TRANSCRIPT: Chamath Palihapitiya on The Tucker Carlson Show

What a blessing. That’s for sure. I had incredible kids. What a blessing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Five.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Five. Incredible kids. That’s amazing. No, Tucker, it’s amazing. Having kids is amazing.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I had incredible friends. I have a Thursday night poker game that I will, frankly, no matter where I am in the world, I will go out of my way, planes, trains, and automobiles to fly back for because of what that game gives me with my friends.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I have these little things. Wait, where’s the game?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: In my house.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, and it’s great, too, because, by the way, like, you know, poker players. Well, so poker, so in Silicon Valley, there’s like a group of us, like some well-known folks that we all get together. And my wife was the one that did this. When she first looked at the game, you’d see all these people, and it was really interesting.

But, you know, a lot of my friends have a touch of the tism, and so what happens is, you know, you just end up, like, looking down at your cards for eight hours straight. Nothing was happening. And she said, “Guys, this is ridiculous. You can play for a few hours, but at 7 p.m., we’re going to break for dinner. We’re going to sit around the table, and we’re all going to talk. And you must look at each other in the eyes.”

It was so funny. But it’s become a ritual. And for all of us, we all feel seen. And then slowly what happens is people start to talk about things that they would have never talked about. And what you see is this repetitive pattern. People with this dark passenger, lots of insecurity. They achieve a lot. But all of that, a lot, is externally validated, but not internally felt.

And so there’s just a sense that there’s an emptiness. And people start to panic. I thought that XYZ would solve the problem. I thought the watches would solve the problem. The boat, the plane, the clothes, the chains. None of it solves it.

And everybody, like clockwork, all of my friends, go through it. And so it’s funny. I’m sort of at the tail end of this. But that poker game has been almost like this therapy session where we all get to talk. And then as a result, people feel calmer. They feel a little bit more seen about what’s going on.

Self-Awareness and Personal Growth

My point in telling you this is not sympathy. It’s just a state that, like, everybody is going through this struggle. So back to me, I was able to sort of put a finger on what my thing is. What is that, you know, big sack that I’ve been trying to carry up a hill that is totally worthless and not worth my time?

It’s this idea that I am worthless and I’m not worth anybody’s time. And that just comes from the way that I was raised and the things that happened to me. I don’t want any sympathy for that except to say, that’s my thing. But now that I know it, I can try to do things that are more productive in ways where I feel real value.

And I think that’s a very useful process because it reintroduces. I think it can fix for so many people the thing that is so broken right now. You know, we are completely de-spiritualized.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Nobody believes in a higher order, faith, God. And so I think what happens is everybody has this Carl Jung moment. All of this difficulty sits on top of them. And at some point, they may never say it out loud. They think, I am living in a tale told by an idiot. Right? That’s that famous quote about why spirituality is important.

And when you feel that way and you don’t have an answer, you start to feel angry. And you start to push back and you start to think, tear it all down. None of this is working. It’s all BS. So I want to try to solve it for myself. And then as I live and as I just kind of do the things that I’m doing, start new businesses, make new investments, I’m going to try to point this out. Because I think by pointing it out, you have a chance for other people to start questioning things. Do I have a dark passenger?

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you get so self-aware about all of this? Most people, when they feel sad to sort of bumble forward and keep doing what they have always been doing to no effect. What stopped you and made you think about what was happening?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, I am. It’s still very much a source of anger for me. Like this idea that I’m basically worthless makes me mad. And I projected it for many years sort of on the people that I, you know, my parents for the most part and all that dysfunction.

Um, because I think about it a lot. And then when I make mistakes, so in that 2022 period, when I started to really write down, here are all the mistakes I made. One or two layers.

TUCKER CARLSON: You wrote them down.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Wrote them down. It’s like, okay, I invested a couple hundred million dollars in this thing. It went to zero. What was I thinking? And I would first, I, and your mind is very clever. At first you lie to yourself and you lie to yourself incredibly well. Well, I underwrote it this way. I thought the discounted cash flows. It’s all BS.

One layer after that was, and then I communicated my thinking to hold myself accountable. Also BS. That communication got me attention and I liked the way it made me feel. And then I said, hold on a second. That feels true. I hate that I can even say it, that it may be true, but that feels true.

And so then I go back and I start to think like, how many other decisions that I made, that I made in that period were rooted in that? And when I saw four or five of them, I said, this is not what I’m supposed to be doing. And then I went back and I said, how many other decisions in my life have I been making that were rooted in an idea of look at me? And it turned out that there were a lot. The things I bought, the clothes I wore, the things I said, the way that I tried to live a life. And I felt that that was not me. I was ashamed of it. Then I was angry about it. And then I asked my wife, I need you to help me fix it.

And this is what I mean by, like, you have to have a partner, I think, in crime that can really go through the ups and downs with you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn, what did your wife say when you told her this?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: She’s like, I’ve been telling you this for years.

TUCKER CARLSON: What every wife says.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But, you know, I was like, finally, I listened. And, you know, she always makes this joke. She’s like, I could tell you the smartest thing in the world. And she’s like, you think you need a man to tell you. And I said, well, this time this man was me. And it’s a joke.

No, it’s true, though. And so, and my father-in-law. And my father-in-law, when I finally, like, kind of got rid of all the anger that I had. My father-in-law was a father that I wish I had had. And what I mean by this is, like, some people may not understand this, Tucker. You may or may not. It is extremely discomforting to feel unconditional love from the people around you, if you have not felt it. If you have always felt it, you don’t know what it means when somebody says it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You’re like, what does that mean? I don’t know. I knew what it did not, what I thought love looked like. And then when you have people that love you in this way, it’s tilting. And it made me angry.

The Journey of Self-Discovery

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I would push back on this, and I would go back to that and say, why didn’t that look like this? I was just in an endless loop of being mad.

TUCKER CARLSON: So when you experienced the way your wife’s family loved each other, it made you mad about your childhood?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. At first I was mad at her. Subconsciously, because she’s giving me something that I don’t understand, and I thought, there’s got to be a catch. Where’s the asterisk? There’s always a catch. And, you know, for years, she’s like, “There’s no catch.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And then she says to me, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.” She’s like, “Now, this next phase of totally building will be that you and I do it together.” And again, I freaked out. And I thought, what do you mean?

TUCKER CARLSON: Where did you find this woman?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh, my God. She’s, I mean, she’s from the heavens. She turns out she’s from Milan, but she’s from the heavens. And she’s like, “But we’ll do it together. And it’s going to be incredible, whatever it is, because we’re going to look back and the process will have been the thing.”

I just needed a guide and I needed to be open to listening. And so I needed that event, right? Because, yeah, like, think about a kid, me. I grew up in Sri Lanka. There’s a civil war. We claim refugee status in Canada. Grew up on welfare. I get an engineering degree. And within a year, I’m in the United States. And my career just goes up and to the right.

Everything was working. Youngest vice president at AOL, you know, when I was 26 years old, running this big messaging business. Then I get recruited by Zuck. I go to Facebook as one of the early execs. I build that business. All the key things that they look back on now, the network effects, the early monetization, internationalization. That was my team. Most of my team still runs that company.

So it was like, then I left and I started an investment business. Those investment returns are really good. So everything was, quote, unquote, working. So I held myself in really high regard, but for the wrong things, if that makes sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course it does.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I could point to a bank account or Twitter followers or all of this stuff. And then when that was undone, right, 2022, 2023, what happened? I thought that this was all supposed to work and it would work forever.

There’s an opportunity for me to really reset and tell myself the truth, the ugly truth. Hey, man, you are motivated by stupid, inconsequential stuff. Get back to basics. And then when I looked around, it wasn’t just me. There’s so many of my peers in Silicon Valley that it also just wasted the last decade doing nothing. We were all, quote, unquote, wealthier, but we were more broke. You know?

TUCKER CARLSON: I wonder, I do know, and I’ve certainly seen that a lot, having spent a lot of time around rich people. But I’ve rarely seen someone address it as honestly as you are now. And do you know other people who’ve been willing to look at themselves as clearly?

Learning from Others

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think there are people that may not talk about it, but I think that they’ve lived it. I know Elon’s lived it, where he’s always underwritten things based on, like, this is the, so, like, you know, the great thing about being in Silicon Valley is that there are people that I have the honor and the luck of knowing, like him, but I didn’t really try to learn from him until 2022, if that makes sense.

Meaning there were all these decisions that he made that I would reductively reduce to, that’s a smart business decision. And it had nothing to do with business. He had, he was always leading from, what are my core moral beliefs and let me act on those. Like, the money never mattered. You know, he never did anything to live that experience. He loves his friends. He loves his family. It took me a decade of knowing him until I started to listen to that. And to, like, to really hone in on that.

So he’s an example. Then there are folks that are a little bit older that have gone through it. My father-in-law has gone through it, ups and downs and ups and downs. And he’s built an incredible business. And he’s had to face tremendous hardship where he’s had to underwrite what is really important. Am I an honorable person? You know, is my word my bond? When you shake my hand and we do a deal, it is what it is.

You know, if I can, you know, make X, but it’s way too much. And if I can make half as X, but it’s more, make my, he makes drugs, you know, life signs of drugs. Make them more accessible. Should I do, he makes those decisions. And so you live, you see his morality play out in his actions.

My wife. So I think now I have three or four people in my life, but I had to listen. And before I chose not to listen because my ego said, hey man, you’re, you know, you’re the best. You’ve heard people say it.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you’re not doing anything wrong, why do you care if other people watch what you’re doing?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, because privacy is integral to freedom. No privacy, no freedom.

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The Upsides and Downsides of Early Wealth

TUCKER CARLSON: So you got very rich in your early 30s.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That itself is weird. It’s really… I mean, it’s not weird where you live. It’s not uncommon where you live. But it’s historically, like, there’s not a lot of that.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What are the upsides and downsides of that, do you think?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: The upside, I think, is that you can start to really focus on things that you care about. The downside is if you haven’t… If you don’t know what those things that you care about really are, you’re going to waste a lot of time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good point. What did you do when… This is after the Facebook IPO.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, I bought a piece of the Warriors. That was really cool. You know, I was like a 10% owner of the Warriors. I had a press release from the NBA. And there was, like, two players on the team at the time that were older than me. That’s pretty weird. And I made some amazing friendships with them. When we won the championships, you know, we would go to Vegas. We would kind of, like, party together.

Don’t get me wrong. Like, an incredible experience, especially for, you know, an ugly nerd that had no social life. Do you know what I mean? So, I took advantage of that because it’s like filling a jug of water, right? That jug had always been empty. I was never invited out, right?

So, okay. I thought, now I’m invited out. Obviously, it’s because, you know, the position. It’s not like, you know, we grew up together or whatever. But I would get invited out. Okay. So, every now and then, maybe more often than not, I’d just pay for the dinner. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’m out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I’m in the mix. I’m in the game. But then the jug fills up. And then you’re like, wait a minute. Because you think, like, when the jug is two-thirds full, oh, don’t worry. It’s that extra third that’s just going to fix it all.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s true.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, you just go through these cycles. And so, I mean, that was a cool thing. You know, you do the, you go after material possessions. That doesn’t do anything. It really doesn’t. These are all very hollowing things.

I think, like, the thing that, like I said, like, you know, the problem with things like social media, what they do is they glorify these things. We all fall for it. I fell for it. So, when you have money, you go and you buy these things because you think this is what happiness looks like or, you know, success looks like. And it’s not. It’s none of that stuff.

Now, nobody listening to this will believe it because everybody wants to live that over and over because it’s not, like, a very destructive life lesson. You know what I mean? Like, to have, like, a Laura Piana sweater and not need it.

But the bigger message is more important, which is if you have a sense of what’s important, you can kind of see the things that are really happening in a much more, they’re more in focus.

So, like, you know, I would say, like, now that I’m 48, I’m much more aware of, like, what does it mean to be an American? What is my job as an American businessman, as an engineer, as an entrepreneur? It’s not all of this other superficial garbage because it adds nothing. It’s to actually allow the system that rewarded and benefited me to be just a little bit better in terms of the contributions I give to it before I’m no longer part of the system in 50 or 60 years.

That’s very motivating for me now. And this idea that my kids can go and join Team America and do cool stuff and find happiness, find a great husband, find a great wife, have a bunch of kids and live a good life and know what their dad went through and have a better sense of that, that seems like an additive thing I can add to the system.

To be a good example for my friends, when they start to go through their own struggles, that they can kind of course correct a little bit faster than I did. But, you know, I mean, I went through a divorce, right? So that’s a terrible thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: After you got rich?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: After all that, I went through a divorce. And I was very lucky to find my wife. But my point is that my first marriage, when you get a divorce, that’s a death in the family.

TUCKER CARLSON: Literally, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Literally a death. And then you are complicit in the commission of that death. You know, it’s the husband and the wife.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, there are only two people responsible.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s right. And so I see a bunch of my friends who are, you can see some veering and teetering. And now I can sort of intervene a little bit and just kind of cajole and nudge and, you know, help them. And I’m not saying that these are all really grand, highfalutin things, but they actually address the inner part of what I needed for a very long time. I just didn’t realize it.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, those are the most important things. If you can help someone save his marriage, I mean, I think that’s a lot more important and virtuous than most things that we do.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Than, frankly, most everything. Especially when you think about compounds to that husband and wife’s children.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s the key thing. I completely agree.

The Importance of Happy Marriages and Children

TUCKER CARLSON: A happy marriage makes happy children. So, yeah, it redounds to the generations, I would say.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, when I was seeing children, I was having a conversation with one of my children this morning. You know, I know a lot of rich people, obviously, and we’re talking about somebody who we know, you know, good guy, billionaire, who is totally focused on making more money. To the exclusion of.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Everything else.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of. And one of my children said to me, and not in a judgmental way, but, you know, with affection for this person, but like, why? Like, what is that exactly? I mean, why, you know, I guess it’s just on autopilot to some extent, like, you know, I make money, I’ll make more money, but, but the drive to make more money that is literally superfluous, like, you will never need that money. What is that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s an emptiness somewhere else. It’s a jug that they’re trying to fill, and they think that the, you know, the closer they get to filling it, the problem is, like, your mind just switches the jug to an even bigger jug. And then it gets closer to being full, and then it switches again, and it switches again.

I think the much better way to think about this problem is, what am I doing with my time that actually helps the place that gave me an opportunity be better? And the people that live beside me be better. That is a really morally valuable statement. And then you can kind of, like, look at all the things and all the problems that make everybody mad in the United States as an opportunity to actually do them better.

And that is useful. And when you have money, the one thing that you can do is you can accelerate that change much faster than folks that have to take a much more arduous path.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I think we’ve lost that. There’s not enough people that basically say, okay, you know what? The United States has given me so much. Now, how do I give back, quote, unquote? And you don’t necessarily have to give back by going into nonprofit or going into government. You can just acknowledge the problems that are there and go fix them. And you can fix them by starting for-profit companies, which are always the best way. And I wonder, like, why don’t more people do it?

America’s Importance and Technological Supremacy

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a great question. You can have five decent children, too, which is probably the best thing you could do for any country. So thank you for that. But I do notice and have always noticed that some of the people who have benefited most from the United States dislike it the most intensely. And I don’t really understand what that is.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think that that is – I think that what’s happened – so I’ll give you my framework. You can tell me maybe where you agree or disagree. But it is important for all 330 million Americans to take a step back and acknowledge this one truth. And I think that it is completely a canonical statement that is inviolate for being an American.

We are the single most important country in existence in the world. We are the most important country today. We must be the most important country tomorrow. Period. If you say that enough times and you believe it, then there are two things that underpin that. And I think only two.

We are the single most vibrant economy in the world. And we are the single strongest military in the world. And if you can agree to those two things, which I think should be non-controversial, if you say – meaning, like, if I said to you, hey, Tucker, we make the best oranges and burritos in America, that does not yield the most important country in the world. If I said we make the best shoes and the best flat panel TVs, that does not equate to the most powerful country in the world.

But if I said to you, we have the strongest and most vibrant economy and the strongest and most powerful military, that is the strongest and most important country in the world. And then there is only one thing that gives you both of those two things, which is technological supremacy.

So go back to these examples. If I said to you, we write the best books, those books could be incredibly powerful, but it does not give you technical supremacy. If I said to you that we have the most abundant energy, oil fields, nat gas, it’s important, but it does not give us technological supremacy.

Those that get there will be in a position to create the most vibrant economy. They’ll take that money and then create the most powerful military. They’ll put those two things together. They’ll be the most powerful country.

So I think today, sitting here, January of 2025, we are in an existential risk of losing our place in the world. And the reason is that we had people, we have people from the inside trying to sabotage our economy effectively and trying to sabotage our military capability.

And they do that not explicitly, but they do that because they are in positions of leadership and they fundamentally don’t know what they’re doing. And this is what needs to get called out. And I think what we need is this wholesale reform of the people that are at the levers and in the controls of these things. The lack of economic judgment, the lack of military judgment is ruining America’s ability to be the most important country in the world.

Silicon Valley’s Lost Decade

We are, you know, in Silicon Valley, I think it’s fair to say that we have had a lost decade. And when you look underneath why, what are the two most or three most or four most incredible technological achievements that the Silicon Valley has created in the last decade? You’re hard pressed to find it.

So in one example, you have Elon. He’s created reusable rocketry. He’s created an entire global mesh of communications infrastructure. He’s created electric cars. That’s an incredible thing. And he’s done that with one hand tied behind his back, meaning fighting the government, local, state, federal at every single turn over the last 10 or 15 years.

What have the rest of us done? We’ve created AirPods and Instagram reels. Why? I think a lot of people fell into the same lull that I fell into. We had people pushing back constantly. We got distracted. We wasted time.

You know, we took an entire cadre. Like, look, engineering is actually very much like professional sports, Tucker. Like, there are Michael Jordans in engineering. Okay? And there are many people that are not very close to Michael Jordan. You know, couldn’t even make a JV scrub team.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There is that crazy distribution of capability. And let’s just say in Silicon Valley there’s 5 million engineers. If you add up all the companies and all the people, maybe that’s a lot, but I don’t know. I can tell you that there’s at least 25,000 or 50,000 of them that are like Michael Jordan-esque capable.

And instead, what we told these people is, hey, don’t win six championships in eight years. Don’t be the most prolific player ever. What we told them to do was like, hey, you can dribble down the court, but don’t dribble too fast because you’ll make these other people feel bad. Hey, you know what? You can do a couple of layups, but don’t do too many layups because you should actually pass the ball so that these other people we hired because the team photo looks better. You know, give them a chance to score.

You did all of these dumb things. Because then team management would come down and say, you know what? I actually think the goal should be to play wiffle ball. And then you take Michael Jordan off the basketball court and you make him play wiffle ball. That’s what Silicon Valley did.

We took all this incredible talent. We got distracted by the money. Because what really did happen in the Valley, what did happen is all the billionaires became decabillionaires and centi-billionaires. The wealth went through the roof. The innovation went through the floor. So we got lulled into this economic complacency. My gosh, I’m so much smarter because I’m so much richer. No, you’re not.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’re not. I’ll give you a different example. Sounds like good old-fashioned decadence, kind of.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But I think that there was some sabotage, meaning, or maybe sabotage is not the right word, but there were traps that were laid out and we all fell on them. The DEI trap, the woke trap, all this kind of stuff that were distractions to core innovation.

Examples of Technological Missteps

I’ll give you two examples that paint the picture. I’ll bookend it. I’ll give you a Silicon Valley bookend. The beginning of the bookend is in the early 2000s. There’s an incredible professor, Jennifer Doudna, in Berkeley, and she pioneers CRISPR, which is the ability to edit genes. Let’s take that off the table, whether you think it’s morally right or wrong, for a second, okay? It could be a tool. It could be a weapon. I grant that. But it is undeniably a tool that sits in the toolbox that we call technological supremacy.

Over the next decade, what Silicon Valley managed to do was embroil themselves in IP lawsuits about who actually owned it. What China did was take the open source awareness of it and pioneer it. Is that smart? Whether you agree or you disagree, should that toolbox be in our toolbox where we can meet it out? Or should it be in China’s toolbox where they can decide?

Where if all of a sudden there is some disease in the future and it requires this very precise form of gene editing and only they can do it, and now a state-sponsored entity in China is the one that provisions a cure for 8 billion humans around the world, that will give them tremendous economic power. Is that smart for America to have done that? I think not.

I’ll give you a different example, which is just today as you and I sit here, President Biden issued an EO. And what the EO said is, executive order, AI is going to be critical. And so we want to give the ability for federal lands to be used for AI data centers. Okay. Now you’re cooking. This sounds smart. Let’s go read the fine print.

And by the second or third paragraph, what it says is, however, we need to think about the, you know, the diversity and equity inclusions of said data centers. And, and, no, hold on. And you have to basically give preference to clean power. Well, is that the same clean power that was essentially made impossible because of permitting issues and environmental impact studies?

You know, you can’t just build solar farms that you want to. You can’t build wind farms in America if you want to. You can’t build nuclear reactors because they won’t let you. These are not technological limitations. These were regulatory limitations. Those are just two examples that just show you. You cannot do what’s in America’s best interest right now because people have forgot. They’ve lost the script. They forgot the priorities.

Guys, the priorities are we need to remain the most singularly powerful economic and military entity in the world. The way you do that is through technical supremacy, period.

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Moves

I’ll give you another two examples just to, you can tell me if these are boring, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not at all.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Saudi Arabia is doing an incredible job. They’re monetizing their oil. They are doing very strategic things with the capital. What they’ve decided is they’re going to allocate money that they take from selling oil to build a global data center infrastructure for AI. That’s really smart. And when you look at Saudi Arabia on a map, you think, oh my gosh, this is very smart. Why? Because they sit right in this artery between Asia, Europe, and Africa. This is critically smart.

But what is the one thing that they need that they don’t have? It’s AI chips. Now, AI, just to break it down for, you know, your viewers. Think of AI as two buckets. Okay. Bucket number one is where you train the brain. Okay. Think of AI as a brain. Bucket number one, you train the brain. Bucket number two, you use the brain to make decisions. Okay.

The chips that we make to train the brain are under export control. We don’t want folks to train their own brains necessarily unless we can govern them. That’s a Department of Commerce decision on export licensing. The way that we use the brain is a different kind of chip. And we have some export controls there.

What will Saudi eventually be forced to do? They’re an ally of America. They want to do the right thing. But they have a responsibility to their people to try to become the most incredible, you know, economic and military power in the world. They’re going to go and buy the chips from the people that will actually sell it to them.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’ll look east, of course.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They will look east and they’ll find it in China.

AI Development and Economic Strategies

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He had a different example. If you look at Meta. Meta has poured tens of billions of dollars to training a brain. Okay. An AI brain that’s called Llama. Right. That’s Meta’s efforts in AI. And it’s open source. It’s wonderful, actually. My companies use it. It works. It’s high quality.

Open AI, which is the private close sourced competitor to Meta and Llama, also has an AI brain that they’ve trained. You know, GPT, chat GPT. You’ve used it probably. They’ve also spent tens of billions of dollars, in part coming from Microsoft.

Meanwhile, in December, the Chinese company open sourced a model where they spent tens of millions of dollars. And in many cases, that digital brain is smarter than both Meta and open AIs on many dimensions. So, two orders of magnitude cheaper.

Well, what do you think that means for the other 182 countries around the world that wants to do something in AI? Are they going to take the $10 billion version or are they going to take the $10 million version?

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re going to take the $10 million one.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. And when you unpack, well, why did it cost $10 billion?

TUCKER CARLSON: That was my question.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It cost $10 billion because of all the roadblocks that we put in front of companies to make the things that we need to maintain our technical supremacy.

So, I’ll give you some examples. There is a huge – so, for example, one of the things that China chooses to not do is they don’t really respect copyright law. Now, I’m not saying we should violate copyright law, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is a technical overhang that it creates in training these brains to try to filter out content that the New York Times tags or Fox News tags and says, don’t learn on this. You’re not allowed unless you have a deal with me. That creates an enormous layer of expense.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do we judge that issue?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Today, if you ask somebody, it’s a pretty simple conversation. It’s not nuanced. It’s do you believe in copyright or do you not believe in copyright? I think it’s a much more nuanced question. For the sake of training these digital brains, if there was an economic relationship that we could create, isn’t it better that our digital brain is smarter than these other ones and that we make it as cheap as possible?

If you ask that question, a lot of people would say, gosh, that’s a nuanced question. It’s neither an easy no or an easy yes, but on the margins, I would say yes, knowing that there are these impacts.

I’ll give you a different example. It takes all this energy to build the data centers. Why does it cost so much? It’s not that the, let’s just say you wanted to use solar panels. Is it that the solar panels are expensive? No. Is it that the ability to do the interconnects are expensive? It’s that building that facility had a multi-year environmental impact study, umpteen lawsuits, all kinds of indirection and misdirection from all of these independent actors who believed that they were pursuing their own priorities.

And there was no release valve that said, I appreciate and respect the smelt that you’re trying to protect or the land grouse. But this is bigger than that. We need to make sure we maintain our technical superiority. That data center is going to be used by the NSA to protect America. So it needs to go up in nine months. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Right now, we don’t have the ability to say that. Or if we do, it’s not clear who should say it. And so all of this time costs money. All of this complexity costs money. And the output are practical costs of building these things that are just two orders of magnitude bigger than our competitors.

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Energy and AI Infrastructure

TUCKER CARLSON: I wonder, though, if just the basic economics of AI, just force change. For example, the power draw for AI, I was hearing about it. There was an AI center in another country three days ago, and they were saying they’re not exactly sure, you know, what it’s going to take to run one, but it could be 10x a normal data center, which is – that was amazing to me. So how do you power that exactly? So you have these competing imperatives. You’ve got the climate agenda versus AI, which is clearly the future of the economy of California, for example.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. Can I just say – okay, I have to go on a small diatribe.

TUCKER CARLSON: Please do. I’m trying to evoke one.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There is nothing that the Western countries can do that will equate in any way, shape, or form the impact of what China and India decides to do. We do not live in small bubbles. There is no glass bubble that sits on top of the United States. We all share an ecology, that ecology is extremely complicated and nuanced, and it’s a global one, and the reality is that India and China collectively together have way more impact than what you and I are going to do by becoming vegans.

TUCKER CARLSON: Impact on the climate, on the environment is a –

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed, yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So I think the reason why, for example, like we have – again, so we have lost so much ground. The California wildfires are an example that lays us there. We should have 50% of the American population on solar panels and battery walls today. The reason – it’s nice to have that you do it for climate change, but the reason is resilience. The reason is so that you can power yourself in moments of calamity. The reason is so that you can make sure that you can take care of your family, cook food, you know, desalinate water, whatever it is that you need to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: The prepper approach to energy. I’m with you.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s just like the practical reality.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally agree.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And instead, we make it this sort of like moral blanket that you have to wrap yourself in. Everybody then takes a view, and all it does is retard progress. So I guess what I’m saying is we spend way too much time getting distracted on fringe ideas, and we need to recalibrate. But we need to be and we need to remain the most singular muscular power in the world, which comes from economic and military supremacy, which comes from only one thing, technical supremacy. So you have to find a way of enabling those 50,000 Michael Jordans that exist in America to cook. Let them cook. That’s what you need to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: I wonder if the structure of Silicon Valley or –

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Can I give you a different example?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, of course.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Sorry. This is my last one.

Rare Earth Metals and Robotics

One of the big pushes in AI is in robotics. And just to double click into a robot, a robot moves through these things called actuators, okay? And one of the things that actuators needs, one of the ways that they generate mechanical motion, 3D planar mechanical motion, is through the use of magnets, permanent magnets. And permanent magnets are different than the ones you and I play with or what our kids play with. They are made from these things called rare earth metals.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And rare earths are a misnomer. They are not rare. But they are abundantly available in the earth. There is an incredible supply of rare earths in California. You could not, for the life of you, get a permit in California, no matter how clean, how green, to mine those materials to make sure that we could make magnets so that we could make the robots so that we maintained our technical supremacy. Right?

That’s how that decision, I think, should get made. We want technical supremacy in the next 5 to 10 years. There’s going to be a huge wave in robotics. America needs to be at the forefront. America needs to make them. We need to understand how to program them. Our robots need to be smarter. So there’s an AI track, right? There’s a mechanical engineering track. Okay, well, there’s a mining track. Let’s get the materials. Let’s make sure that we are beholden to nobody so that we can make them.

By the way, these are all great paying jobs if you are able to actually get them permitted. And when push comes to shove, when it’s like, yeah, get the rare earths out of the ground and make the permanent magnets, can’t do it. Why? You’re going to spend 13 years in permitting hell in California to try to get that done?

And I know this. The reason I know this is that I started a business to make sure that China does not have access to the only supply of rare earths. And I initially tried to do it in California. Impossible. I invested in one business that actually had an old mind that we were able to get back online through a bankruptcy process and blah, blah, blah. But it’s not nearly enough.

So I went to India. And I was able to get a deal done with the Indian government. And what they were able to see was the strategic rationale of making sure we had access to not only the rare earths, but also to make sure that there were subsidies so that they would compete on the global stage cheaper than China. And now I can bring them back into the United States to make these magnets.

Would I like to do that in America? Yes. Can I? Impossible. I’d be sitting around twiddling my thumbs for a decade. The guys in India did that deal with me in less than 18 months. They understand. There’s an escalation point where they’ll sit down and say, Chamath, what do you need? What makes sense? And I say, well, sir, here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s why having a global supply chain that’s independent of China is just important. It’s competitive. It’s good for everybody. They’re like, OK, great. X, Y, and Z. Do the following three things. Build a plant over there. We’ll make sure that we support you. Here, we’re just going to a morass and die.

Energy Independence and Technical Supremacy

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, can we generate, do we have the hardware to generate the electricity necessary to remain dominant in the AI?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. So the other crazy thing about that Biden EO is why do you have, like, why couldn’t you have just stopped the EO at that first paragraph?

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it wouldn’t include the control provisions, which are the whole point of it.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: We get, we control your behavior. We give you something, but then we’re in charge. We’re in charge. We have more nat gas and oil in the United States. I don’t know if you saw this, Tucker, but there was a piece of data that came out this week. But our reliance on foreign oil is almost entirely gone.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Meaning, like, almost like to where we don’t even need to buy it anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not just that we make more than we import, but where the imports will soon go to zero.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. That’s an incredible statement about the energy independence of America. It’s the single most obvious way, by the way, to guarantee peace.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: If you’re not fighting over that critical resource, it’s going to be very unlikely you’re going to go to war. Which, if you look past the last four or five years, four or five wars, the trillions of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of American lives, what were they all about?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oil.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And now, you know, we have the ability to power those data centers. So, should data centers be built in a fair, predictable way on federal land? Yeah, because it feeds the technical supremacy we all need. Now, by the way, there is a conversation to be had. Okay, great. When you have all this economic abundance, how do you share it more? I get that. Right. But at least you’re in a position to have the conversation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that is jumping ahead.

Energy and AI Infrastructure

TUCKER CARLSON: So, back to this, though.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But, like, you know, if you’re able to build these things, I think what Biden should have done is just say, hey, listen, folks, do your best. Get the energy, because it exists. Use nat gas. Use oil. And we will figure it out after we’ve won. That feels like leadership.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, but he can’t do that, because he’s surrounded by people who have already said no hydrocarbons, period.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But it’s not rooted in any reality.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m aware. I’m aware. It’s just… It’s rooted in moral grandstanding.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh, I’ve noticed.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I just think that we’re… I mean, if you’ve got mandates for net zero or mandates for no hydrocarbons, mandates for EVs, and this economic imperative around AI, I just don’t… And people like air conditioning, I just don’t think we’re going to have enough electricity unless there’s hardware built, like, really soon.

Innovation in Air Conditioning

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s incredible that you mentioned air conditioning. So back to sort of one of these… Back to one of these ways where I was like, you know, after 2022, how can I just get back to basics and do the things that I do well? One of the projects that I started with this incredible mechanical engineer was we set out to rebuild the air conditioner.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, good.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And when you look at air conditioners, the heat transfer mechanisms can be made much, much more efficient, and you don’t have to use this horrible coolant. And so we have a working version now. It’s like our second prototype. We’re probably two years away from getting something working. But when that works, by the way, we’ve started a process to figure out how do we sell it. But this is, again, Tucker, it’s like if I tried to sell it to a home, the number of people that want to touch that thing…

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It will take me an extra $150 million and an extra, extra $150 million. It’ll take $150 million to build it. It’ll take an extra $150 million and an extra seven years.

TUCKER CARLSON: To comply with code.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. What is it that I’m supposed to do? And by the way, not to be pedantic, but those rules were never passed by the Congress. I don’t think those rules were passed by people, even to give them the benefit of the doubt, by one degree removed, folks that even have an understanding of physics.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, of course not.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Of course not. So there was probably a very smart, capable lawyer representing some smart organization who knew that this was something that they could write in to slow people down. But what people need to understand is, again, it just slows down our ability to remain number one.

Questioning Motives

TUCKER CARLSON: But where does this… I think you’re exactly right. I think you’ve described it very nicely. But I’m still baffled by the motive. Why would people in a country as great as ours want to wreck the country? Where does that come from?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I don’t think that they want to wreck the country as much as I think that they have lost the global context. I don’t think they understand that we are in an existential risk of no longer being number one. And I think that they also don’t understand the implications if we are not number one.

You need to just look at the UK. If you want to have a very simple and visible picture of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation completely losing itself, totally losing the economic war, losing the military war, losing the technology war, and fighting a fringe issue war, you need to just look there. And people should ask themselves, is that what we aspire to?

TUCKER CARLSON: I’d rather live in Pakistan than live in the UK. I’m being serious. I think it’s the most depressing country on the planet for the reasons you just described. There’s something about decline that’s… It’s hard to describe. But when you’re there, you feel it.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Terrible. Oh, it’s sold. It’s so much worse. You’re much better off, to your point, being in a developing nation on the come up than you are being in a…

TUCKER CARLSON: There are over 200,000 Brits in UAE right now, in UAE, which they formally controlled until not that long ago. And now there’s a massive outflow. There are far more Brits in the Emirates than there are Emiratis in Britain.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So the thing that we need to do, I think, as a Western set of nations, is we need to understand and agree on the fact that governance over this last decade has totally and miserably failed by focusing on these fringe issues and by losing sight of these global priorities.

I’ll give you a different example. At the end of the global financial crisis, Canada emerged as the healthiest G7 country out of all of us. They were doing phenomenally well, low debt to GDP, phenomenal growth. And then over those intervening 17 years, they focused on all kinds of fringe issues, rampant open immigration, poor allocation of risk capital inside of Canada. Canada, they’ve allowed this incredible flight of human capital to the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And now today, if Canada were to join the United States, it would be poorer than Alabama on a per capita basis.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah. And much more depressing. So what has happened in Canada? There’s a vibe shift. When countries decline, it’s not simply a matter of GDP moving in the wrong direction. It’s the spirit of the country is palpably different and sad. I mean, it’s why so many Canadians accept their government’s invitation to kill them through the MAIDS program. Their suicide rate is insane. Why is that? That’s not a measure, a sign of health or vigor or ascendance. That’s a sign of, you know, terminal decline. It’s like shocking. You’re from there. When you go back, what does it feel like?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, my dad passed away 10 years ago. My mom now comes to see us. So I rarely go back. Actually, I’m going to be back in February for a little bit. Um, I’ve always felt like a fish out of water in Canada.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I’ve loved it for many reasons. I think that it had had some principles back then that I think are very legitimate and I think should exist in the United States. The most important being a capped cost of higher education. I spent $12,000 a year to get an electrical engineering degree from a place called the University of Waterloo, which globally is as good, frankly, better than MIT. If I had to be in the United States and if I had gotten into MIT, which I probably would not have, but had I been able to, I’d be $100,000 or $200,000 in debt. And so had I not had this lottery ticket for me pay off with an IPO and working at Facebook, I don’t know where I would be today.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s crazy.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So there are things that Canada, I think, and we should acknowledge that, does really right. That is probably the most important thing that it does right. And I think the idea of a state-sponsored healthcare system, it’s implemented horribly poorly. But there are elements of that where I think, especially around sort of capped costs, which I think are important, meaning, you know, in the United States, a healthcare CEO was telling me, when you look inside of an EMR system, the electronic medical care system, let’s say, Tucker, you’re a doctor and you did a knee surgery. You would have a hundred different prices attached to you, depending on the plan, depending on the insurer. That’s dumb. You are one person. Those are one set of hands. That’s one surgery. It’s one quality. The idea that one person is lucky enough to pay $1,000 deductible and the other person has to pay $50,000 is an egregious market failure. It’s just egregious.

So Tucker Carlson, the best knee surgeon in America, if he charges $2,000, then he charges $2,000 for everybody.

TUCKER CARLSON: That seems fair.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It does seem fair. It seems much more efficient. I just can’t… Not everything else in Canada is broken, I think, but those two ideas…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, their healthcare system is a disaster.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, the implementation, then, of the system…

TUCKER CARLSON: So my question is, you know, it’s like one of those things that I’m not against it in theory, but I can’t think of, I mean, national health system doesn’t work, Canadian healthcare system doesn’t work. I mean, is there a working national healthcare system?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. I think that you need to have competition. I think you need to have… There’s a hybrid that the United States could implement that is not NHS or the Canadian system, but it’s not just a pure free market free for all.

Well, it’s a little bit in between, and let me describe what the in-between parts are. Medicare is an incredibly important insurance program in the United States. I think it stands to reason that Medicare should have its own PBM. If Medicare was able to negotiate, you know, an extremely aggressive price for drugs, it sets the boundary for what is allowable for everybody else. And for folks that are 65 and older, then now they have a very viable alternative to use that. It also creates transparency around the variation in pricing, number one.

Number two, there needs to be a way where a private insurer can build up some credit for doing things today that may only pay off for that employee in the future when he’s no longer an employee. So, for example, you worked at Fox. Should the Fox insurance program have put you on a statin? I’m making this up. Have put you on a statin in your early 40s to help you manage your… I’m not saying you have rising cholesterol, but, you know, if you had that, because in 10 or 15 years from now, it would help a potential cardiac arrest or heart attack. A lot of the companies that are faced with this decision today say, we’re not going to do that because you may not be an employee in 15 years. So why am I paying now for something where I get the benefit from it?

But that’s a simple healthcare economics market solution. We should have those. We should give private insurers incentives to, you know, in some cases, maybe the right thing to do is to put people on Ozempic and Munjaro. Do the work now. I understand that that employee may be retired by the time that, you know, they may need that. But it was the right thing to do for that person for having worked for you for 15 or 20 years.

Another thing, with AI today, you can read all of these insurance plans and you should have a standard way of knowing that a condition is going to get approved or not before it starts. And that needs to be auditable. It cannot be where you need like a PhD and five different people to read these insurance plans and then all of a sudden a random person can make an economic decision to say no. That’s also where, you know, simple technology can get built to build very strict guardrails. What is approved? What is not approved? Have it be known. Have it be auditable. Be in a log so that, you know, people can just simply escalate. Hey, that person got his approved and mine was dinged. Why?

So there’s all these little things to like make the system better. It needs to be more open. You need to have, for example, a different, on the case of open. It is highly unlikely that you’ve ever tried to get all of your healthcare data.

TUCKER CARLSON: Impossible.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Now you would say, Chamath, why would I need that? Maybe there’s an AI agent that can actually be your doctor in your pocket that just works for Tucker. You know, it’s the person that is constantly reading my every interaction with the healthcare system to tell me what they think. It’s my own second opinion.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s not a bad idea.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That’s a very low cost thing to do. Except you can’t get the data. Why can’t you get the data? Because there’s federal regulations and most people don’t listen to them. Federal regulations, Kefka says, you have to be able to download your data. These companies make it very hard because they know the more open it becomes, it induces competition.

TUCKER CARLSON: Competition.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Exactly. Competition that will show up will probably be infinitely better. So I’m going to do everything I can to block it. And, you know, federal and state governments don’t do enough.

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AI Innovations in Healthcare and Transportation

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said AI can be used to make sense of, you know, like the Talmud of health insurance regulations. What, looking down the next five years, you know, name three or four innovations that you’re pretty certain we’re going to see life enhancers from AI.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Anyway, I, so I, I start companies.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But when I don’t see something that I think I can start right away and there’s somebody that’s a little bit in the lead, I’ll just invest and I’ll just take a large piece so that I can help guide them.

One of those businesses where I’m the largest shareholder has been working on breast cancer surgery. And today across America, for every 10 women that go and get diagnosed with breast cancer, three of the surgeries are, leave cancer behind.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ouch.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, and the way that it works is you go in for what’s called, so there’s two different kinds of breast cancer surgery. There’s a lumpectomy, which is take out the lump, or a mastectomy, which is take out the entire breast. And in the lumpectomy, you have to have, you visualize with your own eyes, whether you think most of the cancer is gone. You close up the woman and you take that sample. You give it to a pathologist. And typically between seven and 11 days, which is how long it takes because they’re clogged up and there’s backlog, they’ll look under a microscope and visually inspect and say, actually, sorry, 30% of the time they say, you left some cancer behind.

So now that woman has to, those three women have to go back. They get another surgery. But again, 30% error rate. They do it again. And then one of those women gets a ding. So now one woman has had three breast cancer surgeries. That is happening today.

Now, if you go to a really, really good teaching hospital, that error rate will be 5% because the docs are incredible. If you go to an overly zealous doctor, that error rate will also be low, but you’ll come in for a lumpectomy, you’ll end up with a mastectomy kind of a thing. They’ll just take out so much of that, and that creates a disfiguration.

So this company basically says, hold on a second. I’ll just use AI. I’ll look right down to the granular microscopic level. I’ll take an extremely high-res picture. My brain will be trained on only this one task. Is there cancer or is there no cancer?

So we built it, and it’s in a bunch of the leading hospitals in America. But we had to file with the FDA to be allowed to tell the doctor. Right? So I just want to be clear. Like, we know. We can see it. And so we ran an 18-month trial. You know, it cost us $10 or $15 million. And we met our endpoint in November. We can now absolutely be sure that the cancer was removed or not removed.

Now we have to package all of that up. We’ve filed it with the FDA. We’ve been told we’ll get approval by June. And then we’ll be able to sell. Meaning sell the software upgrade. So that essentially, in the operating room, instead of having to wait for the pathologist 7 to 11 days later, the doctor will do the lumpectomy, put it in the machine, and instantly you’ll say, Tucker, you need to take out a little bit more. The margins are not right. Tucker, perfect job. Close her up.

TUCKER CARLSON: While the patient is sedated.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That is using AI, and that can get breast cancer surgeries to be so prolifically good that the error rate goes to zero. Now, the impact and the quality of life of those women, and then by extension, their families, their kids that have to deal with that stress as well, can go away.

So that’s a profound impact of AI that you’re going to see in the next year. We could quibble that this should have been faster, could have cost a lot less money, meaning it cost me the same amount of money to get this trial done as it cost that Chinese company to build a digital brain that’s as good as OpenAI or Facebook. Look, that’s crazy, but whatever. Okay, put a pin in it. We did it. We’ll file, and we’ll move forward. You know, we play the rules that are on the field, even if the rules make no sense, and it’s hard to tell anybody, change the rules, but it is what it is. That’s an example.

Elon published some data yesterday, which is incredibly profound, which is he has an AI brain inside of the Tesla, and the ability to drive safely on the highway became seven and a half X better than his previous version. And his previous version was already 10 times better than a normal car, which means when you get on the highway, you engage FSD, it’s called, his version of autopilot for the car. And it was already 10 times better. Now it’s seven times better than that 10 times to not get into an accident.

So the idea about using AI now to just eliminate all the unnecessary deaths that happened because of traffic mishaps, there’s the potential where that goes to zero. That’s today as well. Again, his issue isn’t technological. His issue is going to be regulatory. At what speed will people be able to be comfortable letting him take people from point A to point B?

In yet a different example, there are all of these small airplane companies. They’re called eVTOL. So it’s not a plane, not a helicopter, but it’s kind of this hybrid thing in between. And they have this autopilot where it’s like taking off in a no-pilot configuration, piloting it in the air, which is much simpler, by the way, than driving on the ground, and then landing. And you have the ability to now just create a level of transportation which increases GDP. And that is an AI brain that’s calculating all the system variables around itself, being able to fly safely, getting from point A to point B. You don’t have to drive seven hours. It’s a 40-minute hop, skip, and a jump now. So now go and do your job and come back.

All of these things are happening right now. We are gated on the regulatory machine, which are unfortunately not filled with enough actual technologists, mostly bureaucrats, teaching them, getting them comfortable that, you know, what do we intend with all of this? We intend of reversing this thought lost decade. We just want to get to work and build a thing so that America kicks ass.

TUCKER CARLSON: David Sachs, your co-host, is now the AI czar, also crypto.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it is amazing. And I’ll just say.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He is an amazing human being.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, he really is. Like, he is a guy.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I agree. I had to teach Sachs how to hug properly.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did it? Can you show me how you did that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, Sachs was a side hugger, which I can’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can see that.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Like, I’m not a side hugger.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You’re going to give me a hug. And we’ve been, you know, really, really close friends for 20 years now. So I was like, bro, learn to hug. And we have all of these videos where, like, over the course of, like, four years, you know, I had to take his arm and teach how to.

TUCKER CARLSON: You did video training.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh, yeah. Like, I had to teach him how to put.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, with him and me, you know, his wife would take a video. It’s like, Sachs, you’ve got to put your arm this way. And then he’s like, okay, now you have to, you know, put your head over here. He is a brilliant guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you taught Sachs how to hug.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. I mean, he taught me everything else, but I taught him how to hug.

The “All In” Podcast

TUCKER CARLSON: So your show, All In, I did it last year. I did it because David asked me, and I love David. I had no sense of its penetration. I had no idea. I’m not in business. I’m not in technology. You know, I drive a stick shift. I’m kind of the opposite of that. And I just didn’t realize. Everybody watches. It’s unbelievable. I heard from people I hadn’t seen since early childhood. I heard from everybody. I was so stunned by it. So what’s that like for you? You’re obviously well-known in Silicon Valley, Facebook, and your investment business. But, I mean, it’s a much larger audience than Silicon Valley. So what has that been like?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, I think it’s made me much cooler for my older kids, my teenagers. You know, they use these words, which I just can’t stand. But they’re like, you know, if somebody comes up and says hi, and we take a picture, they’re like, Dad, that was some good riz. Or, you know, they’ll be like, yeah, that was okay. Good aura, Dad. Good aura. And so we make fun of it. Let me, you know, I will turn to them, and I’ll be like in the car. I’ll be like, guys, shut up. You know, they’ll be making a lot of noise. They’re like, why? And then I’ll turn up, because I’m a very important podcaster.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you expect that? So, like, most of the people on the podcast, maybe all are, you know, don’t need to be doing podcasts. You’re not doing it for the money, obviously. So this starts as, like, for fun? Or why did you, how did you end up doing that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It actually started because our poker game, me, Saks, J. Cal, Freeberg, the four co-hosts, we were four of the kind of like the regular everyday players. Because when the COVID shelter-in-place happened, we weren’t allowed to go out. And so we started to Zoom each other, and then we just started to record, and then we just threw it up on YouTube. Because we would, you know, we would ask Freeberg to teach us about the disease and the science of it all. Then, you know, we would all take turns riffing on how frustrated we were at Newsom. And then we would kind of post it. And then it just took on a life of its own. And, yeah, fast forward four years. I mean, we’ve done, you know, an episode a week.

I think it had a, we got very lucky because it happened in a moment. I think you and Joe Rogan are two of the more leading examples of this. But the traditional media is totally dead. There was a stat today. The Washington Post’s traffic in the last four years has gone from 20 and a half million viewers to three.

TUCKER CARLSON: Isn’t that incredible?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: 20 and a half million monthly users to three million. So the question is, in that vacuum, it’s not as if the American population shrank. It’s grown.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is the sense making? Or news stopped happening.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Actually, much more is happening.

TUCKER CARLSON: Or did news, yeah, exactly. More news is happening.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So I think it’s important to rebuild the sense making. And I think we accidentally found ourselves making sense of things that are happening to people. Like, explain this technology thing. Explain this business thing. Explain this political thing. Not necessarily so deeply. But connecting the dots so that you could have a slightly better worldview. And I think that that’s been helpful for people. It’s been really fun for me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, apparently. And then Trump comes on. I mean, he is really incredible.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, I didn’t know what to expect. And then David and I threw a fundraiser for him. I mean, I think part of where all of this started was David called me in June. So actually, taking a step back. He and I had always been active in politics. He was a, you know, died.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was a tried and true conservative.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. From the beginning. I was a little bit more promiscuous. I didn’t really understand how to make my political beliefs fit into one of these vessels.

Political Evolution

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But for the most part in the last few years, like everybody else, I got lulled into buying into a lot of the Democratic lines. And I was a large donor to the Democrats. And it all started to unravel for me in 2020 because I didn’t understand COVID. Then I got the, you know, vaccine only to realize that it was, you know, not a vaccine. I was really upset. A couple of my kids really struggled with what happened to them by not being able to go to school. And I was like, why hasn’t the government intervened and gotten my kids back in school?

All of these things just made me super frustrated. So I started to question, maybe I wasn’t seeing things right. And maybe I was, you know, reacting more with my ego. And the answer was, yeah, actually, like, you know, the Democrats are extremely charming. And they can play a very sophisticated game where they make you feel exclusive.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, for sure.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And that’s part of the shtick of how they get money from you. I mean, I remember, and I would tell these stories as a point of pride. Now I tell it as a warning to myself. I was sitting at dinner with Obama the day of Brexit. And you know that very famous kind of moment where, like, you know, Andrew Card passed that piece of paper to George Bush.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There was a version of that moment, obviously much less important, but where somebody…

TUCKER CARLSON: Summer of 16.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, where somebody, like, passes a note to Obama and he goes, oh, my… This is like, we were in San Francisco. It was, like, at 8 or 9 p.m. And he’s like, oh, wow, the UK just voted to leave. So I remember where I was that day. But those kinds of moments made me feel that maybe I was doing the right thing, right?

And then all of my businesses just kept running up against these brick walls. Over and over and over again. And every time I tried to do something good that I thought was valuable, it would bump up against all of this stupid regulation and slowed back. And every time I looked at who they were, they were all supposedly on the same team that I was in. So I said, forget this. I have to start from first principles.

So in 2023, and Sax and I decided we’re going to start throwing fundraisers for a whole variety of candidates. So the first one was at his house. We threw a fundraiser for RFK. We got to meet Bobby. It was exhilarating. And, you know, for the first time, you have this person speaking truth to power. Then at my house, we threw a fundraiser for Vivek. David and I did that together. And then David called me and said, let’s do a fundraiser for Trump. And I said, absolutely. And I think that that started the…

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you check with your wife first?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s quite a statement.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: She’s very supportive. You know, my wife, she’s in the life sciences business, but, you know, she’s always been like, you have to make these decisions, not from how other people will perceive you, but what do you feel? And she’s like, explain to me, Bobby Kennedy. Explain to me, Vivek. Explain to me, Donald Trump. In your own words, that isn’t tied to, well, here’s what other people will think of me as I do this. And then when I did that, she was like, okay, let’s do it. Let’s do it. And, I mean, Trump is unbelievably true.

TUCKER CARLSON: But at the time, just for… Because I sort of understand the cultural context.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, it was very… It was a very tough moment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of ballsy.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It was very ballsy. People… I got the amount of, like, hate text messages. I should have kept some of them. They’re probably still on my phone, actually. But people were very mad. And part of, I think, why they were mad is they were afraid. Meaning, there was a lie. That Biden was sharp as a tack. And myself and David had not really dismantled the lie beyond just saying it looks like a lie. And I think that they were worried that it would create, I think, what Peter Thiel calls this, which I really agree with, is a preference cascade.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, like, Peter is a genius. But he is on an island many years ahead of the rest of us. Then there are other people, you know, like me and David to some degree, who are also sort of like we can kind of see the patterns not nearly as fast as a Peter. But then we do a decent job of translating it for other folks. So I think people were afraid if these guys translate their interactions with Donald Trump into the truth, it’s going to tip a lot of people. And they were right. Because when Trump came, wow, I mean, like.

TUCKER CARLSON: Had you met him before, by the way?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He had called me. So I’d had a telephone conversation. So I knew what he was like on the phone. That’s when I knew I’d made a mistake before about, like, believing what the press was saying. That’s where I went back and I looked at the Charlottesville press conference. And I looked at all of them again after my phone call. When the president called me, I was like, hold on a second. This man was incredibly charming, polite, kind. And he just like, what I honestly thought, Tucker, I called my wife. I was like, he was raised by really good parents. That’s what I said to them. That’s what I said to my wife.

Because you can tell in your kids. You know, like when you see kids around and there are some, they are polite, they’re kind, they make eye contact.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: There’s these, I don’t want to call them simple, but there are these building blocks of being a human being that you need to be taught by your parents. Because he was taught. And I have tremendous respect for that. So then when I saw him at David’s house, I mean, it’s like, it’s like a, it’s a larger than life figure. And he’s extemporaneous. He talks for an hour and a half. He’s going all over the place. He’s doing the weave. You know, it’s incredible. And so I was.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s hilarious, too.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: He’s very funny.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is really hard to be, actually.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. And, and so I walked away thinking, wow, I had got it totally wrong. And I was lied to. And I believed at a very superficial level what the mainstream media was saying. And then I did even more research. You know, I read the lawsuits. And it was just the, the amount of contortion that people were going through to try to prevent this man from getting into power made me want him to be in power even more.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Right. Because I thought they’re afraid of something. That’s something they’re not going to say out loud. But that is the thing that we need to exercise from the U.S. government.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: That, that thing that they want to protect.

TUCKER CARLSON: So nicely put. That’s right. It’s not even now clear exactly. It’s just, it’s disclosure of some kind. They fear being, you know, revealed. But, yeah. That’s as far as I’ve got. And then, and then, you know, different from his first time around, the caliber of the people around him, it’s like, it’s like the 92 Barcelona, you know, dream team. As far as I can tell, I mean, like, my gosh, like, you get Elon, you get Vivek, you get RFK, you get Tulsi, you get all of these people, you know, Howard Lutnick.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: David Sachs.

TUCKER CARLSON: David Sachs.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Scott Bessent. This is, this is amazing.

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TUCKER CARLSON: So what is the view, I remember that, I remember vividly the day that you all had that fun news for Trump and thinking, this is, I never thought I would live to see this. This is like a major change, major, major change. Was there a major change in attitudes in Silicon Valley toward Trump after that?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: After that, yeah, because it gave permission. You know, David is very complimentary to me in that because I was a little bit more promiscuous and not necessarily just a straight, hardline Republican.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: But it was a little bit more valuable, I think, for that cohort of people because they could kind of say, oh, well, if it’s, you know, Jamal said, oh, then yeah, sure. But I think that he probably took a lot of heat as well. And more than that, what he did was, he then said, you know, I’m really going to put my foot on the gas here. And he’s great at this, which is just like, I’m going to tip the preference cascade. So then he went to the Republican convention. He spoke. He, you know, he did a lot. And his wife did a lot. There, that’s a real dynamic power couple, those two.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then Marc Andreessen came out.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And then Andreessen came out. But, and it was funny, like the Andreessen thing was so, a little bit interesting. I don’t think the full details, so I’m just speculating. But, you know, it did turn out that his partner also gave like 50 or 100 million bucks to Kamala, which I suspect then that Marc probably gave 50 or 100 million to Trump. It looked like they were splitting it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So what was it like, though, living that, living in, you know, among the people you work with and have worked with, like, how did people.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Oh, there was like, there was an initial part where people do this, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s like, and I felt that because I’m very sensitive to that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, and my feelings get hurt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And I get super annoyed by it. You know, I think you call it the private equity wives for me. It was like the private equity husbands as well. You know, they all.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s really shameful.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: They all just like kind of like a scowl. Well, and then after the election, it was more like a. And I’m like, what changed?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, what that’s I’ve felt that across the country. What is how would you describe? I think a lot of people.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: People are not necessarily fighting a moral or ideological battle, Tucker. I mean, people are just trying to get from one day to the next day.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And and I respect that. At first, I was hurt by it because I didn’t understand it. And I thought, again, it goes back to, oh, I’m worthless. Like, is there something about me? Is that why you’re rejecting me? And I realized it has nothing to do with me. This person is just today is a day. Tomorrow is a day. And they’re not fighting these battles. Doesn’t make them better nor worse. It’s just a different. For me. I’m caught up in my own head about having to do something a little bit more ideological and morally rooted because I need that so that I feel like there’s purpose.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Not everybody’s built that way. And I wasn’t built that way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, people are distracted by their day to day concerns.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. And I think that that’s very fair. So, you know, I kind of leave it to them as what they are. It’s I think it’s good that their minds are open and their eyes are open. So the the way that this is going to be really tested now is what’s happening in California. There are if you look at the Palisades, which is an incredibly affluent area.

California’s Political Landscape

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Beautiful place.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Beautiful place. And has just been decimated. And several of my very good friends lost their homes there. They were tried and true Democrats. It didn’t matter what the candidate’s name was beside the box in the ballot. They checked it and they moved on. And now the real test for them is what do they do? Will they look through the label and actually look at the policies and ask, did these help or hurt me all of these things that I give money to, all these NGOs and nonprofits, did they help or hurt me?

California has a $322 billion a year budget. Do I, as a taxpayer who pays some of the highest taxes in the nation, have a right to ask where that money is being spent? And if the answer to all those questions is, it doesn’t matter, check the box, then we deserve what we get in California. But it can be much better. Because today the state is totally broken. We have lost the script. We don’t prioritize California’s economic supremacy. Nor its technological supremacy. That is a huge mistake when you look at the number of companies that have left the state. Oracle, Tesla, Chevron.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, this is not like just fringe businesses.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No. These are the businesses that matter. And they’re voting with their feet.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it does feel like the tipping point is here, though. I mean, you said that we’re…

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I would not underestimate the Democratic machine. It’s a cartel that runs that state.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And Gavin Newsom is extremely charismatic. And he is able to convince people of things that are just not true. And so he is fighting for his political life. He definitely wants to be on the national stage. And so the real question is, is he able to convince enough people that this was the environment and that these winds came out of nowhere? Or will it be laid bare at his feet that it was just a lack of skill, intellectual rigor, and distraction and negligence and incompetence that caused this fire?

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I think you make a pretty strong case for the latter.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, I found that there were three bills that started in the legislature that were either approved by the legislature and were then vetoed by Newsom or were then pulled down by the legislature itself. Again, this is like Democrats on Democrat violence. To just give a waiver to all of these local municipalities to go and clear the brush. Just that. Clear the brush. Now, would that have stopped the fire? No, I get that it wouldn’t have stopped the fire. But, you know, the intensity of a fire is directly proportional to the energy load that you give it.

TUCKER CARLSON: To the fuel, of course.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, take away some of the fuel and the fire will be less. And if we can’t even admit that plain truth, this is what I mean by if we’re going to continue to just lie to ourselves because we care so much about this failed ideology, then California is going to just continue to just degrade.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there’s a point, I mean, you see the same thing in New York City where if the, you know, the engines of the economy leave because it is, you know, a country with 50 states, you know, there’s a point where the math doesn’t work and things just decline so quickly that it’s hard to recover.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: The thing, it is true, but the thing that is important to keep in mind about California is sometimes you get lucky and we have to acknowledge our luck but not fritter it away. Specifically in California, there is a critical mass of these 50,000 Michael Jordan engineers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You cannot rebuild Silicon Valley by casting it to the four winds. Some people go to Priorya, Illinois. Some people end up in Boston. Some are in Miami. Some are in Las Vegas. Some are in Austin. All fine and good. But that is not the place or the way to create the technical vibrancy we need to generate technical supremacy. You need these people close and around you so that they are pollinating from each other. And this is, again, where why hasn’t the state realized that? That is an incredibly critical resource.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, at this point with, you know, the decline of ag and entertainment business and aerospace, I don’t really know what drives the economy of California other than technology.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, right now, if you look at California’s employment, the employment picture is quite scary because it is government jobs that are convoluting how healthy the actual state is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So if you take away the government jobs, but at the end of the day, what do government bureaucrats do? They want to govern. How do they do that? They’re going to legislate or they’re going to regulate. Where is that felt? It’s felt on private industry and private citizens. But eventually, at the limit, the amount of regulation goes to infinity and they’re legislating themselves into oblivion.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Nobody will be there to legislate, to be governed by all of this insanity because everybody will leave. And first, the people that leave are the people that can leave. Then the people that leave are the people that have to leave. And we’re in the first part. It’s clear that people have left. Many, many, many.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you thought about it?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. I mean, look, my, again, I’ll tell you in terms of my poker game, half of that, half of those people that have been my lifelong friends for 20 years have left.

TUCKER CARLSON: Half.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Half.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where’d they go?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Austin, Miami.

TUCKER CARLSON: Texas and Florida.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, Texas and Florida. And it’s just so frustrating. And they’ve left because they can’t build things. The taxes were like secondary. One of my friends left because, you know, one of their children went through, you know, a bit of an identity crisis, if you want to call it that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And the police showed up and wanted to, you know, take the kid away. So, you know, so that the kid could go through like a transition that the kid ultimately decided they didn’t want to go through.

TUCKER CARLSON: The police showed up?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that’s the law in California.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, like, encourage it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not sure if it’s to encourage it, but my understanding of the way this works is if you, if you as a child have these issues and you escalate that, there is a requirement for the school to basically call Child Protective Services, who may or may not call the police, who may or may not come to your house and try to take the kid away.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, so, so they’re not your children in California is basically what they’re saying.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Well, they’re your children to the point where the government believes that they know better.

TUCKER CARLSON: Man, that’s just, I mean, any government that presumes to know better than parents is an out of control, scary government.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, look, I, I try to think of myself as a good parent. I try to do the best I can.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Do I make mistakes? Yeah, sure. But am I generally more, you know, better for my kids than some other random adult?

TUCKER CARLSON: Also, yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, strongly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And so, like, the idea that just some random person in an office somewhere can read some piece of paper and all of a sudden take your kids away.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s very scary.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s very scary. It makes me feel very insecure, that idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s keeping you there?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I’m very stubborn and I feel very grateful. I feel very grateful to America. I feel very grateful to California. It gave me a path that I would not have had anywhere else. And so, I have a responsibility to stay and fix it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good for you.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I feel guilty that I left. Because it’s the prettiest state. I mean, nothing comes close. So, to get driven out of where you grew up and where your ancestors lived is pretty, it’s bitter, but I did it. So, does it change? Does the state change? It’s a one-party state. Clearly, it’s enormously corrupt, as you know, and wasteful. And now it’s fallen down on its most basic obligation, which is to keep your house from burning down.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, does that force change politically?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think people need to force the change now. It has to force change. People have to understand that these labels mean nothing. Meaning, you could have the smartest person in the world and the dumbest person in the world. You cannot vote for the dumbest person in the world just because the label beside them is something you’ve been told is wrong. That is just the height of stupidity. It’s not what you’re allowed to do as an adult. Adults aren’t allowed to do that. Your kids can do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And you’re supposed to teach your kids that that’s not how you make decisions when you’re an adult.

TUCKER CARLSON: On the basis of labels, brands.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: It’s so stupid. It’s childish. There are some really competent people that are in that state that will try now to come out of the woodwork to do the right thing. To deregulate California. California has 60,000 regulations on the books. It was 10,000 less than a decade ago. Go back to 10,000. Go to 5,000. What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of the breast cancer thing that could get to market faster? Are you afraid that Elon’s autopilot can now save people’s lives more? Are you afraid that we can catch rockets and then send them back to the stars and the heavens and Mars? Why is that bad?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the point of regulation is to encourage, guarantee, health and safety. And growing up in California, it was a healthy state. It was the healthiest state, as far as I could tell. And it was a very safe state. And it’s neither one of those things. It’s one of the least healthy states. Actually, there’s more poverty in California than any state. Autism rates are the highest in the country. And it’s dangerous in a lot of ways. So, like, it’s not working. I guess that’s what I would say. The regulations aren’t working.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: This is my point. It’s not working. So, how long do, you know, well-heeled Democratic voters need to see their state run over, need to see their lives ruined, and now their kids’ lives ruined? And maybe this is the thing that actually…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you tell me you live among them. Like, do you see the change coming?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Um, so, not where I live, because the only, the only thing that, the only damage that has ever happened in Silicon Valley is economic damage, but then it’s righted itself.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And so, people just go and move along blindly in the orthodoxy. It’s only when your business is at risk where you’ll flip. So, you know, you’ve seen kind of like Metta have a total, you know, come to Jesus moment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, what’s that? Have you talked to Zuckerberg about it?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: No, Mark and I have, you know, I gave this speech at Stanford in 2016, which went pretty viral, which kind of laid bare what was going on in social media, and he and I have not spoken since.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, knowing him as you do, and for as long as you have, what do you make of his Joe Rogan appearance?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I think it’s a calculation to manage the conditions on the field. Meaning, what I said on the pod is, all you need to know are two things. One is, there’s an incredible picture in Donald Trump’s book, which is a picture of Zuck sitting in the Oval. And by the way, this is the same book, which you have to get. It’s the book where like, you know, he talks about, you know, Trudeau’s mom, kind of like casting about with the Rolling Stones and like, you know, not just casting about rolling about, rolling about and like, you know, he’s like Fidel Castro’s love child.

Anyways, but in that book is a picture of Zuck, and it says, you know, Zuck was the nicest guy to my face, but then would, you know, work against me to turn over the election. And, you know, I’ve made it very clear that if he tries to do anything like that, again, he’ll go to prison for the rest of his life. That’s what, that’s what Trump says in the caption. And then he was asked about that last week, the exact same day that Meta changed their policies. And he said, do you think it was in response to what you said? And the president said, probably. So I think it’s a very smart but necessary set of calculations, but I think they are calculations.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what are his highest values? What are his first principles?

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Zuck?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, I’d only be guessing.

TUCKER CARLSON: But an informed guess since you know him.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: You know, I think that he, he’s a, well, I think that he’s a very big fan of the Roman Empire. If I had to translate and guess how that manifests in his day-to-day decision making, I think he thinks of things empirically, meaning like as an empire, and he has an empire. You know, he has Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, you know, Messenger. These are institutional worldwide products. In the, in the digital sphere, he is Rome. And so I think that he cares about the propagation of that empire, probably more than he cares about any philosophical trends, per se. Because, you know, the empire endures if you can, you know, manage the vicissitudes of trends.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: So, when the trend was under the Democrats to build a censorship machine, you know, you do that.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: And then when the trend is to do the opposite, you’ll do the opposite.

TUCKER CARLSON: He said to me a number of times and over a number of years, you know, off camera, but has said, you know, basically I’m a kind of 70s liberal and I really believe in free speech. You think that’s true?

CHAMATH: Sure. I think that that’s not the question. He has, you know, he controls Facebook with an iron fist. He has complete voting control. He has less economic participation, but, you know, he has, he has absolute power. And that was the justification in some ways of explaining how he made these changes now. Um, it doesn’t explain why it veered in the other direction then. And I think it’s important to just probably get the answer to that. And then you’ll know where he stands. You know, meaning the, the economic power has ebbed and flowed, but the absolute power has never changed. So, you know, the philosophy that he believed in then, if it’s the same now, then the question is, well, why did the manifestation of that power change?

TUCKER: Well, he’s basically said, you know, he’s bullied by the national security state. I can believe that too, by the way. I’m sympathetic to that. I mean, that’s got to feel like a lot of pressure when you’re a young guy on the come up and a bunch of these well-heeled politicos show up at your office and say, you know, bend the knee.

CHAMATH: Why don’t you go fuck yourself? That’s what I would say. Maybe that’s why I’m not a billionaire. But I, I, it’s, it’s like unbelievable that happens in this country. It’s like shocking.

TUCKER: There are, there are billionaires that have said, go fuck yourself.

CHAMATH: Yeah, I know. And they, and they, and they’ve become, you know, even more successful as a result. So the, I mean, the richest man in the world did that.

TUCKER: So what is his role in Elon’s role in the, in the new administration? Do you think?

CHAMATH: I think he’s the heartbeat. Here’s what I mean by that. I’ve thought about this. It is the most important temperature check that we are going to make the changes that Donald Trump wants. Meaning I think the president in some ways is the most powerful job, but he, but I think this second term, he’s more of a vessel in the sense that he’s got all of these great field generals who can now run the place. And of all the field generals, the one that has just an incremental more degree of freedom to also communicate openly and continuously with the public is him. So you’ll get a sense of whether there’s an arrhythmia by just monitoring his X feed. You’ll also get a sense of whether there’s like a, you know, like if the drum beat is building, I think you get a sense of that from Elon as well. I think he is the, he’s the heartbeat.

TUCKER: So do you think that Elon’s X feed is a kind of pretty accurate window into what he’s thinking?

CHAMATH: Yeah. And that’s, that’s, what’s so powerful. And this is why I think, you know, when you compare and contrast Zuck with Elon, it’s, I think Zuck is like every other CEO and Elon is just a complete singular outlier in the sense that there is no book that would have told you just tell the truth, ground it in your morality from day one and just burn the boats. You know, that old Cortez line, right? And people would have said, what?

And so whatever he’s felt he shared in complete truth and candor, no other CEO has ever done that. And probably no one will ever will because you can’t do it as a strategy and you can’t implement it on day 17 or day 1,004. It’s you either are or you’re not. And so he sets a way of behavior that future CEOs should emulate, but we also have to a little bit give a break and cut some slack to everybody else because they’re just never going to do as good a job as him in doing that.

TUCKER: How was he seen in Silicon Valley?

CHAMATH: Oh, he’s a star. He, but he’s a kind guy. Like, I mean, you know him as well, but like, um, this is, I, I just, I think that people should know this, like, this is a kind, he’s a kind guy. He’s like a, like, he’s a beautiful person. He’s a kind guy. I don’t know what to say.

TUCKER: Has any American ever had this much power?

CHAMATH: Gosh.

TUCKER: Meaning like the intersection of private and public industry kind of thing?

CHAMATH: Yeah. I just, I can’t think of, I mean, of course the president has the power to launch nuclear weapons. So that, that trumps all power. But, um, but as a private citizen, non, a non-president, I, I can’t think of any time in 250 years where an American has had as much power as Elon Musk has in the sense that, you know, he’s the most successful businessman by many measures. He runs the most powerful media outlet in the world, which is X. Um, and he has, you know, this mandate from the newly elected president of the United States to, to change the government. I mean, I don’t just, nothing like that has ever happened that I know of.

TUCKER: Yeah. It’s like, yeah, I mean, I guess so. You know, I guess, I guess it hasn’t happened. Um, why does he buy X? Because as a business decision, it’s kind of hard to justify.

CHAMATH: Well, there’s like a, it happened in a moment where I think that there was the intersection of, um, a lot of free speech issues. And I just think like there was like some, you know, stuff I’m not going to get into, but like personal stuff, I think probably in his own life. And it just like made him question like, what, what are these philosophies? What are these ideologies? And how destructive are they if we can’t, if we, if we can’t question things and talk out loud? And so we all got very lucky. He paid the personal, this is what I mean, but like, like everybody can be like, wow, it’s so easy. It must be amazing. It’s not so, that’s, that’s like a, I would crumble under the weight of that.

I don’t think I’m capable of that. I know that about myself. It’s not easy at all. My God. And like the price you pay, the personal price you pay, I couldn’t do it. I think it’s a, he’s a unique person that way. His capacity for pain, his capacity for just, just the sheer grudgery, like just grudgery, like just, it’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I mean, I guess in this context, you know, I’ve been around two of these incredible figures Mark. I worked in the trenches with Elon. I’ve, you know, seen now for 15 plus years. And I, and when you think about those two, um, yeah, with Elon, there’s just an incredible intellectual curiosity, an incredible amount of ability to suffer pain and suffering. And yet he’s incredibly kind. I don’t know how he also seems to, I don’t understand how he does everything. How do you tweet that much, run that many companies also have that many children also, you know, he’s a gamer, I guess. Like what, like, how does that work?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I agree.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Like, I mean, scheduling matter. I know exactly. I, look, I got here last night, ate at the pink elephant, went to bed and I felt guilty. I thought, you know, should I be doing more yesterday? I really thought that, you know, and I saw my email kind of piling up and I, and I used you as an excuse. Oh, I have to be fresh for talking about good night. That’s what I did. So you’re right.

And then I think, okay, I’m, I’m, I’m operating across an investment portfolio and, and one company that I run very intensely. How do you do that multiplied by seven and all of these other, I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t know, Tucker. I wish that there was an answer, but I also think it’s not the right thing to answer in the sense that we’re all going to give some glib answer and everybody’s going to try to run and copy it.

And I think what you forget is he is the product of 20 years of preparation. He started with one company and he started two companies. Do you know what I mean? Like, so these are reps upon reps, upon reps, upon reps over decades. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind. Like that is a level of skill that he is demonstrating human peak level performance. It’s easier to observe it in maybe an athlete or something else, but that’s what he’s demonstrating. He is at the peak of human intellect. That is the brain unencumbered by all the other stuff that maybe a lot of us get caught up in.

TUCKER: Well, that’s the other thing is he’s given up possessions effectively, you know.

CHAMATH: Great idea.

TUCKER: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s not, I’ve never.

CHAMATH: He tweeted out like, like there’s all these things I’ve never, I never tell him these things, but like there are things that he, that’s why I follow him because part of it is like, I get things from him in Twitter that really profoundly affect my life. So when I was going through all of that turbulence in 2022, you know, he tweeted out, I think it was in 21. I can’t remember when it was, but he’s like, I’ve just sold all my homes and possessions. And I went back immediately. I thought of that is the one thing that I was taught as a Buddhist when I was raised Buddhist, you know, and despite all the stuff and all the anger that I had, and I never thought that Buddhism was all that effective or useful for me. I took one lesson, detach yourself from the physical world.

TUCKER: Yes.

CHAMATH: And I saw it and I connected that dot to myself and I said, I’m the opposite of that. It’s totally true. I am totally, totally, totally attached to the physical world.

TUCKER: I keep a verse on my phone. I’m not a great Bible scholar, hardly, but I do keep this verse because I, I think it actually, I mean, it’s one John three, do not love this world or the things that offers you for when you love the world, you don’t have the love of the father in you for the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see and a pride in our achievements and possessions, right? These are from the world and the world is fading away along with everything that people crave.

CHAMATH: There you go. Christian, not Buddhist, but same idea and true.

TUCKER: Same idea, same idea.

CHAMATH: And so he tweets that out. He sold all of his houses, you know, um, he sells all of his possessions and I’m like, what am I doing? I’m buying more.

TUCKER: Yeah.

CHAMATH: I’m like, oh, I’m going to take delivery of this thing and this other thing. And now I have to hire people to manage the things. And I’m like, what am I, what am I doing?

TUCKER: Yes.

CHAMATH: Um, so that helped me a lot. I’ve never told, I never told, but yeah, these things. So he is an incredible, I think, guidepost on how to clarify your own intentions. If you’re willing to see through it all and clarify that message, that would be a thing that I think he’s an incredible exemplar of. Find the thing that you care about and then just double and triple and quadruple and quintuple down on that.

TUCKER: That’s exactly right. That is exactly right. So speaking of bookends, we began this conversation with your description of your, I hate the word journey, but it is a journey, um, to like a much higher level of self-awareness and peace. And you’re ending by describing, you know, with admiration, Elon’s decision to detach himself from the world, even as he engages in the things that he really loves. Now, do you think that there is a greater spiritual awareness, a greater hunger in Silicon Valley where it matters because of the richest people in the country, um, than there was? You said, you know, no one believes in God. Do you think that’s changing?

CHAMATH: No, but I think we need to make it more fashionable to be spiritual.

TUCKER: Oh, you don’t think it’s changing?

CHAMATH: I don’t think it’s changing yet. Um, I think that a lot of this extreme wealth was created in people that are in their thirties, some in their twenties, many of them are in their forties. And I think that in over this next 10 or 15 years, there’s going to be a crisis of identity when they realized that, you know, they were playing dumb games focused on superficial things beyond the companies themselves.

TUCKER: Right.

CHAMATH: And that there’s a bigger purpose, right? There needs to be a loyalty to country, loyalty to the state, loyalty to the people around you that you don’t even know, not to virtue signal, but to actually just do the hard practical work. Part of that is enrooted, I think, in a spirituality. That’s not there yet. But I think that it will become cool again. Sorry. It can become cool again. I believe in God.

CHAMATH: And the reason I believe in God, and if I were to tell my friends in Silicon Valley, the way that I would incept this idea would be purely from a scientific lens, which is, if you believe it is true, which I think most people do, that there is a finite moment in which the universe began. Explain not the process, but explain the moment. And you cannot. And it is an endless rabbit hole that if you spend your time, and again, when I was feeling very empty, that’s where I started.

And I, you know, I read all about, I read about Islam, I read about Christianity, I read about Judaism, I reread, you know, about Buddhism. And the only explanation is God. And I think that that’s a way where people there can be, you know, they’ll let their guard down. Because if you start a conversation about physics and cosmology, and people are very open-minded, and then you go, well, how did it happen? How did T equals zero happen? And what does T minus one look like? And their brains explode.

TUCKER: Why?

CHAMATH: Their brains truly explode, because people that are very good technologically in that way are very good at getting to explanations. And they’re very good at kind of like breaking things down, I know it’s used a lot now, but into first principles.

TUCKER: Yes.

CHAMATH: There is no first principles explanation for how the world, for how the universe began. There is none. Don’t tell me about the Big Bang Theory. It doesn’t work. Don’t tell me about general relativity, because it all breaks. We have to make these profound assumptions in math and physics to make it all hang together. Because you cannot tell me what T equals zero right at that moment. How?

TUCKER: Nobody can answer the how.

CHAMATH: No. And so, then if you look at this entire lived world around you, I don’t know, I’m filled with this immense gratitude, and that I think it must be God. And that gives me something. I didn’t have that before. And so, I take that. I’m not trying to push that on other people, but that works for me. You know, it makes me a better husband, it makes me a better dad, it makes me a better friend. I do things now that I, you know, when the fires were happening, you know, my friends, I just round robin. I just kept calling them every day to check in on them.

It’s a small thing, right? Um, but these are values that I had lost somewhere along the way, where, you know, just like, just calling people, caring about people. Um, one of my friends lost a home. I spent an entire afternoon, not an entire afternoon, sorry, again, I don’t want to overplay it. I spent like an hour or so going through all my Google photos, clicking through and finding all the photos of him, our friends, so that we can make him an album. Um, because he lost everything. And yeah, you get the clothes, whatever, but you know, these picture albums, you know, they mean a lot. Um, and I was happy. And I felt really like a useful, good person at the end of that.

TUCKER: Yes.

CHAMATH: I don’t know. That’s, that’s, I got that from believing in God.

TUCKER: Right. And, and my final question is, are you hopeful, since we are at a moment of real change in the country, are you hopeful for the future?

CHAMATH: Yeah. I think there is, we were, we had a fever and that fever has broken. And what has to lie in its place are examples of how all of these things that we thought we were not allowed to do, when we do them actually work. Meaning, we’re actually just going to focus on merit and get incredible people. And it’ll turn out that you’ll get your, you know, diversity wish, but you’re not going to get it by mandating it and forcing it down our throats.

TUCKER: That’s right.

CHAMATH: We’re just going to get the best people. And then the best people are just going to go and kick ass together. You know, we’re going to get an ecology that we protect and love because we want to be out there hunting, fishing, camping, living it, skiing it, whatever it is. But we’re going to get there because we actually manage it and take care of it and clean up all of the, you know, stuff that would otherwise burn it to the ground. So we’re going to test all of this stuff. And I think it’s going to work. And then the other thing we need to do is we need to cut down all of these things that are these little ropes that are pulling us all back.

Meaning, this is a stretch, but I’ll use myself in this example. I think I’m one of those 50,000 people that can go and ram and jam for Team USA. I can’t. I’ve been, you know, there are moments where I’ve been really dunking on people. You know, if this is a basketball analogy, I want to do more of that. I want Team USA to kick ass. I just want it to be a little bit easier. And so I hope that we figure out a way instead of having 60,000 little regulations and people that want to lord over us, just give us 10,000 and just trust us that we’re trying to do the right thing. And if we don’t, fine, trust but verify, you know, and if we screw up, fine, hold us accountable. But just give us a chance so that we can just make sure that USA, Team America, that idea is the singular organizing function for America, not everybody’s own little pet project.

TUCKER: Right. So I think that that’s possible. But, I mean, time will tell. These next four years will be super critical. Chamath, thank you.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Thanks, sir.

[Closing remarks about YouTube suppression and channel subscription removed]

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