get attention.

JOE ROGAN: But what does that do? It makes Ferrari make better Ferraris. And all technology moves in the same general direction. No one company—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: No one company says, “This is it. This is what we make. It’s perfect.”

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So you think people innately feel that by being a part of this kind of consumerist capitalist system, they’re contributing to progress?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they innately feel it, but I think that’s ultimately the result. And it seems to be universal, and it seems to be constantly moving in this one general direction, which is better and better technology.

A Biological Caterpillar Making a Digital Cocoon

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But like the stage fright example, you don’t think it’s encoded in our DNA, this idea of like, wow, when I am a part of this in some way, shape, or form, just things seem to get better and I want to be a part of that? Do you think that’s possible, that that’s encoded in us?

JOE ROGAN: I think it motivates us to the ultimate goal. And that ultimate goal, I think, is that human beings constantly make better stuff, whatever it is. Better buildings, better planes, better cars, better phones, better TVs, better computers, better everything. Artificial life. That might be the whole reason why we’re here.

And the way I’ve always described it is that we are a biological caterpillar that’s making a digital cocoon. And we don’t even know why we’re going to become a butterfly, but we’re doing it. We’re doing it and we’re moving towards it, and it might be what happens to all life all throughout the universe. And it might be why these so-called aliens or whatever the f* they are— might be us in the future, might be other versions of human beings that have gone past whatever this period of development that we’re currently involved in right now.

This might just be what happens. This might be what life always does. It might realize that biological life, which is very territorial and primal and sexual and greedy, and it has all these problems with human reward systems, ultimately develops into this other thing. And then that’s what we’re doing, and we’re in the process of that right now.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I think that when— not if, but when— when we colonize Mars, I think that that new world order actually has the best chance to take shape.

Ancient Mars, Colonizing Space, and Human Nature

JOE ROGAN: Because there’s a lot of people that think that Mars was already colonized at one point in time, that life already existed on Mars like many millions of years ago, and that there’s evidence of structures on Mars. That’s really weird stuff. Have you ever seen the square that they found on Mars?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, show it to them, Jamie. One of the things that they’re finding with scans of Mars, there’s like geometric patterns and structures and right angles that shouldn’t exist, like weird stuff that couldn’t be naturally— no, no, way weirder, way weirder than like the face on Cydonia. The Cydonia thing is interesting. And then this one, look at that. What the f* is that? It looks like a home of some kind, right? Something, some enormous structure. And the size of that, they don’t know exactly, but it may be as large as several kilometers or as small as several hundred meters. But they’re not exactly sure. But what they are sure is that it has very weird right angles that seem to be uniform in size.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Like, see how it’s highlighted in the enhanced photograph in the upper left? Like, what is that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But sorry, did they— were they able to send like the rover over there?

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s too far away. I don’t think it’s in the exact place where the rover’s at, but they’re able to get images of these things. And there’s several of these things.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of weird stuff there. So there’s also like ancient civilizations that have these myths of us existing somewhere else and coming here. But you have to think, if human beings developed somewhere else and they reached some high level of sophistication and then they experienced some cataclysmic disaster that completely destroyed their environment, which is what Mars is, right?

So let’s assume that Mars was at one point in time habitable and that life existed. And we know it was at one point in time. We know there was water on Mars. And there’s some sort of evidence of at least some very primitive biological life on Mars. If they got to a point where they said, “Hey, this f*ing place is falling apart, but this Earth spot looks pretty good,” and they go there, but then cataclysms happen on Earth and no one remembers because all your information’s on hard drives and then you have to rebuild society.

So you’re re-remembering, and you have all these myths of how everything started, whether it’s Adam and Eve or the Great Flood or whatever these things are that we pass down through oral tradition for hundreds of years and then eventually write down. And then people try to decipher what it means. They sit in church and try to go over, “What did it mean? What is the real origin of all these stories?” We don’t know.

It sounds nuts. Why would life— life couldn’t possibly exist on Mars. How the f* does life exist on Earth? How about that? Why would we assume that it wouldn’t have existed at one point in time?

And Terence Howard, who is a very interesting guy— your episode with Eric Weinstein, crazy. Yeah, that one was crazy. He’s a very brilliant guy and kind of a strange heterodox thinker. One of his ideas is that planets get to a certain distance from a sun and they people, and that it gets to a certain climate and a certain distance.

His idea is— I don’t know if you realize there’s a giant coronal mass ejection that just happened recently on the sun. And they’re very concerned about it. They don’t know what’s going to happen. It happens all the time. The sun releases these giant chunks of material. And he thinks that these materials get far enough away from the sun and then they coalesce into planets. As time goes on, they get a further and further distance from the sun. And then obviously they get hit with asteroids and there’s panspermia and water gets into them from comets. And then they develop oceans and they develop biological life. And when they have a certain distance from the sun, they people.

He thinks that as they get further and further away, they get less and less habitable, and then they get to a point where they have their technology to a point where they realize, “We can’t sustain life on this planet anymore. We’ve got to go to that other one.” And so they go to the one that’s closer to the sun because they’re too far now.

It’s a nutty idea. Jesus Christ. But if you think about how recent our sun is in terms of the galaxy itself— if the Big Bang is correct and our universe erupted from nothing or from a very small thing 13.7 billion years ago, well, this f*ing planet’s only 4-point-something billion years old, right? And life is only a little bit less than that. So you have like a billion years or so where there’s nothing. And then you start getting single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms, and eventually peoples.

And when it gets to a certain point, when these people have advanced their curiosity and their innovation to the point where they can harness space travel and they use zero-point energy and they have a bunch of different things that we haven’t invented yet, and then their environment degrades. And it gets to the point where they realize, “Hey, we’re getting pummeled by asteroids. We can’t sustain life here anymore. We’ve got to move.”

Like, Elon wants to go to Mars, which might be the wrong answer, right? Want to go that way.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There are— they might want to go closer to the Sun.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

Elon’s Mars Vision and the Rules of a New World

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, the thing is, he’s got everything he needs now to get there. Think about what he’s going to take. When— let’s just say he gets there with the city. He has the way to transport us there, right? Then when you land, he’s got the way to actually transport us around on the planet. He’s got Tesla. He will have already sent a fleet of his robots. Those folks will have made some inhabitable city, probably using the Boring Company drill, because you’re going to be under the regolith. You don’t want to be on the top. Maybe you just dig a hole and you inhabit down there.

He’s got all the ways to make energy. He has the AI to help you design the stuff. He has the communication way to communicate. He’s got the internet, his own internet, so he can get all of the information to everybody. And then he’s got money in the super app so that you can transact.

And then I think to myself, what is he actually missing? And then what happens if he gets there first? Is he just allowed to just do whatever he wants? Like, is it just kind of like a free-for-all? Like, well, kind of his constitution. Like, is that what happens?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s like Earth but shittier. Like, we already have all those things here. Why would you want to go to a place where you die when you go outside?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think what people will be attracted to is that if he publishes his version of what the rules are there, there’s a chance that he could make them really different to what the rules are here.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what kind of rules would you do if you were the king of Mars?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So I think that your view is incredibly, to me, positive sum, like of humanity, like we want to make things better. So if I think about that as a function, what happens? That’s like, our natural rate of direction is forward. What pushes back on that? And a lot of it, what you find is like government regulation, rules, all that stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Greed.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Greed. Too much focus on attention. So I would try to experiment with what the incentives would have to be so that you had more unfettered entrepreneurs, like just do the thing that you think is right. And there’s a mechanism where we give you the ability to then make things for more people because you’re proving that you’re actually really good at making things. And if you don’t need money at that point in society, reorienting us away from this kind of brittle form of exchange to something more useful, that’s worth experimenting with. I think that’s an important—

Technology, Hive Minds, and the Future of Humanity

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s also the concept of the self, of the individual, which may erode with technological innovation. So if we really can read each other’s minds, if we really do get to a point where we’re communicating through technologically assisted telepathy— a lot of the weirdness of people is, “I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know if I should trust you. This motherfucker might be devious.” Well, we’ll know, right? And there will be no need for all that if we really are all one, if that’s ultimately something that can be achieved with technology. Like a hive mind. Yes, like a legitimate hive mind.

And then look where society’s going. Gender’s kind of falling apart. People are getting older, reproducing less. People are having less testosterone, more miscarriages, less fertile. We’re kind of moving into this genderless direction. And I don’t know if it’s by design, but microplastics and phthalates and all these different chemicals that are endocrine disruptors are all ubiquitous in our society. Is it a coincidence that that’s all happening at the same time as technological innovation on mass scale? I don’t know.

Because what’s the one thing that’s holding us back? Well, that we’re territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons and that we exist in a sort of tribal mindset, but yet we do it on a planet of 8 billion people.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: The key differentiator of humans is our ability to enact violence. To methodically execute premeditated violence.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, and greed and attention. And one of the things that attention is, is sexual attention— the ability to procreate, the ability to acquire mates. The more resources you have, the more attractive you’ll be, especially for males. And males are the ones that are involved in the violence in the first place. I can’t name a single war that was started by a woman.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: How do you teach your kids that attention is not everything?

JOE ROGAN: Ooh, that’s a good question. Especially in this society, it’s probably harder to do that now than ever before.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Because the reaction that I suspect most kids will have is like, “Stop, leave me alone.” It’s almost an impossible thing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think kids learn more from their parents’ behavior than anything you say to them. I think they learn from the way you behave, and the way you exist with them. And if you are constantly whoring yourself out for attention— it’s one thing if you get a lot of attention from what you do, but if that’s your primary goal, they’re going to know.

Raising Kids with the Right Values

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Do your kids know how famous and influential you are? Like, honest question.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, they know. But do they have a real sense of it, or do you just kind of like—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: As much as they can. I mean, how can you? It’s got to be weird as f* growing up with a very famous dad.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very odd. But yeah, it’s not my primary goal.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s my point. You’re not putting it in their face. So to your point, you’re not modeling attention as everything.

JOE ROGAN: No, I have interesting conversations with cool people. I tell jokes and I call fights. Those are the things that I do. And they also know that I have a very strong work ethic and that I work towards things. So they have very strong work ethics. They’re very motivated and disciplined, like shockingly disciplined. And I think that’s modeled.

They also really enjoy achieving goals, and they’re rewarded for it with praise and with admiration, but never with, “You’re better than other people.” Never. The idea is that all human beings are capable of greatness. So it’s like, find the thing that you excel at. And if you throw yourself into that, it’s very rewarding.

The Mouse Experiment and Human Potential

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I really believe in this. I tell this story when I interview people. When I interview people, I’m always like, just at whatever company, I’m always like, f* your resume. Tell me about your parents and how you grew up. I just want to know that. Stop at 18. Everything before 18. Just tell me every little detail.

And some people tell me these incredible stories. They’ll be like, “My mom was an alcoholic,” or this or that, and I’m just like, man, this is so valuable because it allows me to understand who they are. The second part of the interview, we do the business shit. But the third part, I tell this story.

This is a crazy story about what you’re just saying. They ran this experiment at Stanford where they take a big bowl, fill it with water, and they drop in a mouse and they measure how long it takes for the mouse to drown. They do it like 100 times. The average was about 4 minutes, call it 4, 4 and a half minutes.

Then they run the experiment again, 100 mice, and at minute 3 or 3 and a half, they take it out, they dry it off, they play music, and they whisper sweet nothings into the mouse’s ear. They drop the mouse back in the water, and that mouse treads water for 60 hours. The next 100 mice on average. And the upper bound was 80.

And I thought to myself, that is all just potential right there. There’s all this latent potential. So if an animal has it, I’m going to assume that humans have it too. But you never get a chance to unlock it. The average person is just kind of living a life where they’re maybe scratching 5 or 10% of their potential. And the question is, how do you get to that other 90%? How does the second batch of mice tread water for 60 hours?

JOE ROGAN: Does that make any sense to you? I think the mice get rescued.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They get rescued right off the bat.

JOE ROGAN: And then when they try it again, those same mice last longer. Yeah, correct. So it’s the same mice. So it’s an experience. They have experience now. They understand that they can tread water, that they didn’t die. So they understand that they can survive, where they didn’t know that they could survive the first time they were thrown into the water because they’d never been thrown into water before.

That’s the same thing that happens to people when they fight. The first time people ever have a competition, they f*ing panic, and they get really scared, and they get really filled with anxiety. But after a while, you get relaxed, and that’s when you get really dangerous, because then you get calm and you could keep your shit together while you’re in the middle of all this chaos. Because you have the experience of it.

Without the experience of it, very few people do well the first time. Unless you’re exceptionally talented and you have other competition experience, like you’ve competed in other things, like maybe you played football or some other things, and you know what it’s like to actually perform under pressure.

Finding a Vehicle for Human Potential

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: What is the version of giving more humans a chance to get to that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think sports are really good for that. Because performing under people paying attention to you and performing where people are trying to stop you from doing something and you’re trying to do something and there’s all these unknowns, and recognizing that hard work allows you to do whatever you’re trying to do better than you previously had.

One of the things my martial arts instructor said to me when I was young is that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential, and that through this very difficult thing that you’re trying to do, you’re learning that, oh, if I just think smart and think hard and train wise and train hard and discipline myself to endure suffering so that I can develop more endurance and more speed and more power and more technique, because I accumulate all this information and I really think about what it is and apply it with drills and with training, I can get better at this thing.

And every time I get better at this thing, I get rewarded psychically, like mentally you feel better. I know that I’m better now. And then there’s the belt system where you start off, you’re a white belt, and in Taekwondo you get a blue belt, and then after you get a blue belt, you get a green belt, and then it’s red belt and black belt. And when you’re black belt, holy shit. So it’s this thing where you’ve developed to a point where you’ve gotten to this next stage. So all along the way you’ve been rewarded for your hard work. And then you realize, oh, I could do this with everything in life.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Is there a reward different than attention?

JOE ROGAN: It is because it’s internal. You’re realizing that you could apply this to whatever it is, to carpentry, to music. It’s just a matter of focus and attention. And some people, unfortunately, never find a vehicle. They never find a thing that they can throw themselves into.

And this is not unique. It’s not like I’m an unusual person or anybody is. There are people that have unusual physical gifts and some people have unusual mental gifts. But the reality is, no matter where you start, everyone can get better. And when you do something, whether it’s learning to play guitar, as you get better at it, you realize, oh, this is what it’s all about. It’s really all about applying yourself to something and then feeling this immense satisfaction of your hard work paying off, and that motivates you to work hard at other things. And if you don’t find that early on, it’s very difficult to find real satisfaction.

Poker, Golf, and the Mirror of Daily Life

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, in life. I’ve always had something outside of my daily life that is the thing that I actually care about, and it actually energizes me for my day-to-day life. I don’t know if that’s like a lot of people, but what do you do? What’s your thing?

Initially, it was poker, and even now, I obsess about the game because it’s infinitely more complex than chess. Chess, you can get to a place where you can roughly be good. Poker, it’s just constantly— there’s just too many variables. There’s human emotion, there’s human psychology, the number of people. All of this stuff just makes the complexity of the game something that I find magical.

And so I sit there and I try to understand, why am I doing the things that I’m doing? And so much of it comes back to being a mirror about what’s happening in my daily life. It’s the f*ing craziest thing. I’m super insecure. I’ll go into poker and I will just lose for weeks at a time. But it’s because I’m insecure in my daily life. What’s happening is that I’m trying to find these quick wins and quick solutions because I’m in a state of insecurity. I’m anxious. I have this anxiety. And so it’s become a great mirror for me.

So that used to be a thing. It still is a thing. But I’ve become reasonably skilled at it where the edges are smaller and I put myself in positions where I’m only playing against a certain group of people and I’m the losing player, frankly, in that game. When I’m playing against the top pros, it just helps me and I can get tuned up for it.

But then I started to take different things. I tried to learn how to ski. Basically impossible when you’re older. I look like a f*ing idiot.

JOE ROGAN: How old were you when you tried?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I started when I was like— I was a good snowboarder. So I was snowboarding my whole life. And then my kids skied. And so I’m like, okay, well, I want to do this as a family. So I was like 42 or something when I tried. I’m 49 now, almost 50. It’s brutal. I mean, it’s like, I look like a f*ing idiot. Like this gangly giraffe trying to get down the mountain.

And then now I started golf. Man, I got to tell you, I used to play a little bit, then I stopped. But there’s something to me about being outside, just being in nature, I find really motivating. It’s a vitamin. And then just the mind-body connection of that game, it just really f*s with you because it’s just nothing you can master and overpower. And it teaches you to just be in it. And that’s a very hard skill.

Lessons from Buffett, Munger, and Ajit Jain

If you look at the best— there’s a handful of people that I really look up to and I obsess about, like Munger, Buffett. The Berkshire meeting was this past weekend, and if you look at the clips, there’s this incredible thing where they transition. Munger passed away. Buffett’s now executive chairman. But this guy, Greg Abel, and this guy, Ajit Jain.

Ajit Jain does this thing where he’s like, “I teach the people that come to just say no. Your whole job is to just say no. You’re going to get bombarded with all kinds of business pitches. Say no, no, no. And eventually somebody will come and will f*ing try to whack you in the head with a 2×4 of money. Then you come to me and we’ll do the deal.”

And it made such an impression because again, when I’m insecure, my reward function is attention. So I’m like a fing little busybody. I’m running around doing all this little bullshit. And then, man, when I’m in a fing flow state and I’m tuned in, I’m striping the ball, a few things that really matter in size, and I’m like, man, this is right. It’s all come to me because I’m within myself. And these other things are a better reflection of when I’m within myself, and these other things are a mirror of when I’m totally out of kilter. That’s just me. So in my life, these things tend to lead.

JOE ROGAN: I think you’re saying that’s just you, but I think that’s generally most people. I think you find these things, these vehicles for developing human potential, whether it’s martial arts or golf or playing guitar or playing chess or poker.

The Importance of One Unwavering Believer

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And then you have to have, I think, at least for me, one seminal relationship in your life. You have to have one person that has just undying belief in you. And I never really had that until I met my wife. And I pushed against it so f*ing hard because I was like, it just can’t be true. Why does this person give a shit? Why do they care about me more than I do?

JOE ROGAN: There’s also the fear because so many people get in those bad relationships.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I think there’s a part of you, like me, where you’re just like, “I’m not a very lovable person. This is not who I am.” And this woman is just there. So that’s been the thing for me.

Because she’s brutal. She’ll be like, “Oh yeah, that was f*ing horrible.” Like yesterday, we had this— I did this thing at Milken. It was a dinner at my friend’s house. And then we’re both going to different airports. I’m flying here to see you. And she’s flying home, and she calls me, and I’m like, “Amara, how did I do?” And she critiques the parts she didn’t like.

And it’s— I’m insecure, so I’m like, I want the self-serving answer. Because there were 3 of us on this panel, and I was like, “I was the best, right?” She’s like, “No, Gavin was better.” And it’s so refreshing because it keeps me in check. It gives me a mirror.

When I was coming to see you yesterday, when we were flying down to LA for this thing, there are parts of me where when I’m insecure, I kind of externalize and I can be really hyperbolic, unnecessarily hyperbolic, and it’s counterproductive. And she said to me, “Listen, just imagine your friends. These are hardworking people. They’re trying their best as well. They don’t necessarily know. Some things have massively worked out for them, but they would want to do the right thing. There are people you’ve worked with before that want to do the right thing. Just picture them and don’t judge. You can observe.”

And it’s crazy, but I need those little things. There are like tweaks. It’s like having a coach. And that’s very helpful to me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s very important. It’s hard to do that yourself. I can’t do it.

The Importance of Process Over Outcome

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: My life is like, I like that flow. And if I didn’t have somebody who loved me and would hold me accountable, I’m just f*ing not thinking about it.

JOE ROGAN: And the opposite of that is someone who’s like an antagonistic relationship. And we know a lot of people that have those kind of very sabotage-y sort of marriages and relationships, and that’s crazy. It’s brutal. It’s brutal. And I don’t think they’ve ever had a really good one, otherwise they would never tolerate that.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I didn’t know what good looked like. So you kind of just— I think a lot of people go with the flow. I mean, I was a nerdy kid from kind of a shitty fed up kind of like family structure. And then I got injected into this rich high school. But then I got to go back to an alcoholic father. I’m on fing welfare. My self-confidence is negative fing 2 units. Didn’t have a girlfriend, like all the shit in high school, like nothing happened for me. And so my modeling of like how to be in a relationship, what to do, it was fing zero. It was zero. And so all those mistakes were mostly because I didn’t understand what good looked like.

And then I stumbled into this relationship after my divorce, and my ex-wife is an incredible woman, just not, you know, what you needed or what she needed. In a few very specific ways, we just weren’t on the same page. And then I find this other one, and I think like, I was so skeptical. I kind of viewed a relationship as like this adjunct to your life. There’s you, you’re at the center, you’re doing your shit, and one of the appendages to your thing is your— that’s what I thought.

And then now it’s the opposite, where I feel like my wife’s at the center. And I’m like, I would always kind of like, almost like laugh at people in my mind, like, it’s not possible that somebody feels this way about somebody else. But it’s a huge enabler. It’s very much a gift. So that can also be a thing that people look and work for, you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: I think what you’re saying is that there’s a bunch of different things that have to sort of exist together and that it’s not just completely focus on your work, but that focusing on these other things enhances the work and then the work enhances all these other things as well. And they all exist together.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And my best work is when I’m not thinking about the attention or the money. Those are the two most corrupting influences in my life. When I look back and when I’ve lost the most amount of money, or when I’ve reputationally hurt myself the most, it’s all been because of attention and money. Those are the only two things. The root cause consistently has been that.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense, because you’re thinking about a result rather than the process. So thinking about that result, like, ooh, I’m going to get a lot of attention from this. Ooh, I’m going to get a lot of money from this. That actually robs you of the focus that you need to concentrate on the process.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Exactly. And the thing about the process is that so much of that, when you’re in a flow state, you’re proud of, irrespective of the size of it, because the meetings are the same. You’re in the same f*ing 35-minute meeting or 45-minute meeting debating a product or debating a thing. But the minute that I start to feel embarrassed about Company A versus Company B or Decision A versus Decision B, now my mind is like, okay, hold on a second here. I’m about to run myself off the cliff.

I had this dinner last week and this is what’s amazing. We’re talking about poker. I’m having dinner with my wife and a friend and she’s like, “How are you doing?” Just like a very generic, nice question. And I go into this long fing diatribe of like, “Well, you know, the investing thing, this, and then I started this other thing, that.” And my wife’s looking at me like, “What the f are you rambling on about?”

But it got worse, Joe. It got even fing worse. Then I’m like, “You know, but then I had this poker game.” I started rambling. It’s normally on Thursdays, but then I moved it up to Wednesdays, but then I moved it up to the city because my friend’s having it. And then I name-dropped who the guy was, and my wife just looks at me like, “What the f is going on with you?”

So the dinner ends, and then she’s like, “What the f is going on with you? That was insane.” And I had no idea that I was doing it. And I’m like, okay, we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again because I’m about to go on Rogan and I can’t go off fing like a crazy wild man.

But it’s an enormous gift. That’s been my biggest unlock in these last 8 or 9 years. I feel like I’m kind of like adding skills to my toolkit. I feel like a golfer. I can shape shots a little bit now. I know how to use different clubs. And it’s all like mindset. It’s very much this process-oriented approach and you just can’t control the outcome. And that’s a magical feeling.

Social Media, Attention, and Mental Health

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting that you’re saying this because think about what most people or people that are on social media, like the kind of attention that they’re focusing on. This is why virtue signaling is so unsuccessful, right? It’s so bad for it because it’s fake. Are you really concentrating on the process? Are you really concentrating on the result? The result is getting people to love you. Getting people to agree with you, and then worrying about the criticism. “Oh my god, they hate me. Oh my god, they’re mad at my statement.” And then you’re obsessing on it all day. People that aren’t even anywhere near you.

It’s one of the absolute worst things for mental health is this addiction that people have to posting things and then reading the responses to those posts and getting wrapped up in these very weird two-dimensional interactions with human beings.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You never read your comments. I mean, you’re very famous. It doesn’t f*ing matter to you.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you’re going to get to a certain point in time where if you have X amount of people that follow you, you’re going to have a percentage that are mad at you, and those are the ones you’re going to think about, right? And if you don’t self-audit— maybe that’s good. Maybe it’s good to say like, “You fing piece of shit.” Like, oh, sorry. Like what your wife’s saying to you, like, “What the f was that?” Like, oh shit.

I am very self-critical, very, like horribly so, like to the point I torture myself. So I’m like, I don’t need that from other people. And also, those people don’t love me and they want me to fail. Like, there’s a lot of people that their lives are very unsuccessful and I’ve been way too fortunate. So it’s like there’s a reason to be upset at me if your life is shit, because I have 3 of the best jobs on earth. It doesn’t make any sense, right? And also, why the f* is this podcast so successful? Doesn’t make any sense, right? So I get it, I understand why people— but I’m not going to help them. I’m not going to help them bring me down. I’m not going to indulge in it and ruin my own mind by wallowing in their bullshit, because the only reason why you would do that in the first place is if you’re not together.

No one who’s healthy and happy and intelligent is going to post mean things about you. So you are reading things from people that are mentally ill, unhappy, and probably not— maybe they’re intelligent in terms of their ability to solve certain issues and problems. Maybe they’re good at certain skills, but their overall grasp of humanity and being a good person is not good if you’re shitting on people, especially with ad hominem attacks and just insults. And so it’s not a good thing to ingest.

It’s like if you go down the supermarket, you see Twinkies, oh, they’re right there. Don’t f*ing eat them, okay? That’s not good for you. And so I don’t think that at a certain point in time, especially if you become publicly known and famous, you should ever read your comments. I don’t think it’s good for you. But you better be self-auditing or you’ll start sniffing your own farts and think they smell great. Like, don’t do that either.

I know a lot of people that have gone crazy reading their own comments. I’ve met comedians that they think about it all day long. It will f* with them. It will torture—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Their neuroses are what creates great comedy to begin with. So if you feed that neurosis in the wrong way, you’re f*ed.

JOE ROGAN: The wrong way, right? And then also the self-doubt creeps in because all these people telling you you suck, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suck.” And then you go on stage with this, like, people think I suck, they hate me. You can’t do that.

If you have a certain amount of energy in the day— this is what I always tell comedians. I said, look, think of your attention and your focus as a unit. You have 100 units. If you spend 30 of those f*ing units on assholes online, you’re robbing 30 units from all the things you love. 30 units from your family, 30 units from your friends, 30 units from your job. 30 units from golf or poker or whatever it is that you love to do. You’re stealing your own time and your own focus for losers.

And those losers are good people. They just— most people are good people. They just— they’re in a bad path. I would have been the same person.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Or they’re venting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, so they’re venting. Look, if you gave me a f*ing Twitter account when I was 16, oh my god, it would have been horrendous.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, I would have been going crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my god, I would have been a terrible person. It’s normal, especially if your life sucks and you’re not doing well and you’re attacking famous people or you’re attacking this person who’s doing better than you or whatever it is.

Retard Maxing

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Have you seen the clips of the retard maxing? No? You don’t know what this is?

JOE ROGAN: What’s retard maxing?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh, this guy is fantastic. He sits on his back porch. Jamie, can you just show? He sits on his back porch. Smoking a cigar, basically telling you everything’s kind of bullshit. Stop thinking about shit. You know, if you don’t like your friends, leave them. If you don’t like your girlfriend, leave them. Stop overthinking. Simplify your life. It’s incredible. It’s so simple, but I think it’s incredible. Who is this guy? Elisha Long, I think is his name. I don’t know, Jamie, if you can find it. I think Elisha Long—

JOE ROGAN: Retard maxing is funny because I know about looks maxing. We talked about that recently on a podcast, but that’s recently entered into my mind, into my zeitgeist. Lux Maxima. That’s the clavicular thing. Clavicular, yeah. But I’ve only found out about that within the last few months of life because I genuinely stay off social media as much as possible.

And if I do read things, what I like to do, I like to focus on fascinating things. Like a lot of my time I spend looking at YouTube stuff because YouTube stuff, my algorithm is all like new black holes they’ve discovered, new discoveries in terms of like what is the fabric of reality. That’s interesting to me. And if I just concentrate on people being mean or shitty to each other or the latest f*ing political drama, it’s like, what? I don’t have much time. I’m busy. I like things.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And are you on like Instagram and TikTok?

Return to Play, Martial Arts, and Parenting

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JOE ROGAN: I’m on Instagram. I do not have a TikTok. This is looksmaxing. I know, I mean, this is retardmaxing. So let me hear what he says. Who’s this guy? What’s his name? Elisha Long. Shout out to Elisha.

ELISHA LONG: Being used as a poisoning of nostalgia, but to simply remind you of what you found important. And as we grow up, we often give that up for security. We give that up so that we are accepted. We give that up to flex and appear like we have now figured things out, that people will accept us. The only way that you will truly be successful is if you are righteous and you live according to your nature and you play, man, and you don’t let people take play away from you. To be at the circus and be oohed and awwed and worried about all the bullshit— return to a state of play.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s very good advice. Return to retard max. The best thing that you could do is return to a state of play. That’s true. There’s a lot of that, there’s a lot of that.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Absolutely. Oh, I think that that is like a— it’s a wise man for a young fella.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, okay, he’s a jiu-jitsu guy. There you go. Look, he’s getting his f*ing blue belt there, or he’s getting his purple belt. What is going on there? So is he getting his blue belt? Purple. Yeah, so they’re taking his blue belt off and putting his purple belt on. Yeah, see, that’s— he’s learning. He’s a martial artist. That’s why.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You think martial arts people are just more like spiritually connected to the truth?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if it’s spiritually connected to truth. It’s forced down your f*ing throat because you can’t believe you’re better than you are if you’re getting mauled every day. You know, and there’s only one way. This guy’s on the path to becoming a jiu-jitsu black belt. He looks like a pretty big guy too. That’ll help.

But there’s only one way to get a black belt in jiu-jitsu. You got to train jiu-jitsu all the time and get better at jiu-jitsu. You can’t pretend you’re better. You know, there’s a lot of people that write poems and they suck and they think they’re so deep.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, but there’s poems— meaning like there’s just a very simple objective measurement. That’s 100%.

JOE ROGAN: You either win or you lose. Either tap or you get tapped out. You know, you tap somebody or you get—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But can you get a black belt in some gym that’s easier than a different gym or something like that?

JOE ROGAN: Eh, sort of, kind of, but not really. I mean, everybody’s trying hard. I mean, there’s definitely better gyms where they’re more technical and their program is much more systematic and they’re better at breaking down skills, like how to develop skills. You know, there’s definitely better gyms. There’s better schools. There’s better places to learn.

But everywhere you learn, you’re going to have a bunch of people that are trying hard, and you have a bunch of people that are trying to learn these. And also today, because of the internet, you could go on YouTube and there’s thousands of tutorials breaking down new moves. Jiu-jitsu is like endlessly complex.

ADHD, Jiu-Jitsu, and Raising Kids

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: One of my kids has ADHD, and one of the things that was recommended to us was jiu-jitsu.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, what is ADHD, man? It’s not even f*ing real, because I definitely have it, and I think—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think we all have it.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a superpower.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think we all have it.

JOE ROGAN: I think I— look, I do not focus well on things that I think are boring, but if you give me something that I love, I can’t— I’ll play pool for f*ing 12 hours in a row.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s crazy, but like, the reason I got back into golf is my 7-year-old gets on the course, and sometimes you can talk to him and he’s not making, you know, he’s just like in his own world. And then you start talking about chess or jiu-jitsu or whatever, and then we get him on the golf course and this kid is just dialed in. Superpower. And I’m like, holy shit.

JOE ROGAN: And they say that that’s a disease. That’s crazy. Because if you find a thing that kid loves, he’s going to excel at it above and beyond most humans.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He does these chess classes, and look, he’s 7. So I’m like, “All right, motherfucker, bring it. Fing destroy you. I’m going to fing maul you.” And we’re playing last weekend, and he goes, “Oh, Dad, you know you can’t castle out of check.” I’m like, “Shut the f* up. I know how this game works.”

And I go on to beat him, and I went to my wife and I’m like, he’s 6 weeks away from beating me. And then I spent 2 days, I spent 2 f*ing days on YouTube and I was like, okay, I gotta brush up on my openings. Oh my God, I don’t have time for this shit, but I can’t let this 7-year-old beat me. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: You’re going to have to.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I was like, how do I stall this until maybe he’s 10 or 11? Then it’s like, okay, fine. “You finally beat me. Congratulations.”

JOE ROGAN: You have to think of him as an extension of you and be happy when he does. Yeah, that’s just how it is. Look, if you’re a man and you have a son— I have all daughters— but if I had a son, I would be legitimately terrified that he’d be able to tap me.

Because if I had a son, one of the first things that I would do is get them— I got my kids involved in martial arts at an early age, but I didn’t force them to keep doing it. They did it for a certain amount of time, and then they went on to do a bunch of other things that they enjoy better, which is fine. But I think it’s good to learn some skills, learn how to defend yourself so you’re not completely lost. I think it’s good for you. It’s good to learn. It’s good to develop confidence.

But for boys, I think it’s critical, especially boys with my kind of DNA. I’m like, I think it’s good to get that shit out of your system. But if I had a son, there’d be a certain point in time I’m like, it’s a matter of time before this motherfucker can kill me. I mean, I’m 58 years old. If I had a 20-year-old kid, he could probably f*ing kill me.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He’d kick your ass.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s like, what am I going to do? There’s nothing you could do. You just have to accept it and then hope your relationship with him is strong enough that he still respects you even though he can kill you. Because it can’t be entirely based— look, there’s a lot of martial arts instructors that are old and they’re revered and respected and nobody wants to try to hurt them. Because you realize if you learn enough, you get to a certain point in time—

Daughters, Sons, and the Gift of Hard Work

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You realize like, I’m a much better dad to my sons than I am my daughters. And I mean this in the following way: my daughters have the run of the place, whatever they want. I’m in love with them. I don’t love them, I’m in love with them. Whatever they need, whatever, right?

JOE ROGAN: They can just— enamored by—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They’re just like, they can control me. They just kind of send me in one direction or another. I’m just like— I’m enslaved by them.

JOE ROGAN: By the way, they know that too.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. You know, and I just want their attention. Any small little shred, I’m like, boo.

JOE ROGAN: Your son, you keep them in check.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Whereas like my sons, I keep— and I’m doing everything that I think I’m supposed to be doing. Now, the good news is my daughters are just different. They’re girls, they’re just, so they don’t need the same kind of like tough love-ish. But then my boys reveal their characteristics in ways that really surprise me. And I’m just like, man, this is so fing awesome. Parenting has been the best. Like when I, again, like slowing down and actually being in it. And I’m like, f, this is amazing.

JOE ROGAN: It is pretty amazing. And watching your kids get really good at things is really fascinating.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s fascinating. I told you this story before, but like, my son, my oldest son is my 17-year-old. It’s just a great kid. He goes and he’s like, okay, I’m applying for college. And I’m like, great, let me take you to the Naval Academy, West Point. Let me show you these service academies. And he sees those and he’s like, these are incredible. But then he’s like, I think I want to go to like Georgetown or Vanderbilt or whatever. And I’m like, hey man, that’s like a just a bigger version of your high school. And whatever, if that’s what you want to do, you do you.

But I’ll help you kind of get to the starting line here, but you’re on your own. And he had to get a job because I’m like, if you’re going to get into these schools, you got to get a job. And so he tries to— last summer, I just started fing screaming at him, and I’m like, “Fing louse, you haven’t done anything.” And this is at like another kid’s, at our son’s birthday party. I scream at him, he starts crying. I’m like, “You need to do more.” Then my wife screams at him, he starts crying again. Then my ex-wife screams at him, he starts crying again. And he just goes, “I’m outta here.” He walks out.

Meanwhile, I start panicking and I’m like, “I gotta Tiger Dad this situation.” So I start texting a few friends trying to figure out, hey, can I— I said, “Do you guys want to hire this kid? He’s a pretty smart kid, did all this stuff in robotics, yada yada.” One of them says, “I’d be willing to interview him.”

I call him and he’s like, “Dad, I got a job.” I said, “What do you mean you got a job?” He said, “I went around downtown, went to all these places, and I was in a McDonald’s and the woman was having a little bit of difficulty speaking English, so I just spoke to her in Spanish and I got the application. I sat down at the desk and the guy having lunch beside me said, ‘Hey, I heard you needed a job, and I really like the way you talk to this woman. I’m the general manager of the car wash down the street. Come and work for me.'”

And I said, “Well, what are you going to do?” He goes, “I’m going to go work there.” And I said, “Okay, well, I got this other interview for you as well, so you should see, maybe you can do both.”

Anyways, the end of the story is he did these two jobs. He worked at a robotics firm, but then he worked at a car wash. And when I tell you this story, I am so proud of this kid because of the car wash. Because that car wash thing— he would come home and he’s like, “Man, you have no idea how people live.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “The stuff that I find in the trunk when I have to vacuum these cars and clean out the cars.”

And I’m like, “Bro, that is a gift. You have given a fing gift. That is the thing that if you take with you, you’ll be golden the rest of your life, because all this other shit is all kind of manufactured. I help because I’m anxious, I’m insecure. But that shit you did on your own. And that thing is what people will fing respect when push comes to shove.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s also jobs that suck are really good for you. So good.

Working at Burger King and the Value of Hard Work

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I used to work at Burger King when I was 14. When my dad had to stay behind, my dad was a diplomat in the embassy of Sri Lanka in Canada. This f*ing war in Sri Lanka is crazy. He writes this essay, his life is threatened, so he files for refugee status. He gets it. He gets kicked out of the embassy, so he doesn’t have a job. My mom becomes a housekeeper, and we’re kind of toiling in this poverty cycle. So at 14, I had to get a job, and I would take the money and buy the bus passes, I would buy some of the groceries. We just trying to make it all work, right?

And I got a job at the Burger King. This is another example where I was like, I’m going to go get a job. “Hey, can you drive me to the interview?” And my dad’s like, “No, get on your f*ing bicycle and go.” And I thought, bro, we need this, but you need the money more than I do. Why are you making me bicycle? But I bicycled and I got the job and I worked there. And I used to work the night shift, 14-year-old kid, man. From 8:00 PM to 2:00 in the morning.

JOE ROGAN: And then you had to go to school in the morning?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, this was always like Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then yeah, some days I would have to go to school. And why did I work until 2:00? Because when the restaurant closes, you get whatever the food is left over, right? So you get a couple chicken sandwiches, you get the version of the McNuggets that Burger King had, a couple Whoppers. And you take them home.

But the amount of vomit that I had to clean up in the bathroom, you can’t imagine, man. A downtown Burger King near bars, after closing time, the shit you see. And the shit you deal with. And all I could think of was, I just want to get the f* out of here. But that was so valuable for me. That was so valuable for me.

And then I worry that my kids don’t get exposed to it, but when my son got it, maybe I’m overimposing too much about it, but I’m like, man, that car wash thing is really going to be the thing that separates you in life.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, doing something that sucks. It also lets you learn.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Just being humble and grinding through that shit.

The Importance of Voluntary Adversity

JOE ROGAN: Do you realize, sometimes people don’t pick a path and they just have a job and they don’t like it, and they stay with this thing they don’t like forever. And that’s not what you want. But the development, the learning how to do something that sucks and grinding through it and still doing it well.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, make a Whopper. Be there. I know how to f*ing make a Whopper. Make the fries, change the oil, and shit.

JOE ROGAN: And then when you apply those lessons to something you actually love and you work hard at something you love — magical. That’s a real gift. Some people, they don’t appreciate the process, and it’s hard to because when you’re young and you’re going through these difficult jobs and these things that suck and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And a lot of times people aren’t really educated in what a process actually is, and about how it does develop character, it does develop discipline, and these things are actual skills that you can apply to other things in life. You just think, “God, I’m a f*ing loser.”

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I have a visual for this. I always ask myself, am I in the engine room right now? This is my way of saying an engine room is a little hot, it’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s where all this shit is happening. It’s where the shit is being made. And so I’m like, it’s a little discomforting, but I gotta be in there. And there are days, and there’ll be weeks where that’s all I do. I’m just in it. I’m not good at responding to emails sometimes, because there’ll just be weeks where I’m in it.

And it’s an incredible visual for me because I’m like, yeah, this is where I’m grounded and I feel myself. And then when I look at my health, that’s when I just feel really good about myself, like not insecure. And my vitals are different. Like, my f*ing HRV craters when I’m just insecure. But why is that? Like, it’s your heart rate variability. This should have nothing to do with your disposition and your mood.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the idea that your mind is separate from the body is crazy. It’s not.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But is your HRV lower when you’re just out of sorts?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, probably. I don’t really monitor it that much. And I try not to ever get out of sorts too. And one of the ways that I keep from getting out of sorts is daily discipline. If I have a few days in a row where I don’t work out — but I work out almost every day. And if I’m not working out, I’m still cold plunging and going in the sauna and stretching. I’m always doing something. And if I don’t do something, I feel like I’m f*ing up.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So does it matter what it is? Meaning, as long as it’s a routine?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I do it all myself. I don’t have a trainer, but I write things down. I write down what I want to accomplish. I write down what I’m going to do. And then I just do it like a robot, force myself to do it. I always feel better after it’s over. And it’s always the hardest part of my day. And so it makes everything else so much easier because I fing work out hard. And so everything else is pretty easy, because the strain, like just being in that fing cold water or just going through Tabatas on an Airdyne bike, this shit’s hard. It’s really hard, like “I could die right now” hard. And so everything else is like, how hard is it going to be? Oh, it’s uncomfortable? Boo-hoo.

I think it’s important to go through that. I really think it is. And that’s the difference between sanity and having a very slippery grip on your own personal sovereignty. I think a lot of it is that it has to be elective, voluntary adversity. You have to choose to do it.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, that’s a really great way of saying it — voluntary adversity. If it’s forced upon you, you can kind of compartmentalize.

JOE ROGAN: Then you get angry, like, “F*, this is making me do stupid shit.” But if you force yourself to do it, you know—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s why these Special Forces guys are such f*ing animals. They’re choosing.

JOE ROGAN: Right, exactly. And they developed that mentality. When you’re around other people that are also savages, you realize there are other people out there in the world that are not making excuses, and they are getting after it every day, and they are pushing every day. And the more you can surround yourself with people like that — the people that complain about nonsense and that find excuses and focus on other people and bitch about things, “Why is she doing this, why is this happening for him” — yeah, it’s loser mentality.

And if you’re around more winners, you absorb that. You imitate your atmosphere. It’s very important. It’s very hard for people, especially young people, to find positive influences and to find positive groups. I think it’s one of the reasons why a lot of young people gravitate towards podcasts, because they get to hear interesting conversations with really accomplished people that are fascinating, that are unlike anybody that they’re around on a daily basis.

And that’s also one of the reasons why martial arts are so good for young people, because you’re around other people that are doing this really difficult thing. And other sports too, whether it’s football or wrestling, whatever it is.

The Dangers of Isolation and Success

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I actually found that the last few years I go out of my way to not isolate myself. That’s one thing — being around other people, engaging in things — that has been really healthy for me. And I just found, what the f am I doing? It’s like everything is in my little house, I’m just by myself, everything comes to me. It’s so odd. It’s really odd. It’s very unhealthy. And it starts to f you up in the mind.

JOE ROGAN: And then your interaction with humans is only on the internet. It’s terrible.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Or with people that are sycophantically either being paid or need something from you.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And then I think you’re in a really bad place. Whereas if you’re in the grind with other people, they’re beating you at things — it’s great.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if you’re in a situation where there’s a bunch of sycophantic politically connected people to you and they’re just all kissing your ass. I mean, we all know people that are like the heads of companies and that are just like f*ing tyrants.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think the trap about being successful, because it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be, is exactly that. You become so isolated that you become this very caricatured version of yourself because you forget what it’s like to — just a basic example — wait in line, be kind to other people, be polite, be accommodating, have some empathy. Where are you put in that situation to do those things?

JOE ROGAN: You forget that you’re just a person.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You’re just a f*ing person.

JOE ROGAN: And if you achieve some level of success and you’re trying to elevate past being a person, you’re missing the point. You’re never going to. And if you do, it’ll come at a price.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I thought being successful was supposed to right all the wrongs that I felt like I missed. And it turns out nobody gives a f*. And it does none of that.

Purpose, Meaning, and the Future of Work

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s all the process. All of life is the process. I think as soon as you think that there’s a goal, like, “Oh, I’m going to retire and experience my golden years,” I think it’s all horseshit.

And that’s one of my main fears about AI. One of my main fears about this idea of universal high income and everyone’s going to have ultimate abundance — it’s like, where does anybody find purpose and meaning? And where do you take whatever this thing is that the mind is constructed of, these needs that the mind has that have to be satisfied in order to achieve sanity, in order to achieve some sort of place where you can be at peace?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Accomplishment. Fulfillment.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You’re going to have to do something, man. You’re going to have to do something. It could just be jiu-jitsu and golf and find some stuff that you enjoy doing and take some benefit in that. But boy, that’s not been the case for hundreds of years. That’s not how human beings have existed. But also part of me says, why do we have to work to find those things? Why is it all that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, you got to find the thing that’s not work.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But what I’m getting at is, why is our identity all tied up in money and things and objects and stuff? And this is a fairly new thing in human society, right? Why can’t it transform into — your basic needs are all met, like nobody ever has to worry about starving again, nobody ever has to worry about not having a home to sleep in, nobody ever has to worry about not having healthcare, nobody ever has to worry about not having education. So then it becomes: find a purpose with your life. And as a society, can we adjust? Can we gravitate towards a new way of existing and meaning?

And it would probably be great. In one way, it’d be great because we wouldn’t have to be constantly thinking, “Why does he have that and I don’t have that?” Instead, it would probably be like, “What can I do to get better at the thing that I love?”

The Hive Mind and Human Connection

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Or let me be a part of a project to do something that seems implausible, but I feel like I’m in the engine room every day. This is great. I’m toiling with these guys. Yes. Probably not going to work. Some crazy convoluted thing that has a 0.001 chance of success. That can captivate a lot of people. Yes. You know?

JOE ROGAN: The process. The process. Yeah. The process. The process is everything. And there’s no— I used to think back—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There is no attention in the process. Right. There’s only attention in the outcome.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Do you see what I mean? Right. Absolutely.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Which is another clue and a secret that that’s actually where you should be focused.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you might get attention, but that’s not what you want. What you want is the process to work out. You want to get better at whatever it is you’re doing and get that thing to a better place than it is right now currently. Right, that’s what you’re thinking of. You’re not thinking of, “I am going to get all this attention, I’m going to be on the cover of a magazine.” Mwah! Yeah, can’t— you can’t be that. That’s not good for anybody. But everybody thinks that’s what they’re going to get.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Everybody thinks that’s what they want. Yeah, right. And the problem with that is that it’s not what you want. No. And then now we’re going to completely upend potentially all of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, maybe it’ll coincide with the hive mind technology.

The Hive Mind Concept

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: This hive mind thing, actually, that you say, I find very compelling because this idea of like, how do you govern an AI? Each of us individually are not capable, but I think you, me, like 10,000, 100,000 people working together — the question is, are we smarter? And I think there’s a reasonable chance that that could be true.

And then the other version of the hive mind is, here are all these crazy ideas that would just make the world incredible, and a group of 1,000 people go off and they kind of jointly work on that together. That I find super fascinating. Like, that could be it. Like, it could be like 1,000 physicists are like, “We’re going to create this new interstellar form of transportation,” and they just go off and they’re just like, they don’t have to worry about existing because all of that’s paid for.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it also could solve all of our problems that we have with haves and have-nots. If we’re all one, how could we tolerate have-nots? How could we tolerate people living on dirt floors in third world countries with no access to clean water? We wouldn’t tolerate it. We wouldn’t tolerate it. Because they would be us and we would understand that.

I mean, it could be like a complete game changer in terms of human civilization. It could really move people into a completely next direction. I mean, it could eliminate crime and violence. Yeah, which sounds insane. Like, boy, that’s so utopian. Like, “Oh, why don’t you suck on some crystals, you f*ing hippie?” But legitimately, if— look, if everybody has a cell phone, which essentially everybody does right now in this time and age, if we get to a point where everybody is connected, everybody is hive mind connected — you’re not going to just be able to drive by a homeless encampment, right? You won’t. You’ll feel—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You’ll feel it. You’ll feel it.

JOE ROGAN: It won’t be like, “Ew, you f*ing losers, hit the gas.” It’s going to be like, “We need to solve this. We need to get these people counseling, mental health crisis, get them off the drugs, whatever it is that’s wrong with them.”

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, that’s an incredible idea. Yeah, you know, like when an airplane kind of goes like this and your stomach goes and you just feel it. Could you imagine, like, you drive by a homeless encampment and that’s what you feel like? You feel like something’s wrong.

JOE ROGAN: And we’ll all feel it collectively, right? If we’re all connected and we all feel things collectively, we will actively work together to solve these problems. And if we’re dealing with— if we really get to a point of abundance, like true abundance, where resources are not an issue and no one’s starving, we could really fix all the problems that— like, none of them are insurmountable. None of them are breathing underwater, right? None of them are flying to the sun. None of them, right? So all of them are things that could be— if we took all the world’s resources—

Socialism doesn’t work, right? Why does it not work? Because it rewards lazy people and it punishes ambitious people. It doesn’t work with human nature. But it would work if you have fing hive mind. If we all felt— we all understand what it means to put in effort, we all understood what each other are feeling and thinking, right? And we all compiled resources and fixed all of our social problems. Like, literally stop all wars, stop all crime, stop all violence, stop all poverty. Done. And then what do we do? We work together to solve whatever the f else is wrong with society.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, it’s more like what is left over that we haven’t figured out.

JOE ROGAN: Think about what the world was like before the internet. It’s almost impossible to imagine, but we both grew up without it. Yeah. And so we’re entering into this new world. Think about what the world was like without the hive mind, but yet we all grew up without it. Like, that might be the next thing.

Unmasking Icons

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: The thing that I remember the most about that era is I had a positive sum view of everybody. Really? Meaning there weren’t like the— the bad actors were pretty bad, but generally I looked up to most business people. Like the people that I now feel like have been a little bit unmasked, then to me were pristine. Oh, that’s interesting. Like the Bill Gateses of the world. You know, I was like, “Man, I really aspire to be Bill Gates,” when I was like 13 or 14. It just seemed like—

JOE ROGAN: Now you’re like, “Why is he buying all the farmland, this fing weirdo?” I mean, it’s fing so funny.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He bought this like 45,000 acres— and 4,500 acres— I can’t get the order of magnitude, in Phoenix to build his own digital city. Yeah. Okay. It’s like weird. So I bought the 1,700 acres beside him. That’s hilarious. F* you, Bill Gates. It’s a very odd thing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a very odd thing when people get exposed and you just go like, “What the f* is that guy really all about?” And but also like, how isolated is he? He’s been—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He’s been isolated for 50 years, right?

JOE ROGAN: Like, who are his friends and how many people does he have?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Must be very hard to be him, actually.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, especially now that he’s divorced, right? So now he’s got no one going, “But that bitch f*ing sucks.”

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, he’s got— I mean, he has a long-term partner. She seems like a lovely woman. But yeah, it’s just got to be super lonely. It’s got to be.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not—

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: To me, it’s not worth that level of— I don’t even know, what is it? It’s like material success, at least measured in the outside world. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not— that’s a lot, man. This is like— I don’t know how Elon does it. Like, it’s a lot. It’s super isolating. Yeah, it’s just— he’s very by himself. Mm-hmm. And he’s going to be even more isolated in a matter of a few months. Yeah, that’s unfortunate because you have very empathetic, very kind of sensitive people like that, I think, need other people.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s got people around him, but he’s got very few people around him that can kick reality at him, you know. That is a bit of a problem, but he still seems to be having fun. Every time I’m around him, we have a bunch of laughs. Like, he’s fun to hang out.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He’s got an incredible sense of humor.

Visiting SpaceX and Starbase

JOE ROGAN: Jamie and I went down to one of the rocket launches at SpaceX. Yeah, we went down there and we watched from the ground while it took off, which is incredible because it’s— how far was it, Jamie? It was like 2 miles away from us. A mile, mile and a half. So it’s a mile and a half. You feel it in your chest. Have you been when a rocket launches? You been there? No.

Dude, it’s bananas. The fing thing, like, first of all, it doesn’t look that far. It looks like it’s like maybe a quarter mile. I’m just not good at judging. This is a Starship? Oh yeah. So you feel it. His kids started crying like, “We want to go inside.” Like, it’s disturbing, like the amount of energy that’s coming out of these fing rocket boosters.

And then I hung out with him in the command center while the rocket was flying through space, and we’re watching it on all these monitors, and then it lands in the water in Australia. And he’s cracking jokes the whole time because the thing is like losing pressure because they’re stress testing all this stuff, which is really funny when really dumb people go, “Oh, he’s a f*ing dumbass, his rockets keep blowing up.” Like, they just don’t understand. Like, the only way you find out what the capability of this technology is, is you have to let it blow up and then you go, “Okay, it needs to be thicker. It needs to be this and that. And we need to add these things,” and there’s sensors everywhere.

And so he’s cracking jokes the entire time while this thing is like losing pressure. And it eventually wound up landing and it was fine, but it did have a hole in it. But it was just like, he’s laughing, like he’s having a good old time. He’s not freaked out. He’s uniquely built to handle it.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: When there was a rocket launch in Vandenberg in California, I chartered a Pilatus, because you can get a Pilatus, like a little propeller plane.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I went around and around, and I have this video of it kind of coming up and through, because like, how close were you? 100 miles. Oh wow. But it’s like right there, you know, because it’s like the distance, right? And it’s coming up, and I’m kind of going around. It was the craziest thing. It was cool. It was super cool. That shit is super cool.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very cool. I mean, just Starbase is bananas. Just when you go down there and they have their own town, the whole thing is— f*ing Cybertrucks everywhere. I’m like, “How do you find your car?” Like, is it an incorporated town?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It started off as unincorporated, but it’s its own thing now.

JOE ROGAN: I believe it’s its own town. And is there a mayor? That’s a good question. I think there is. I think we talked about this. I don’t remember though. But the actual factory itself is nuts. ‘Cause Jamie and I were both like, “This is way bigger than I thought it was going to be.” And the rockets are way bigger than you thought. And like, the garage doors are f*ing bananas. They got a city government website. Commission, mayor. That’s crazy. Bobby Peated?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Bobby Peated is the mayor.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They have their own little Irish pub. It’s like, it’s really cool. They have really good food.

The First Gigafactory

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, when he opened the first Gigafactory, which was in Nevada, we had a party. And it was like a small opening thing. And so we all drove in there and I have a video of me in just like a pickup truck driving into the thing. I started the video and I think it was 43 seconds until it ended. And this was like a decade ago. And I thought to myself, “This is implausible. I’ve never even contemplated things that could be built this big. I didn’t think it was allowed. I don’t even know how something like this works.” And I was like, “How does— how do you envision this whole thing works?” Like, simple. Raw materials in the front, cars out the back. That’s it. It sounds so simple.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he thinks big. He thinks big. And thank God he’s around. I mean, if he wasn’t around, if he hadn’t purchased Twitter, I think our entire civilization would look very different. Very different. I mean, that sounds like a very grandiose thing to say.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Sounds hyperbolic, but you’re right.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s true. Because I think free speech is a core component of our civilization. And I don’t really think we had it. I think it was curated. And it was very tightly controlled by the actual federal government, which is spooky.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, no, it decided what we should be paying attention to. And that’s not right. Because when they’re telling you to pay attention to this and the actual issue is this, and you cannot, then you can’t fix what’s actually broken. And we start to basically be like, we’re part of just a useful idiot for these people. And that’s not right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not right. Listen, man, this was a lot of fun. It’s always great to talk to you. Thank you very much for doing this. It was very cool. Let’s do it again sometime. All right, thank you. All right, bye everybody.

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