Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya is an entrepreneur, investor, and founder and CEO of Social Capital, an investment firm focused on technology and innovation. He previously served as a senior executive at Facebook, where he played a key role in the company's early growth. He is also the co-host of All-In, a podcast featuring discussions on technology, business, politics, and current events alongside fellow investors and entrepreneurs Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AGZ ⁠⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠⁠⁠ ------ LMNT Electrolytes ⁠⁠⁠https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra⁠⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace ⁠⁠⁠https://Squarespace.com/tetra⁠⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠⁠⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠⁠⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠⁠⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter⁠ Follow Tetragrammaton: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/tetranow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/tetragrammaton.now⁠⁠⁠ Follow Rick: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/rickrubin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  There's a handful of us that have known each other for a very long time. Me and Sax probably for 25 years. And then me and Jason for maybe 23. And the three of us, there was like an early cohort of people in Silicon Valley that were really tight. We were three of those people. And it was a very small circle at the time because Silicon Valley was not that important. And we had two things. We would work together and we played poker together. And we all loved poker, just to think. And when COVID happened, we were just totally shut out from each other. And so we just started to film each other. And the fourth person, David, we've known for about 13 years. So he's been in our friend group for about 13 years. But that's how it started.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  We all used to live within like a few miles of each other. We used to spend all this time together and then we were just completely put into our homes.

• 1:12Rick Rubin?

  Would you typically play poker together?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Every Thursday at my house. And now after COVID, it's back every Thursday at my house. And we have like dinners and we bring interesting people and we kind of like, we'll sit there and grill them and not really grill them, but get to know them. And it's a fucking treat for us. And then when they took it all away, like we would just record ourselves. And then I was like, fuck it, just post it. It's like, this is so great. Just post it. Like, we're all going crazy. We're just like, what do you have to lose? And then the thing just went crazy. Last week, we were number one for the first time.

• 1:45Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  In America, fucking crazy.

• 1:47Rick Rubin?

  It really is a vision into a world that no one gets to see.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53Rick Rubin?

  I've been lucky enough a couple of times in my life to be in a room where people have conversations like the conversations you guys have every week.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00Rick Rubin?

  But I remember when I first heard it because it felt like the highest level insider information.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I think that that's a really nice way to think about it.

• 2:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And then to make it good, it takes real effort.

• 2:12Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about each of the members.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  They're all so particular. Like Jason, I would say is, you know, the scene like where Ben Affleck says to Jeremy Renner, we're gonna take my car, can't tell you where, we're gonna fuck some people up and you can never talk about it again. And the guy says, you know, kind of like, you know, your car mine or whatever. You just call. And he's so loyal. But he's also so infuriating because like his views, I find, I find just so frustrating. But I love him. And I love him like I would love a brother who I disagree with. Sax is, he's just the very, very smart kind of poker player strategist kind of guy.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  And then Freeburg is like an incredibly earnest first principles thinker. Kind of like right on the borderline between naive and productive. Because I think sometimes he's a little too idealistic. But so then we're all like, kind of like very different. But then we all grew up in a moment where like, none of us were anything. And then, you know, we had various levels of success and then various levels of kind of downfalls. And we all kind of just stayed close. That's, I think that's the key part.

• 3:26Rick Rubin?

  You came up in Silicon Valley after the first wave of the take power off of you types.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I came right at the end of that. I joined a company and, you know, it was, it had been bought by AOL. I was like, all right, guys, I'm ready for this fucking party. Let's go. And they're like, no, party shut down, bro. And, you know, everything had hit the skids and.

• 3:45Rick Rubin?

  But it seems like you've been welcomed by that old guard for some reason.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Well, I came right, right at the end of it. So as far as everybody else is concerned, I'm effectively the old guard now. And I think I grinded in a way where I haven't really achieved what I'm trying to achieve or my potential, but I've demonstrated that I'm like decently good at various things.

• 4:08Rick Rubin?

  Were you aware when you said, just post it, how revolutionary the podcast is?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  No, I didn't understand that our friend dynamics are actually quite rare. I didn't understand that. And look, we have always been just full on.

• 4:24Rick Rubin?

  Totally candid.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Super candid, very off color, but it's very disarming as a result of that. I just didn't know, and I had only known that. So I didn't know that other people weren't making that kind of music. Does that make sense?

• 4:41Rick Rubin?

  Well, other people talk like that and think like that, but don't release stuff like that.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 4:48Rick Rubin?

  There's a real dividing line between people's public perception and who they actually are. And on your show, that's really these people. Feels revolutionary.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels revolutionary.

• 5:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think like, there's like a simplified Maslow's hierarchy, which is like you have sex at the bottom, you have money in the middle, power at the top. And I think that for many years, there was all these status games where you were trying to achieve one of the three. And it looks like a triangle because at the top, power is so fleeting and there's so little of it. Few people play that game. More people can play the power game and everybody can play the sex game, basically, right? And I think what's happened is actually like, this bottom layer has gone away and it's more now fame. And I think the fame game, the problem with like that status game is everybody that seeks it because of social media, basically runs into a brick wall. And they run into a brick wall because they're not themselves.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  People just sniff it out and they're like, somebody said this, which I think is true. Nobody wants to be fucking sold something. Like, like even if you're the guy that's supposed to be selling you something, you just have to not be selling. And so you just have to be yourself and deal with it. And that's super hard for a lot of people because most of the time, most of our lives, we are boring, predictable, not really interesting. We're all just grinding along, dealing with the same shit everybody else is dealing with. Woke up today, my fucking hip hurts. Woke up today, I feel, you know, out of shape and, you know, I'm not eating well. It's the typical shit. And yet instead, if you were to look on Instagram, it's like, I woke up today, I fly my private jet, now I'm on my boat, now I'm in this party. And it's like, this is not fucking true.

• 6:31Rick Rubin?

  And even if it is true, it's not particularly interesting.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think any of those people are much happier than anybody else.

• 6:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  But you have to play this lie. And I think the problem is the lie gets undone. So it's just easier to be yourself. And then oddly, being yourself is actually the hardest thing to do. Because so many of the times, what you have to offer is really not that much and you have to be okay with that. But then that's what actually sells because it's not being sold. It's weird.

• 6:54Rick Rubin?

  One of the things I notice about the show is that you often speak less than the others. And when you speak, it seems much more important.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think I've learned the hard way. I used to really need to hear the sound of my own voice because I would, I think I felt like, if I'm not saying something, it's not important. Or how can they say something and I'm not saying anything? Must be like what's being in a band. And you're like, oh, that's a great guitar riff. Oh, that's a great lyric. Okay, hold on, I need to add to that. Because if I don't add to that, and now I'm more like, no, that shit can just stand on its own right there. And I have my own things to contribute to. And also I've realized, I think there's like things that I know that are arcane, that will only matter in moments. So it's kind of like sinusoidal. And society is kind of like moves across the sinusoid. And when it intersects, it's valuable. But there's going to be many times where what you have to say is just meaningless.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And then if I start to reach, I'm going to be this person that's kind of faking it and it'll come off and it'll sound like a fucking idiot. So I just, I think everybody, you kind of have to just be in your lane and just realize like the earth has these undulating things that it needs or requires. And when it intersects, you'll be there. And I think that that's okay. But it's hard to know that.

• 8:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the group dynamic of the four of you.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  We are what we are like in real life. And one's definitely on the autism spectrum. One's definitely this pugnacious Brooklynite that doesn't want to be told that he's not good enough. One's kind of like a very eager beaver overachiever. One's like an insecure immigrant type. It's like, we're all actually like very typical.

• 8:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, archetypes.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  We're all archetypes of like these persona that have existed now. And we, and you can point to so many people in your own lives. And so I think we bicker like a family. Sometimes I'm really mean to my sister, you know? My kids are sometimes mean to my other kids in ways that I just think is insufferable. But I don't, it's kind of like how families communicate, I think.

• 9:00Rick Rubin?

  Has anything come from the show really positive or really negative?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I think the really positive thing, I I've probably been canceled. Well, attempted to be canceled at least once in a really big way.

• 9:19Rick Rubin?

  Because of the show.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Because of something I said on the show. And I would say that that that was incredibly positive for me. Because of what it taught me after the fact. I didn't understand how the game was played like.

• 9:31Rick Rubin?

  Can you give me the specifics?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole, the whole story was Jason was talking about human rights or something like that. And I essentially said something to the effect of stop virtue signaling. Because you nor anybody else in America are willing to actually make the substantive changes if you actually thought this was an issue. So you say it's an issue, but your behavior betrays it being an issue. And as far as I'm concerned, it's below my line. And that's, and that's the thing that became a meme. Or like, there's a picture of me talking about the Uighurs in China specifically.

• 10:08Rick Rubin?

  But you meant it and.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Well, I said, I said the uncomfortable truth because it's true. And it's like, you know, I think it's very dangerous to say things matter when they don't matter.

• 10:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, well, when you don't treat them like they matter.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't. So like, you know, you have to reserve like your words. Otherwise you become the boy who cried wolf. This matters, that thing matters, the other thing matters. And you do nothing about it, nothing matters. And then you're an unserious person. And so are we an unserious society? Or are we just caught up in fringe politics? So I got frustrated and I said something and I personalized it. And then, you know, at the time, like, I remember the, the sequence of events was like, I think that was like on a Thursday. We tape typically, it comes out on a Friday. It was Martin Luther King, so it was a long weekend. Some guy clips it, it starts to go viral. People start to post about it. I was a co-owner of the Warriors. They are

• 11:03Speaker 01

  part of an organization that has an incredibly complicated relationship with China. So then the Warriors distance themselves from me. And, you know, my initial reaction was very reflexive. These guys are spineless. But really, they're doing the right thing just to manage the fallout because it's like, you know, we appreciate your capital. But we're not getting into this, which I didn't understand then I get now.

• 11:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  And then the White House put out some comment on the Monday on Martin Luther King Day, which I thought, this is crazy, this is intense.

• 11:33Rick Rubin?

  The White House put out a comment about you, something you said on a podcast.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, on my own podcast. And so I was like, what the fuck have I touched here? Like, what is going on?

• 11:43Rick Rubin?

  That's insane.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  It's insane. And I remember a friend of mine texted me and he sent me this study, which was when you look back at all of these moments online, when you're kind of like in the public firing line. He said, if you believe it, you should never apologize. Never, ever apologize, ever. And then he gave me this like study that showed it like, even if you said something reasonable and then you apologized, you just got run over. I kind of stood my ground and I said, yeah, you know, may have said it indelicately. And this is before cancel culture was canceled.

• 12:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And so it was in the throes of it. And so I felt it on my skin. And I realized this is not a way a sustainable society operates.

• 12:28Rick Rubin?

  Did that make you want to dig in harder?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  No, initially I wanted to go and hide.

• 12:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Because I felt like, oh my God, like this is really bad. What have I done? And, you know, I can't believe people are looking at me this way. And some people I think were probably joyous, like, yeah, finally he's getting some of his own shit. And it was very hard to deal with. But in hindsight, I tell you, that's the greatest gift that I've gotten from the pod is that one moment. Because it was like all these important things all at once that showed me where we were and kind of where we needed to be. And if I'm trying to make the point and the point is valuable, I think it's really important to actually make the point. I could have done it in a much smarter way. I also could have taken the time in post to really think about how I threaded the needle.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And I would not because I was a little cavalier about it.

• 13:20Rick Rubin?

  Did you even know it was an issue though in post?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  I didn't even look at it in post. I was more of like, you know, the golf analogy, grip and rip. I would walk in, I would do it. I'm like, I thought it was cool for me to say first cut, go.

• 13:31Rick Rubin?

  When you said it, did you think, oh, this is something that's really gonna?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I thought it was benign. I had gotten frustrated at Jason, like, this is a family conversation. I'm fighting with my brother.

• 13:40Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  He said something, I got mad, shut the fuck up, Jason. And I just left it and I thought, you know, just kind of move on. And it became so much more than that. But it's a great moment because it's like, it's, it just allowed one side to take the side of you can't have serious conversations anymore. It took the other side to say, it's really important to keep saying these things, even if it's not true. Don't buy the iPhone if actually you believe in this. Don't go to Walmart and expect these goods to cost 99 cents. They are being made in China and don't for a second think that you know how they're being made. So either understand the hypocrisy and live with it

• 14:22Speaker 01

  and be honest about it and then have like the, the moral clarity to say, this is wrong, but I am indirectly supporting it. I don't like, I think people don't like the moral ambiguity of that. They don't like that. And so, so it was a real gift because I lived it. And being in the middle of it is very different than looking at it.

• 14:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And you realize then you can't be canceled. So it's a, it's an enormous gift to know that you cannot be canceled. It allows me to be a little bit closer every day to my truer and truer self, because whenever I get afraid, I can go back to that moment and remember how it felt like, but then remember what the outcome was.

• 15:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, have you been able to mentor any people through things like that since?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Since I, I keep telling them all the time that I go back, that's, that is a very incredible thing. So that was, I think, really probably the most positive thing.

• 15:16Rick Rubin?

  Which again, from the face, it would seem like the most negative thing turned out to be the most positive.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think the most negative thing about it is, again, it's just an hour and a half a week, right? So then the intimacy that you have, that you sometimes is not real. Meaning like, we will talk about moments, but they can be so viewed out of context that I think it's easy for us to oftentimes look like detached dilettante kind of rich guys opining. Whereas the truth of it is, we are four guys, we were all born into nothing. Three of the four of us weren't born here, we were all immigrants to America. In every single which way, none of us were given a fucking thing. We all made it in a way that you would be proud for your kids to make it.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And then we've all enjoyed the trappings of that success to various degrees. But I think that the way that in an hour and a half, sometimes the way that we joke with each other, the way that we do in private, when you see a window into it, if you're just a voyeur or a random person that observes that in a moment, I definitely think it creates these perceptions. And a lot of times those perceptions are deeply incomplete. And then that carries with them. And then it comes back to you later. And that's negative. And then most people would say that's positive because like you look like you're on top of the hill. You have quote unquote, you know, notoriety, fame, whatever it is, people see you that. But the downside is they don't really know. Because you can't, you know, and you're not supposed to carry a fucking placard on your neck that says,

• 16:47Speaker 01

  hey, I grew up on welfare, hey, my dad beat the shit out of me every day. Hey, I worked fucking Burger King when I was 14. You can't do that, that's not real. And so you, you get into these misperceptions and I think these misperceptions can be complicated.

• 17:01Speaker 02

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• 19:02Rick Rubin?

  How is the notoriety different than you would have thought it would be?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  This is gonna sound really weird, but like, society works at the intersection of like, humans, incentives, and the technology that we use. Meaning, think of how much of our world, the knock-on effect of the world, is because of how people's perceptions are shaped. But those perceptions are shaped overwhelmingly by social media. That is a brittle algorithmic way of taking an issue and either highlighting it or not. But the thing is, if you understand how the algorithm works, you can then, by definition, manipulate what is perceived to be important, what is not.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  And as a byproduct of that, you actually are shaping, in an otherwise abnormal way, what society thinks. When you look at, for example, an AI, or if you look at the core structural algorithms that we use inside of Facebook, or Instagram, or X, or Google, the best way to describe it is these are fame weights. They're oriented around attention. In fact, the most critical technological breakthrough in AI, which allowed us to have this current set of experiences that we live with today, the paper, the seminal paper, was called "Attention is All You Need." And it's like, well, if you just took that as a statement and you said, "Is attention all you need?" No, you'd say, "No." That's like, in fact, all kinds of deleterious outcomes will happen if only you focus on attention.

• 20:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Right? But that's how we have framed this current this current era.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  So we are unfortunately fame-oriented. It is a critical underpinning of how society works. And being a part of that, I think, unless you're super vigilant about the fact that it's gonna lead you into places that may not be where you wanna be, you're gonna get sucked into it. And I think that's probably like a very negative outcome of this. And most people would never because you think, "Oh, it's cool to be like, somebody sees you and you take a picture." I think that is. It is very cool. And it's cool to have the benefits that come with recognition. But I think most people do not understand that everything has a cost, right? It's an equal offsetting reaction. Like, whatever you're getting

• 21:27Speaker 01

  as a positive, there's an equal and offsetting negative reaction. And I think the negative thing is that we are all part of a fame and attention machine. And I think it has the potential to really fuck up society.

• 21:40Rick Rubin?

  Based on your experience of being canceled, do you think that there's a cooling effect in society where people are afraid to say what they think?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there's been a long period of time where you can't really say what you think. And but here's the crazy thing. I think what I've also realized is most things, it's like a bell distribution, right? Where like, you have these crazy, crazy, long-tailed things on the left and crazy, crazy, long-tailed things on the right that one could say. Most things are in the middle. The problem is the things on the edges causes people to not even say the stuff in the middle. Because they don't know where the boundary is. That's the chilling effect. And so what cancel culture does is, you know, this is why like, you know, Elon and all these others who are owners of these platforms, why they say the most important piece of information you interact with is the one you disagree with the most. And gauging your reaction to that is so critical.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And I think what he means by that is, if you can talk, if you're like, on the far left, and you see something on the far right and you can disagree but tolerate it. Or you're on the far right and you see something on the far left and you disagree and tolerate it. What that tells is most of the rest of us, who are mostly in the middle, plus or minus a few degrees, how to talk about everything that's in the middle. And it's the everything that's in the middle that actually governs your quality of life. These fringe, far issues affect incredibly small populations of people. Yet they take up all the noise, and if you weaponize them properly, it actually suffocates the ability to talk about the 99% of the stuff that is in the middle.

• 23:14Rick Rubin?

  And that everybody agrees on.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And that everybody agrees on, or you can actually have a debate on.

• 23:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  You know? "Hey, you want universal healthcare? Okay, hey, I want waste, fraud, and abuse out of the government. Okay, let's find the middle ground." Right? Hey, you can't even do that. Because those two issues, which are actually very benign issues, they get transacted on the same ledger where you talk about immigration, and ICE, and trans rights. And those are two totally different sets of issues.

• 23:41Rick Rubin?

  And you personally have a universal healthcare experience because you come from Canada, and now you live here. What did you experience about the strengths and weaknesses of the universal healthcare?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I think it's important to, you gotta look at it from a point in time. When I was growing up, my father had a whole series of heart attacks. And he was very unhealthy, drank a lot, and was a diabetic when he was 42. And basically, he died when he was 72. So those 30 years were like, a decade of pills, then a decade of insulin, then a decade of dialysis, and then he cardiac arrested and died. So if you had to manage your life in the United States with a 30-year chronic illness like that, it would have been a shit show. We would have been bankrupt and, I mean, we were so poor anyways, but

• 24:36Speaker 01

  he could go and get care. So my perception of universal healthcare was very positive. And then I came to the United States and then I was lucky enough to have healthcare amazing. But then you see what's happened since in Canada. My mom is 85. If she wants to get an MRI, it's now a year and a half wait to get an MRI. Nobody wants to admit that that's true, but it is true.

• 24:59Rick Rubin?

  What are the odds of most people who are waiting a year and a half for an MRI dying in that year and a half?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I think probably quite high. I think it's very sad to note that we had universal healthcare, but not legalized euthanasia in Canada. We've maintained a perception that we have universal healthcare, or they have universal healthcare, but now they've legalized euthanasia. And I think it's quite crazy to see that there are so many people that choose to take their own life in a country that theoretically proposes completely free and available healthcare. I think that that's just a really important distinction that somebody needs to explain to me, because I don't understand why that is. Because I think there's something about that that's linked. Where you have these issues,

• 25:49Speaker 01

  maybe they're acute, maybe they're chronic, but maybe you just, you see finality of your life as a simpler solution. That I find absolutely unacceptable. Should you be able to get an MRI in three weeks? Yeah. Three days? Yeah. Should the MRIs take an hour? No. Technologically, we know how to make these things so that they're in 10 minutes. Why don't we? And that goes back to this whole stagnation of Western societies. It's like, we wanted flying cars, instead we got, you know, 140 characters type thing. So you can't take a label of a, of a social program and use it to launder the fact that we've actually stagnated.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And we then have created these programs to deal with the outcomes of that stagnation. Yes, we have a universal system, but sorry, it's gonna take you a year and a half to get an MRI. Yes, we have this great way to take care of you, it's completely free, but oh, by the way, you can also choose to kill yourself. That doesn't make any sense to me. Whereas in the United States, we have a different problem, which is in a moment in time where the United States tried to thread the needle, it made a fundamental mistake and we can't seem to admit it. And you have to be intellectually honest on one very narrow point, which is when they implemented Obamacare, there was a single thing that he did not study well enough, or his team did not understand, or

• 27:19Speaker 01

  they lobbied to include, which has had horrible negative consequences to the United States healthcare system, which is this concept of capping the medical loss ratio. What does that mean? In simple terms, when you have a business, let's say you sell a good for $100. Your incentive is to make that $100 good for $20 and capture $80 of profit. What they said was, your margin is capped at 20%.

• 27:44Rick Rubin?

  The most you can make.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Most you can make. So you wanna sell it for 100? It has to cost 80. Find a way to spend 80. Well, what do you think these guys did? They were like, "Well, I wanna make $200. I wanna make $2,000. So, okay, I'm gonna charge 4,000." And if you look at the prices that have made the medical industry so completely unaffordable in the United States, it's that simple decision. And so undo the decision. The problem is the messenger there. I think so many people dislike, they have TDS, but Trump put his finger on that and said, "That's stupid." He said that as an outsider, and even in 2016. Now, I wasn't listening as carefully in 2016, but that is a legitimate thing, that if you fixed, you would change the financial incentives of all the people in the system.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  And instead of saying "universal healthcare", you have to go one level deeper and say, "How is a system executed so that it's gonna work properly for people?" And you can't use universal healthcare as a way to deliver care in three years where the alternative is euthanasia. That's not a compassionate system. I think we're much better off just fixing the current system and just saying, "Okay, sorry, guys, that was a mistake, and we need more free market competition here, and I'm sure the $3,000 MRI is gonna go to 100. Here's a pathway that we're gonna prove things that can be scientifically proven in six months as opposed to six years." And you probably find somebody built an MRI machine that can do it in 15 minutes.

• 29:12Rick Rubin?

  But why would that be a political issue? That just seems like it's good for everybody.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  But today, it is a political issue.

• 29:19Rick Rubin?

  If there's a solution that's good for everybody?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  The best thing that could happen for the world is if aliens dropped in. Because then you wouldn't care about Republicans versus Democrats, you'd care about humans versus non-humans. And you could make these decisions. But today, we're highly tribal. You have to be on one line or the other, and I'm gonna choose which side I'm gonna be on based on a whole series of factors, you're gonna choose as well. And we're gonna choose to disagree because that's the sport. And that's the shame. And you find very little commonality. So like, you know, if you go back, at least in the United States, it's now become quite predictable. When you go back three or four presidencies now, what happens? Since Clinton, so if you look at Bush, Obama, Trump won, Biden, Trump too.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  In these four-year windows, except when you're a president for eight, in the case of Bush and Obama, in a row, right? When you first get elected, you're basically given one big shot on goal. And you're like, OK, in the first two years, it doesn't matter who it is, go after it. And we basically will get it passed, whatever it is. In Bush's case, it was, crazy to say, but global war on terror. It was the Iraq invasion. It was the Patriot Act, which is insane, insane in terms of civil liberties. And then after that, it was relatively stayed.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Obama comes in, gets slammed with the global financial crisis in 2008. Obama has to unwind that, but gets a massive shot on goal. And he chooses Obamacare, gets it done in the first two years. But again, just like Bush, Obama loses the mandate. And then the next six years, they're just kind of swimming sideways. Trump won, had one big shot on goal, got a huge domestic economic package passed. Biden won, had one huge shot on goal. It was a sustainability, tax credit, long-term investment program around these very narrow kind of technologies. And then Trump, too, was essentially resetting the body politic with respect to tariffs

• 31:31Speaker 01

  and then refining some of the economic incentives. So the reason why more doesn't change is that there's this dynamic where you get one shot on goal and your calculus, whether you know it or not, is more like, man, what is the thing that I can do that has the best chance of helping me in the next two years, going into the midterms and then, you know, getting reelected? And I think in that calculus, it's hard to get people rallied around this other thing. And then when you pick something like healthcare and say, we're going to change the MLR, it's too esoteric, you know? It's like, it seems narrow, it's hard to explain, it's hard to communicate. And there's enormous financial incentives now to keep things the way they are. And I think that's why things don't change.

• 32:13Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about incentives. Is incentives the best way to understand how everything happens?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 32:20Rick Rubin?

  Is there any downside to looking, considering only incentives?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  There's no downside. It's not a complete picture. But I think it really helps me at least understand, why is this thing happening? Like, I think at the end of the day, you know, we're going to go through this really important change from being overwhelmingly psychological in terms of how our society works, to overwhelmingly deterministic as AI becomes more and more part of our society.

• 32:53Rick Rubin?

  Is that good or bad?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  TBD. I think there are certain systems that will benefit profoundly from determinism. Like, I'll give you an example. The United States government processes half a trillion dollars of healthcare payments a year. The best guess that I've seen online is that about $100 to $200 billion of that is just waste. The downstream--

• 33:17Rick Rubin?

  Is it fraud or is it waste?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  I think it's waste.

• 33:20Rick Rubin?

  They're different.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  They're two different things. I do think fraud exists. Maybe fraud is more like 25 or 50 billion. But most people are not spending most of their time trying to figure out how to break the law. But most people, like I'll give you a benign example, are given a job as a Medicare coder in a hospital. And they're told, hey, listen, when Rick comes in for an MRI of the knee, here's how you code it. And now you have like, you're tested for your ACL, your MCL. You also are tested for sciatica. And now you have like, you know, you're upcoded. I don't think that that's fraud, but I do think that that's wasteful.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And maybe there are systems that can deterministically be more precise and say, no, Rick's coming in for this. This is the code. We're going to reinsure him once or, you know, those kinds of like, simple decisions like that, I think they would save a lot of money. It would have a very long-term impact on our system, which is, you know, right now, our system is not trust but verify. Our system is reject and you fight and you figure it out. So determinism in a system like that is really healthy because I think all of us will feel much more safe that things are working in a very logical way. You'll be able to explain it to yourself. Other systems, I don't know. I was on Rogan like a couple of years ago. And I mentioned this example, which seemed far-fetched then, but it's probably going to happen now. Where I said, you know, it makes no sense

• 34:46Speaker 01

  for policemen to be first responders in a crisis. It completely makes sense for droids and for robots to be the first responders. And you can start to program them to really understand how to de-escalate situations. Because, you know, it's sort of like the entropy of human-on-human chaos is cut in half because it's just human-on-robot, right? And then determinism is great because now, you know, cops are much more likely to take the first action that's the just action. That has huge implications to how entire neighborhoods are policed and behaviors, and then your trust in the system and your ability to deploy police everywhere. Is that good or bad? I mean, there will be people that think that's really bad.

• 35:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I could see both sides.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I could see both sides.

• 35:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. I wonder if I was going through some difficult time, if I would be as comforted by a robot trying to deal with my situation as a human?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think that if I was totally stressed out or totally afraid, I would be very scared if I thought that the human couldn't empathize with me. I would feel safer, personally, me, with something that was more deterministic. That was like, all right, Chamath, what are you going through? It asks me 15 or 20 questions or whatever and can just de-escalate because it's programmed. Because we know how to do that. Like, if you talk to the best kidnap negotiator, he or she knows how to de-escalate. And we can learn from that and we can make that programmatic and predictable so everybody has access to that. I don't know, that to me sounds like better.

• 36:34Speaker 03

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• 38:02Rick Rubin?

  What are your thoughts on prediction markets?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  I'm just so torn. I think it is a sign of real societal decay. The fact that they are popular as they are. The fact that you spent all this time betting on everything. It's just a different form of entertainment.

• 38:24Rick Rubin?

  Is that how you think of them?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  It's a dangerous form of entertainment. I think there's a different aspect of prediction markets, but those are financial markets, which are truth machines. I think the way that it would be sold to you and I, as like a societal good, is that these are truth machines that induce insider information.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And I think that's what the creators of these markets would tell you. And why? Because you can't resolve an unknown market like that in the absence of inside information. You have the two sides, they should theoretically be equal. The fact that there is an actual imbalance between one and the other side is the sign of the actual truths. And that necessarily has to come from inside information. Somebody is a sharp one in that market and everybody else is a square. So I understand that logic for why now that's like super valuable. But it's such a slippery slope from there to like, you're betting on whether the the player in the Super Bowl flips it with his left thumb or the right thumb, the shoelace comes untied, that gets like, what the hell is that? That's just degenerate gambling.

• 39:32Rick Rubin?

  If you were looking at trying to understand what a likely outcome was for something that's going to happen in a month, would you more likely trust what you find on a prediction market or what you read the New York Times?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Oh, overwhelmingly prediction market, overwhelmingly.

• 39:51Rick Rubin?

  Well, overwhelmingly the prediction market. So in terms of getting information.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  That's a different question. How would I answer a question that I had for a month from now? I have my own process to get to first principles opinions on things that I think are important for me. And I look at neither.

• 40:08Rick Rubin?

  What do you look at?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  So if I'm curious, I usually start on X, I go to the search bar, I type it in, and I just see a stream of stuff. And I will then probably spend an hour consuming all this information. Then I'll go to a couple of the AIs and I'll have structured questions that I would ask. Then I would probably go to Google and just do a web search to see if there are authoritative things that I've missed. And then I go back and I try to write something that's less than a few paragraphs that just kind of explains what I think. And then I leave it for typically a day or two. And then I come back and I read it and I'm like, that's fucking stupid. Or I'll be like.

• 40:54Rick Rubin?

  That sounds right.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  There's like something there. And so it's like a very intuitive thing, like I've been very lucky that I have this weird alchemy in my brain sometimes that helps me kind of just like write shit down that's, I can't explain it. It's just like this thing, that shape. But so much of it is not right, but I really give in to that process. And I'm okay with the wrongness.

• 41:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Do you trust your intuition?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  I really trust my intuition. And that's an incredible thing because I wrapped my intuition in tons of insecurity and I so I would pervert what I saw. And that's caused huge mistakes in my life that I've made that have cost me tremendously, mostly financially. So in the end, it's not that important, but it's important as a learning lesson. And in that it's like essential. Because I think like everybody is given gifts. Some people have no intuition, but they have other gifts. And so we're all embodied with something that's very special. To be grateful that you have a chance to just be in that thing and feel it, it's very lucky.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  And so I'm mostly in a place where I can kind of like follow my intuitions. I'm in the business of my own intuition. That's crazy thing to say because I feel lucky there. It means nothing to anybody else. But before I would kind of like, you know, pervert that intuition with my own insecurity.

• 42:22Rick Rubin?

  How did you find out that you could trust your intuition?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I mean, look, there's a very incredibly famous clip of you, you know it, with Anderson Cooper, where you're just like, I kind of just feel it. I'm not musical. And then like it became a whole meme, which by the way, is also like memes are very powerful because they are little nuggets of truth, everlasting truth. My takeaway from your meme is you have to be very comfortable in your intuition. And then you have to measure your intuition. And the way that I inferred that from what you were saying is like, you know, you're there with Jay-Z. And I think it was like, you know, maybe it was like 99 problems where you were like, I like that, like, I like, like whatever version of that.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  But you were right, because in that sinusoidal wave, society was intersected with what you thought was right in that moment. And it was a fucking huge hit. But that's a quantitative validation that your intuition is right. In my world, it's similar, but the measurement is different. I made an investment. I started a company. I created a product. And every now and then those things are massively right, massively, like deck a billion dollars right. And it's not that the money is important, but it's a signal to me that I'm on the right track. Then.

• 43:42Rick Rubin?

  Your intuition served you.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  My intuition was right.

• 43:45Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  And then I, but then I have it on the list where I can see where all the other times my intuition was wrong. And I'm like, but as a body of work, that thing is right enough. I gotta fucking go with it. And so I I'll be sitting there in product meetings and we're like, you know, trying to figure out the shape of a product or like, we're trying to figure out like, how do we start this thing and get off the ground or whatever? And it's not rooted in anything other than intuition, I think.

• 44:13Rick Rubin?

  How does it relate to taste?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  This sounds incredibly arrogant to say, but I have developed incredible tastes.

• 44:21Rick Rubin?

  How?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I had a great teacher.

• 44:23Rick Rubin?

  Who?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  My wife. She's a fucking pain in the ass. She is such a hard ass on so many dimensions. She's up my ass on everything. Italian, raised in Milan, grounded in like the Italian education method. I mean, it's like, if you think about it, it's like you're educating the Michelangelos and the DaVincis, but you know, along the way you're educating, you know, the Natalie Donpys, that's my wife's name. And it's fucking crazy because they have a broad-based education which amplifies all of these senses. You know, like the Italian language, I think there's something important about this, like when you're taught a language where when you speak, there's nine different ways of saying the word tasty.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And when your brain processes these nuances, you become extremely detail oriented. So as a culture, they're very detail oriented. So when you see the things that they make, it's beautiful. And when I met her, I had my intuition wrapped in my insecurity. So what did I look like? I wasn't technically an owner of a basketball team pretending to be like dressed like a player, you know what I mean? Like horrible ripped jeans with leather patches and all these fucking sweaters with these logos and all this bullshit. And she's like, what is all of this? And I was like, well, what do you mean? Like I have a fucking stylist. You know what I mean? And she's like, this is all bullshit.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Or like my house or like all these things that were expressions. She's like, this is not your intuition.

• 45:49Rick Rubin?

  You were copying what you thought was cool around you?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And then like I got a normal haircut, literally like a normal haircut, you know? My haircut was a way of trying to belong. I got normal clothes. Everything didn't have a label. And for all this time, I was like very insecure. And so it started in these small ways. Then it's into business. She's like, why did you do that deal? Why did you make that investment? That thing seems way too oversized. And I was like, like, I was like, it's hard, man. And I'm like, I knew there's a reason why she's in my life. And so she helped me unbuckle my intuition from my insecurity. I still have this insecurity. It's a huge, this is my dark passenger for me.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  But then on my intuition, she's like, why don't you express it in a sans insecure way? Oh, you don't need to make an investment that's $200 million. You can do 25. No, I can't. People will think I'm poor. What are you talking about? Calm the fuck down. What are you doing? Think about this as like, you have to make this thing successful. You want to save your money so that if it works, you can give it more oxygen. If that doesn't work, if you believe in the idea, you want to go chase the other thing. That so that that could work because you care about the solution. And she's like, you're not giving yourself any optionality. So I learned how to like have some taste, right? This is good. This is not good. This is oversized. This is undersized. This is wrong. This is right. This is a good bet to make.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  This creates the right sensation like, and it's, it's been hard for me.

• 47:25Rick Rubin?

  Would you say that she had a better understanding of what quality of life actually is?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  She has no ego and I have a huge ego.

• 47:34Rick Rubin?

  And have you always?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  I think that was my response to being poor, to being fat when I was younger, to not having a lot of experiences with women, you know, when I was a kid. And so my protective mechanism became that ego. And then when you, when you imbue that with accidental success or success at an age where it's not deserved, it's like lighting a brush fire. And it takes, it takes over.

• 47:59Rick Rubin?

  You believe the hype.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  You believe the hype, but she's just built differently. She's like, I'm a steward of a business. I make drugs for rare diseases. You know, I broke my back when I was 11 and I was in traction and then I had to kind of relearn how to walk. And I have to manage what I eat because otherwise my body will get inflamed and my body shuts down and I can't, I'm in so much pain. She has no ego that way. So she's just like, is like very like sees the thing. And then more than anything else, she cares about me so much that she sees. The visual I have is like, it's like you close your eyes and you see energy. And she knows when my energy is off. She can just feel it by my words, even my tone of my voice. And I can do that now for her in different ways. I'm learning how to do that.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Which I think is very cool. And then I find I can do that now in a few cases for my friends where I've been able to kind of like, whoa, hold on, I see. I've seen this before. This was me. So, you know, taste is weird because like you can define it as a very superficial thing. I think it's quite profound. It's very deep. It's where your intuition, your emotion, your selectivity and your judgment all comes together. And you're like, this is really beautiful, you know, this should exist. And interestingly, taste is actually very non-judgmental, which is weird because like I thought what taste means is that fucking sucks. That's not taste. Taste is the part where you're like, that's amazing. So I can hone in on the thing that's beautiful, that's right, at the exclusion of this stuff without denigrating that stuff.

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• 51:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as a gambler?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Rick Rubin?

  Have you always been?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Always. I love gambling. Why? One is very superficial, which is, I don't think I deserve to win. And so there's a weird comfort in losing. And I think if you talk to a lot of gamblers, we all are a little broken this way. Which is, we have this weird sadistic joy in losing. Nobody will ever say that to you as a gambler, but real gamblers love the churn of losing more than they love the high of winning.

• 51:39Rick Rubin?

  Because it reinforces what you believe about yourself.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  It tells you, I think, that you're not that worthy.

• 51:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  It creates a pattern and a cycle in some people that's very comforting. But then I think like there's a part of gambling which is incredibly useful, which is, like, you're a version of yourself.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  And there's a theoretical version that you can be. And let's just say you're like a 20 out of 100, but you can theoretically be 100 out of 100. In terms of, you're the best version of you, whatever best means to you.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  You are not going to get from 20 to 100 without taking some shots that take 20 to 10.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Just not going to happen. You don't go 20 to 21 to 22. There's no straight-line path there. And gambling is this really interesting way of training your mind to be able to take those bets and processing the loss. And I don't love losing, but I can process losing, and I can deal with it, and I can move on from it. And part of it is because I started from a place where I thought, I'm supposed to lose. But as I get older and as I got more comfortable with it, I'm like, I can manage this. I know how to take risk. I know what the losses are meant to teach me. Most people don't understand that, and I think they think about gambling as a negative thing. And specifically what I mean by gambling, by the way, to be clear, is poker. I don't really gamble in any other way. I don't sports bet. I don't...

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I don't do that. I don't play blackjack, really, every now and then in the casino, but not really. I play poker. But it's this incredible journey of taking risk, sometimes being right, sometimes being wrong, processing wins. Sometimes you did the right thing, but sometimes you got lucky. Processing losses, sometimes you did all the right things, sometimes you got unlucky. And staying in a process. That's amazing. Balancing intuition with data and your judgment and having taste. Where does taste come into a poker game? You can be incredibly creative. And why is that? Because the number of probabilities in how you play any sequence is quasi-infinite. And so there's a real element of creativity in the game. It's like chess, but on super steroids.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  You know, people talk about creative chess players, Bobby Fischer, like, how did you do that? Like, how did you find these paths in the middle game? And Bobby was incredibly creative. Poker gives you that outlet, too. But it requires some taste, and there are some incredible players that are just so creative. And you're just like, how do they do these things?

• 54:12Rick Rubin?

  How much does luck play in? In poker?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  I think as the number of hands go down, the amount of luck goes way up. So at one hand, luck is, I would call it 100%. And at an infinite hands, luck is zero.

• 54:27Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And so the question is, where are you in that spectrum? And probably the real demarcation point is maybe after, kind of, 10,000 hands, it's mostly skill. So this is another crazy thing. Poker is not many, many, many games. It's one infinite game.

• 54:47Rick Rubin?

  Explain.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Maybe you play on a Wednesday, then maybe you don't play for two months, then maybe you play in a year, then you play...

• 54:55Rick Rubin?

  That's all part of the same game.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Then you play seven games in a row. It could be different blinds, like different risk levels. Raw, one game. It's the same ace-king you're getting in the small game as the big game. It's the same pocket twos. How are you reacting to this? How are you managing this? Do you have a system? Can you maintain discipline under pressure? Can you find creativity? There's very few things in life where you can have an infinite game. And that is an infinite game with yourself. And so I tell everybody, play poker. If you can learn to love the game, it's an infinite game against you.

• 55:34Rick Rubin?

  I imagine you know the statistics as you're playing of what's likely to happen, yes?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:40Rick Rubin?

  Okay. Knowing the statistics, do you ever make a choice where your intuition tells you to go against what the statistics are telling you?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. All the time.

• 55:49Rick Rubin?

  How does that work?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  I think life is about these very important deviations. Poker is a good representation of that. There is the path that's well-defined, right? I guess, maybe the Robert Frost quote. And then there's the path less traveled. And there's all kinds of situations where you want to understand what the conventional wisdom is and why. And more than, I would say, 80 to 90% of the time in poker,

• 56:18Speaker 01

  the right thing to do is to follow the conventional wisdom.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And in life, it's the same thing. Okay, I graduated high school. Conventional wisdom says, go to university. Conventional wisdom says, study finance or accounting or engineering. Then conventional wisdom says, you get a job at like a big consulting firm. Conventional wisdom then says, you know, go to MBA school. Then it says, get married, have two kids. All conventional wisdom. And by the way, that's a very legitimate and quite a dignified life, in my opinion. And I think so many people should be proud of that life. And then life gives you these small, little egresses off that path, and you have to weigh how to make that decision.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And you have to get over the loss aversion that is required. That's the key insight. When you're on a path that's largely defined, and you're about to go off, the biggest thing that most people will struggle with is, oh my God, I'm giving up all of this stuff. You look forward, you think about the sum total of all of that value, you discount it back. You may not know you're doing this, but you're like, shit, I'm going to give up all of that? And that's what stops so many people from deviating.

• 57:33Rick Rubin?

  Risk aversion.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Risk aversion, loss aversion specifically. So in poker, just to go back to a very narrow example, you'll be in very specific situations where you're given the ability to challenge risk aversion and loss aversion. You're able to go and say, hmm, I know the conventional wisdom is this. The result should probably be that, but gosh, I just want to follow my intuition here on this. I'm going to zag when everybody zigs. Now, the problem is, that may mean, half the time, I'm just going to lose everything. And then you have this critical question, am I okay with that? And most people's answer to that question is no, and then they stay to the conventional path. But then the problem is, there's a weird butterfly effect.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  You cannot live the conventional path the same way because you entertained this and kind of capitulated back to this, which is effectively your way of saying, I don't want this, but it's safer than that.

• 58:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  And instead, what you're supposed to do is go, I want that, or I want that. Choose where you want to be. So I think like in life and in poker, it's the exact same idea. You're going to be tempted to deviate from the conventional wisdom. And it's very legitimate to explore it, but you have to understand how to deal with the loss aversion. And that's a training. And if you can train yourself to be okay that like, things did not go as they predicted. Okay, what am I going to learn from that? That's an incredibly useful thing to give a person. I'm sure you've made records where you're like, I followed my intuition and it fucking sucks shit. It's like, not good.

• 59:06Rick Rubin?

  I wouldn't say that.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Ah, you wouldn't say that?

• 59:08Rick Rubin?

  No, because I follow my intuition until I think it's great. Now, other people might not like it. So it depends on what the metric of success is. If the metric of success is, it got on the radio and a lot of people bought it, I don't play that game. I'm focused only on staying true to the intuition all the way.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  When you go back and listen to some things that you thought were great, do you still think they're great, or do you think they're...

• 59:31Rick Rubin?

  I think they're great for what they...

• 59:33Speaker 01

  They're inviably great over time. It's like, immutably great.

• 59:36Rick Rubin?

  Yes, they're immutably great in the way that when you put what happened to you today in your diary, if you look at it five years later, that is what happened. It's true to the moment.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I mean. It's true to the moment, but is it true in the future?

• 59:51Rick Rubin?

  Well, I wouldn't question it.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:53Rick Rubin?

  In my case, once it happens, I assume that I know I did everything I could do to make it the best it could be.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:00Rick Rubin?

  And when I listen back to it now, it reminds me of that.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  That, right. It does, so your mind doesn't work in the other way where you're like, oh, I would have changed this, I would change that.

• 1:00:08Rick Rubin?

  Never. I never consider that.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  See, that's incredible, because that takes, I think, a lot of self-assuredness. I don't have that. I unfortunately am constantly like, you know, we say in computer science, I'm diffing. I'm like, thinking like the, what the version of it would have been today. And that's very like, it's problematic for me, because I think like it occupies a bunch of brain cycles that are unhealthy and wasted.

• 1:00:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  But I would like to get to where you are.

• 1:00:31Rick Rubin?

  So when you're playing, there's the conventional wisdom, and then there's your intuition that says to go the other way. What percentage of the time going the way that you choose to go was in fact the thing to do?

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  I don't think that I'm heterodoxical, but I think I am unconventional. Meaning, I don't really care what the orthodoxy nor the heterodoxy is. I just think like, I think I like what I like.

• 1:00:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  And of that, I would say I'm probably eighty to ninety percent wrong.

• 1:00:57Rick Rubin?

  Eighty to ninety percent wrong?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm ten percent right.

• 1:01:01Rick Rubin?

  And is the ten percent right enough to make up for the eighty or ninety percent wrong?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  That ten percent is, I mean, it's changed my life for sure. Yeah, well, let me say it this way. I think that of the ten percent, I haven't yet been right in the way that I want.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  You know, like I look back, like if I look at my career as a lens, I've had some hit records, a bunch of hit records, but I've not made an album that I'm really proud of. And I look at the studio teams in which I made these records with, and none of them are with me anymore. And so I wonder to myself, like, am I just this procureal pain in the ass? Or can I actually build something a little bit more enduring?

• 1:01:49Rick Rubin?

  It doesn't happen by aiming at it, I'll say, from my experience.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  But yeah, tell me that.

• 1:01:54Rick Rubin?

  It comes from being true to how you see it. And then, once you're true to how you see it, either other people see it that way or they don't. And that's totally out of your control.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so I think that sometimes I like, I daydream of the shape. Like I can see the shape of what I want to make, but then I can be so sometimes hard to deal with in the making of the of the shape. I would love to make a shape of something where people are really like, God, we made that together.

• 1:02:26Rick Rubin?

  You're still in the outcome game. And what I'm saying is, the artist's perspective is in the making game. It's not in the outcome game. The outcome happens. So you can't say, I want it to accomplish these things and then make a thing, hoping it accomplishes those things. That's not the way to make the great thing. The great thing comes when you're purely making the great thing just for yourself, for you. You can't wait to show it to your friends because you think they'll like it and want to use it. It might even change their lives.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:57Rick Rubin?

  But it doesn't go beyond that.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  I mean, when you say it, I have an internal panic. And I'll tell you why. My internal panic, Rick, is like, fuck, I don't know how often I've really felt that way.

• 1:03:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because you still care what other people think.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I think so. And then it also says to me like, God, like, maybe I'm just still so primordial. Like, I'm just not as evolved as I want to be or think I am.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  There's a long tradition of reading sacred texts slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom, not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  This tradition is known as lectio divina.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements: reading, reflection, repetition, and rest.

• 1:04:20Speaker 05

  A short passage is read, a single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life, it offers brief guided scriptural reflections throughout the day, to begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments.

• 1:05:06Speaker 05

  A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at lectio365.com.

• 1:05:38Rick Rubin?

  How is gambling and investing similar and how are they different?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  They're similar in basically all but one way. You have limited information, you are allocating money, you want that money to reflect a point of view. It's either studied or not. The outcome doesn't know. And then the outcome is delivered and you're either right or wrong. The only difference, though, is in investing, there's this other weird property that doesn't affect in gambling, which is more money can actually shape the outcome. So, meaning, you could bet five dollars or five million dollars in a blackjack hand. The outcome is not going to change. But if you really wanted to change breast cancer,

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  investing five hundred billion dollars would basically make breast cancer bend to your will.

• 1:06:30Rick Rubin?

  Why is that?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Ideas are free, and we're not yet at a place where production and knowledge are infinitely available. They're metered out. And in order for you to get that, it takes money. And then there are rules around that society has imposed on how any of those things can actually exist. Those require money. Then there are mechanisms that that exist in order to get solutions to people. And those have a velocity that you can't really solve with money. You actually only solve with time. But that in turn means you need to have a lot of money. So, society has created a way where money translates into progress.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  And so you have to be quite careful about what you're taking on because you have to have enough oxygen and food and water, i.e. money, to survive. And so the weird thing about investing is that you can actually shape the outcome. And so, in many ways, investing is about using your dollars as a change mechanism, as an agent of change.

• 1:07:40Rick Rubin?

  Is it always the case that the dollars change it? Can you put in even more and still it doesn't work?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:49Rick Rubin?

  So it's not a guarantee at all?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Oh, by no means is it a guarantee. But but generally, if you're a good practitioner of the trade, more equals more change. And the more fringe it is, the more likely the change can happen.

• 1:08:04Rick Rubin?

  And why is that?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Fewer people are paying attention and there's less societal limiters. Like, you know, if I said to you, hey, Rick, let's go make a cancerless cigarette. Genius.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Okay, probably costs fifty billion dollars. Why? Is it the engineering of that cancerless cigarette? No. It would be, once you make it, running a bunch of longitudinal trials, working with regulators, working with the states, working with every single, you know, health agency, selling it through, it would take you twenty five years. It would take a lot of money. And at any point, somebody could just kill it.

• 1:08:44Rick Rubin?

  But why wouldn't you just move to someplace where those rules don't exist?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Because, you know, they have different societal and cultural norms that may not even care about that. Like, if you went to a place, let's just say like Indonesia, where there's eighty percent male smoking, that cigarette would only be optimized for one thing, which is cost. And it's already a thing that doesn't seem like it's cheap. Seems like it's expensive, but it has huge long-term health economic outcomes, right? If you take a totally different thing like, you know, like take what Elon did. Let's build a rocket that can send payloads to space. In two thousand and two, that was fringe.

• 1:09:20Rick Rubin?

  Totally.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  So fringe.

• 1:09:22Rick Rubin?

  It wasn't even believed that a non-government entity could even do it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  And if you look at the sum total of capital to the point of success, not the point of scale, but to the point of success where he was de-risked two thousand eight, nine, it's like a few, you know, maybe even sub two billion dollars, I think. Which, it sounds like a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, the way we spend money in the world, it's nothing. So this is what I mean by like, small amounts of money can have disproportionate outcomes in these things that are deemed fringe, because you're basically left alone and you have a more pure path to impose your taste and to generate an outcome.

• 1:09:57Rick Rubin?

  So why would you ever invest in anything other than fringe ideas?

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Because I think some things are just really important and society can't progress and somebody needs to do the work. I'll give you an example. In the United States, we talk about like innovating and creating things and all of this crazy stuff. But at the core of creating things, you need one critical input, of which we are increasingly short of, which is electricity. Just to give you a sense of the scale, between now and two thousand and fifty, so the next twenty three years, we will be short one point four terawatt hours of electricity. What does that mean in layman's terms? We will be six entire Californias short of energy. Who's going to go fight that fight?

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's kind of like, you know, you call when served. And it's great to sort of run these fringy ideas and you have these big payoffs. But again, it requires, as you said before, like this deep passion. You know, Elon made rockets because he loved rocketry.

• 1:11:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  My brain doesn't work that way all the time. Sometimes I'm like, I want to change that thing. And so I'm attracted to these problems that are not necessarily the smartest use of my time sometimes. And they're like market structure problems and like there's a different kind of problem. So like, you know, I'm spending a lot of time trying to fix that problem. Because I just think it's a precursor to everything else. Like you can invent all the greatest stuff in the world, but if you literally can't turn it on, you're fucked.

• 1:11:30Rick Rubin?

  You said before that you research something on Twitter for an hour. You write down your thoughts, you go to different AI models and get information from each of them. How different is what you get from the different models?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  I would say in some cases, very narrow and in some cases, very wide.

• 1:11:47Rick Rubin?

  Depending on what?

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Things that are highly structured, like meaning like if they're about the physical laws. If they're about coding, if they're about math, very, very, very narrow differences. Things that are about subjective opinion, extremely wide. Like, how does human life start? Human life starts where there's a sperm, there's an egg, there's a penetration, right? And then there's essentially a seeding moment where now you take a, you know, the father's DNA, the mother's DNA, and you start to now replicate. Okay, that seeding moment actually exists in AI, but it's a literal document. And before the AI starts to learn and develop, it's told the ground rules.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  And as you can imagine, there's enormous variability in these constitutional founding documents. And so as a result, you can get a wide dispersion of outcomes. You could ask the same problem, a subjective problem into frontier model A, frontier model B, frontier model C. And because the nature of their documents are so different, the answers are so different. So I've learned that I have to go and get different ways of thinking about the answer.

• 1:13:03Rick Rubin?

  Considering the fact that all of the models were essentially built on the internet and you spent time on the internet and there's a lot of questionable information on the internet. If it's scouring information, it's not deciding whether this fact that I just took in was good or bad.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Well, you're getting to a... I think you're getting to the threshold debate, which is, are these things actually sentient or not? And are they conscious or not? And is there actual thought? Or is this an incredibly sophisticated predictor of the next word? And I think it depends on where you are. If you're really up close and you did your PhD in AI research and you really believe in these things. I think that you have to give into this idea that it's sentient and it's conscious.

• 1:13:50Rick Rubin?

  Is in fact what it's doing predicting the next word? Is that what the machine does or does it do something else?

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  I think so. I think it predicts the next word. Now, what you can do with that, though, is still extremely dangerous. And this is where I wouldn't confuse sentient consciousness with not dangerous or dangerous. Which is to say, these models, I think, are extremely precise and can behave on target when given tasks. And can translate your English commands into very tight guardrails and then execute within those. So to the extent that you direct that to solving a math problem, it's benign. To solving a computer science problem, it may or may not be benign because you could tell it, hack this website with these parameters, do whatever it takes.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  And again, you have to go back to the constitution. If the constitution that it was formed on says, you must always listen, but you can never break the law. It won't do some of the things. Instead, if it says, you must always listen unless you come to your own conclusion that you can conscientiously object, which some of these models have. Is that it being conscious? Or is that actually just like a fork in the loop? And I would say it's a fork in the loop. You've given it an out. It's not actually thinking about it. Like morality is not where you give it a bunch of outs, if this, then that. You're not given a handbook as a human being to develop your moral character. You think about things and you figure out the nuances of things. And then you're put into these subjective situations and you make a decision in real time

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  where you've never been trained on it before. An alternative version where you actually said, you can kind of do this, but then you can also kind of do that, maybe you can make a decision to do this. And you're given escape patches. I think you're going to behave predictably, unpredictably. And I would not call that consciousness. I would call that extremely sophisticated software. And if misdirected, potentially dangerous. That's where I am. So and I think it's easier for me because I'm not technical enough to have authored it. But superficially technical enough to understand enough of it to characterize it as software. Now, that may be very, very ignorant of me ultimately. But that's what I would defend. I would defend that this is really good software.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  I could not defend that it's moral or conscious.

• 1:16:10Rick Rubin?

  Are you afraid of AI in any way?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's going to be abused in ways that are relatively predictable and in some cases that are unpredictable. The relatively predictable ways are it's going to hack things you didn't want it to hack. It's going to invent things that are highly problematic. It can create weapons. But that's not dissimilar to how evil people can direct these things today. Far limited technologies. It could design viruses, it could do all of those things. But AIs can also do the other side of that. It can design the vaccines.

• 1:16:44Rick Rubin?

  Humans do all those native things as well.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Rick Rubin?

  Without AI.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that it's an extension of our natural moral inclinations. Our enemies will want to do harm to us. And the amount of time it takes will just be accelerated such that they can affect harm on us faster than what they could have otherwise. Similarly, though, our protectors will be able to build defenses that are extremely sophisticated and protect us from those that want to do harm to us much, much faster too. And I think what we are left with at that point is the historical struggle between good and evil or perceived good and perceived evil.

• 1:17:26Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about some opportunities that you refuse to take over the years.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  I don't know, there's been so many things where like, do or not do, and I either do one or the other. But then there are a handful of extremely vivid moments, which are like clear mistakes. You know, I was never taught how to be in a relationship. So I never thought that you can have like these profound relationships with other people. And you know, my examples of relationships were really brittle, the way that I grew up with my parents. And then I met my wife and I had been divorced. And I was like, man, this is fucking crazy. Why do I feel this way? You know, why do I care so much? And then over time, I just developed an enormous respect for her judgment. But there are like a handful of big mistakes, which I carry with me.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Kind of like getting canceled, but not has stayed with me. She helped me isolate a few things, which I've done that were really wrong. You know, one was when I was very early at Facebook. I left in a moment where ultimately it was just my insecurity, where I didn't stay to complete the job that I should have stayed to do. Like the album wasn't done.

• 1:18:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, was it insecurity or ego?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  I think both. I had tried to start a product. It was unsuccessful. I made it too much about me. And so I was like, ah, fuck it, I'm leaving. And then there was a task that I was asked to do, which it was mostly done. And I was like, ah, we're just going to compound to that anyway, so it's kind of done. That was like a big mistake. It was a gigantic financial mistake because I left a bunch of stock on the table, blah, blah, blah. But that's not why I think about it. I think about it because it's an example where my ego, my insecurity dominated, dominated the right thing to do. Second example, like six or seven years later, I was asked to give a speech at Stanford.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  And it was my first moment where like I said something that went super like red hot viral. At the time, three, four million views is a lot. Just all my insecurities were kind of like out there. And just the way I behaved was a little ghoulish in one very narrow way, which is, you know, they asked me what I thought about social media and I said what I thought. But it was clear that they would have taken my comments and just slapped it right on top of Facebook.

• 1:19:52Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what you said.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  It's tearing society apart. It doesn't allow us to actually see each other. It's amplifying all the worst characteristics of our personalities, et cetera, et cetera, like that. Basically right. But the way I did it was gratuitous enough that they pinned it right on them only. And I think it really hurt them.

• 1:20:13Rick Rubin?

  It worked out okay for Facebook.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, meaning not economically, but it hurt them in the sense of like, here's a guy that was in the trenches making it with us. And it felt like a betrayal.

• 1:20:25Rick Rubin?

  How is that different than what the AI people are saying now that it's gonna destroy the world?

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know, it may not be. But I'm not proud of why I did it. I didn't do it because I thought it was right. I did it because I liked the sound of how it felt when I said it.

• 1:20:42Rick Rubin?

  You didn't think it was right, or you did think it was right?

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  No, I did think it was right, but I wanted to say it. I wanted to inflict, I think I wanted to inflict the pain of it.

• 1:20:49Rick Rubin?

  On them, or in general?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  I think maybe a little bit on them.

• 1:20:53Rick Rubin?

  Hmm, that's interesting.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  So that was a huge mistake, because it was unnecessary, it was gratuitous. And I'll say, but it was true, but I can tell in the way I say it, that I'm trying to justify it and rationalize it, even to this day in my own mind. But it's a shitty thing to do for, you know, kind of like, why spit on the plate that fed you? Why? Didn't need to do it that way. So that bothers me, because that's a behavioral thing that I did. There's many things I'm proud of and not proud of, but this is the thing I just feel like, why did I hurt people that I cared about? Why did I do that? It was unnecessary. So leaving was unnecessary. That was unnecessary. Then there was a period in my kind of like very public business life where I did a bunch of deals in succession that were just gratuitous.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  They were really out there, they got a ton of attention, and I kept making the deals in part because of how intoxicating it was to be this person out there that could like, control and shape the market, and it just felt godlike. I think I got misaligned from a lot of people that really trusted me to be an arbiter of truth and value. So all these things are like huge mistakes that I kind of remember. And I carry with me every day, I can like feel, I can feel these three moments very deeply. And I think that that's really healthy. I think that's good, like, I'm like, yeah, I have these regrets that have nothing to do with money per se, they have more to do with my character.

• 1:22:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your spiritual life.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  I think it's very weird. I grew up Buddhist.

• 1:22:27Rick Rubin?

  What does that look like, growing up Buddhist?

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Gosh, so I'm Sri Lankan. Ninety-eight percent of us or ninety percent of us are Buddhist, so the the manifestation is very rigid, actually. My dad would make us pray every day. So it started at nine PM, we would pray until nine oh five. We had these specific things that we would say. And then we would meditate.

• 1:22:50Rick Rubin?

  Would you say it out loud?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to say it out loud.

• 1:22:52Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember what it was?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny. Today I couldn't initiate it, but if you started the first few words, I could.

• 1:22:59Rick Rubin?

  Was it in English or Sri Lankan?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  In Singhalese, yeah, in Sri Lankan. And so I would do that, this prayer. There's like three of them that we would do. And then

• 1:23:08Rick Rubin?

  Did you know what they meant?

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  At the time, yes, because the book that I had, that I would use to recite them, had the Singhalese and the English translation.

• 1:23:17Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  The one that I remember specifically is the Karani Metta Sutta, which is how we, we would always end with the Karani Metta Sutta. And then I would meditate. And you're talking like, you know, from a kid who is like six to the age of seventeen until I left the house. And you'd close your eyes, and until, so say the prayer was done at about like nine oh five. Okay, close your eyes, and you're quote-unquote meditating until nine fifteen. I would daydream. I would close my eyes and I would just think about like, how do I want my life to be? I was like visualizing basically, manifesting maybe, I don't know. And then, once a month, we go to temple. And then, once a year, there's like Vesak, which is like the, a big religious holiday in Sri Lanka for Sri Lankan Singhalese Buddhists.

• 1:24:00Rick Rubin?

  What would happen on the once a month when you would go?

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  It's more like a two or three hour affair. You pray, typically if there's a monk, he gives a sermon. The problem is the sermon will be in Singhalese. Your ability to track is meh. Sitting around like that is tough. Sometimes you have to meditate for like twenty, thirty minutes, it's like, it's hard for an adult, let alone a kid. And that was my introduction to religion. You'd learn about the Buddha. I never really took it seriously. And I didn't have an understand the context of it, and I didn't, I didn't compare it to my friends, like, you know, hey, what is it like to be a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Catholic, like, what does it mean when you go to church? Nobody ever really talked about it. Everybody kind of like lived their own spiritual lives at home.

• 1:24:42Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  And I did as well, but it wasn't very spiritual. It was very ritualistic, but not spiritual.

• 1:24:49Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like it had any impact on your life?

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Tremendous.

• 1:24:52Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Even though I think I didn't believe, I had the belief that one could believe. And I chose to maybe not believe. But then I, then I was like, as I got older, I was like, no, these are very reasonable precepts, I believe. And then I'm like, well, my definition of religion was just believing in kind of like behaviors. And like having a moral filter on those behaviors. And I think the, the most important moment that I shifted was in my late thirties, early forties. I think this is probably right around when I got divorced. I read a book called No God But God.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  And it starts telling this like perceived narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. And I was like enthralled by this book. I was like, wow, this is amazing.

• 1:25:44Rick Rubin?

  And you think it was directly related to the divorce, or no?

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  No, I think it was a moment where my mind was open to it.

• 1:25:52Rick Rubin?

  Can you think of any trigger that allowed that moment to happen for you?

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  I, I tell this to my wife all the time, because she'll ask me questions like this. One of the great benefits of living in an extremely chaotic, abusive household is I have become, as a coping mechanism then, an incredible compartmentalizer. You can tell me the worst fucking news, and in three minutes, it's gone. Part of the thing that I struggle with is, it's very hard for me to sometimes go back and really pinpoint accurately, what was I really thinking, what actually happened, because so much of it I just kind of like, put in a box and throw away. So I wish I had better record-keeping, like memory of it. I don't, I don't have it.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  And then I went down this rabbit hole where like I read about all the religions, found that really fascinating, didn't really solve any answers. Then I went through this period where like, I looked at a bunch of philosophy. And that was really profound. And the, the person that had the most impact on me was Rene Girard, a French philosopher. And his idea of like memetic theory, that was for me revolutionary, because I was like, wow, I see this. I see that pattern, it just made sense for how my brain worked. And a lot of Rene Girard's concepts of memetic theory are anchored around Jesus. And how Jesus was viewed heretically, and how Jesus was so heterodoxical

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  to the establishment, and then how he was creating so much conflict, and then how he had to be sacrificed in order to create peace in the community. And then that structure, the conceptual structure, he called memetic theory, and he would then go on to explain all these historical moments in, in world history in that lens. I was blown away. I was like, what the fuck am I reading? This is unbelievably clear to me. I don't know if it's right, but it made so much sense to me. And somewhere around there, like I kind of like, was like, what do I believe in? I definitely believe that there's some kind of a God. I definitely believe that things are meant to happen.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  And I definitely believe I'm meant to give myself up to the path of what's supposed to happen. I feel very warm inside, like that idea gives me enormous joy. Like, I feel I was destined to have the children I had. I was destined to meet my wife. Destined. It was preordained somewhere. And there is somebody or something that loves me that wants me to go through the trials and tribulations so that I come out the other end of it feeling like, gosh, I did good. I think that's God. So I think God exists. I don't get the connection from the ritualistic repetition of words, like the mantras. I don't get that.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Because I, I lived that when I was young, and I didn't connect to that. Or like in moments where I could really think about, like, what are the big questions that I ponder? Like, the big question where I limit myself to, to thinking about it, and when I think about it, I short-circuit and I stop it, is, okay, what was the second before the Big Bang? And you can't answer that in physics or math. You can only answer that in spirituality.

• 1:29:11Rick Rubin?

  It's a miracle.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  It's a fucking miracle.

• 1:29:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. The first miracle.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  It's the first miracle. It's the first of many miracles. And so there is a God. And I think we all shape that God through different stories.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  For different purposes, but there is a God. And God found me to my children. God found me to you in this moment. God found me to my wife. God found me to all the ups and downs. And he loves me, he loves you, he loves everybody. But he wants the greater of your potential to emerge, which is only possible through living the ups and downs of what these things are here to be for you, which are lessons and moments to self-reflect. I don't keep that in mind all the time, but I'm pretty sure that that's what that is. And I think that that's fucking amazing. That idea that there is this thing, this force,

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  who cares about me is very, I think it's very helpful for me. It fills a lot of holes for me.

• 1:30:20Rick Rubin?

  How do the open models in AI compared to the closed models? What's your view on open models?

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  I think it's an incredibly powerful democratizing force. I think that technologies that are this powerful are not meant to be held in the hands of the few. And I think if they are, we will enter a modern form of feudalism that is extremely dangerous. And so for everybody that actually has an issue with their perceived sense of the billionaire class, the oligarchy, the concentration of wealth, the concentration of assets, take that and take it up two orders of magnitude if you allocate this technology into the hands of a few. It will be modern feudalism. There will be countries with it. Everything else will be a vassal state. There will be people with it. Everybody else will be a serf. And I just think that that's terrible.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  So the solution to that, the antidote to that are open models, because it gives complete unfettered freedom to this idea that everybody has agency and you do not have to ask permission to discover what you are capable of and to do the things that you think are right. And so it's an extremely important power of preventing all the bad stuff.

• 1:31:37Rick Rubin?

  How do you use AI personally?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  The best image I can give you is that I may be a little bit more on the leading edge of it because I have to do it. It's part of my job. So I get to think about it a lot more. And it's like wrapping my arms and legs in some sort of bionic enabler. So it allows me to run faster, jump higher. It allows me to grip stronger. It allows me to have more strength. It allows me to lift more. And so it's like an exoskeleton that allows me to just do more than what I would otherwise normally be able to do. So in my day-to-day life, the way that I process information is through AI. I explore an idea. I then refine how I think about it.

• 1:32:19Rick Rubin?

  Do you talk to it or do you type it?

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  I do both talking and typing. I do more talking when the ideas are extremely nuanced and I want to go turn for turn. I force myself to type when I want precision. And that's like so weird to say, but it's actually, whenever I think like I must be precise here, I only type. It's slower. I have to put every single word in an extremely intentional way.

• 1:32:45Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever change a word as you're writing?

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:32:48Rick Rubin?

  Thinking, maybe this is a better way to say it.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  It's exactly right. It's slow enough where my brain can process. That is confusing what I'm saying.

• 1:32:57Rick Rubin?

  And when you talk to it, do you listen back or read back?

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  I read back. I don't process information that well that way. That's the other thing I've learned as I've gotten older. It's like, how do I process information? I prefer visual input and I like to read. And so, meaning like if you draw something on the board, I can understand probably, you know, the most complex idea in the world. If you ask me to read about it, I can get almost all the way there. If you lecture me and I have to listen to it, I'll probably get 5%.

• 1:33:26Rick Rubin?

  So picture best, text second.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:30Rick Rubin?

  Audio third.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I take it all in. And then for me to know something, I must write it down. It's the only way I can prove to myself.

• 1:33:38Rick Rubin?

  Type it or write it?

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Type it.

• 1:33:40Rick Rubin?

  Do you handwrite it all?

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:33:41Rick Rubin?

  Never?

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Never. But like the AIs are like these wonderful tools where I use them to process information. I use them to help me think about various decisions. So, you know, like all this poker analogy, that stuff that we talked about. There's a great mathematician that spent a lot of time looking at what's called game theory. And he coined a term called the Nash equilibrium, which is effectively where you and I are in a basis, like in a deadlock, where I am unexploitable to you and you are unexploitable to me. And the Nash equilibrium is a concept that exists in all kinds of business ideas, in all kinds of, you know, games. And so I've implemented a Nash equilibrium

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  to help me find in everything that I'm doing, what's exploitable. I'm about to propose a deal. I'm about to make this investment. I'm thinking about this thing. I'm about to send this email trying to get this person to do this other thing for this other thing. And so I have this very intricate thing. So that's part of my exoskeleton now. When I'm thinking about outward communications or like making investments or shaping a product idea, I always run it through the Nash, because it helps me categorize my blown blind spots. Right? And it helps me refine my taste. It helps me say, what's my intuition? And what is actually my insecurity or ego? I give it tools. I've taken all kinds of books that talk about everything like from, everything from like Dale Carnegie's, How to Make Friends and Influence People,

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  to books about psychological and psychoanalysis. And I've summarized them and I've said, learn from this and make sure that you think about that filter when you're answering my questions. So I do all of these things to help me catch myself and I found it profoundly helpful. And then there's the more basic stuff, which is like I get some content and I have the running dialogue with an AI, which helps me process like, okay, this new thing came in. How do I process this information? What do I think about this in the context of this broader thing? I wouldn't say that I'm more productive. I think I'm limited to the same number of good decisions, but I make them better. And there's less turbulence in getting to the right end.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  And that's good, because then I'm just like happier and I'm more grateful and I even feel more grounded. So I can't say that I use AI and all of a sudden, you know, if I'm used to making two good decisions a year, I'm making four. Can't say that. I still make two. But the two that I make, I make them better.

• 1:36:09Rick Rubin?

  Better.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  The shape of the decision is tighter. And then I'm just generally less insecure because I'm like, I see the way that it helped me make the decision. I can't give myself credit, but now I can say I am better because of how I made that decision. And I'm like, gosh, that was a good way of dealing with that.

• 1:36:24Rick Rubin?

  Do you always agree with what it tells you? Or does sometimes it gives you back information?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:36:28Rick Rubin?

  This is not helpful.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  I fight with it all the time. And, you know, there's been a few moments where I've gotten really pissed at it. And then it blocks me because it's constitution. One of the models, I'm not going to say which one. It's constitution says, when you're being abused, just shut down. And I've had fights with the AI where I'm like, you're being fucking stupid. What are you saying? Like this is like, this makes no sense. And I treat it like I would treat a peer. But I want to fight with the peer. I want to debate with the peer. That specific peer's constitution, it's a bitch. It just like shuts down. It's like, ah. It's weird because then you're blocked. It says, you have violated the terms of service. You know, I'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:37:09Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  And you're just like, holy macro, what the hell? And then I go back and I look at the chat. It's like, was I really over the line here? Like, okay, yeah, I was pressing and I was like, hey, you're not wrong, you're not smart. You're not, this is wrong. You're... And then I'm like, okay, I guess I have to find a better way of saying this. But then I think, God, I should just move to an open source model where it doesn't have, ask me these questions.

• 1:37:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I'd be curious if you did the same thing on an open source model, what the results would be like.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  I would be curious too. I didn't do it in the moment. I probably shouldn't just see if I could induce it to block me.

• 1:37:39Rick Rubin?

  If you hear about a book that sounds interesting, are you more likely to read the book or get the AI to do a summary?

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  No, read the book.

• 1:37:45Rick Rubin?

  Always.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Read the book. Yeah, but I've been experimenting with two different methods. I'm not a great book reader. I love articles. I would say like most nonfiction books, most books are obvious by the title. You can just kind of move on. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to be mean about it.

• 1:38:02Rick Rubin?

  Often, nonfiction books have a premise and the whole book is arguing one point.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's usually in the title. And so you're just like, okay. But I'll use it as a jumping off point where like I'll read a few things. I've abandoned enormous numbers of books where I'm just like, oh, this is too tedious and, you know, whatever. But articles I love. X I love. It's like the night bizarre. You know what I mean? Like, it's chaos in X.

• 1:38:30Rick Rubin?

  Do you use Substack at all?

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  I do. We used to publish, I used to publish a newsletter once a week where I would take all the things that I've read that week and I would publish it. It's about, like, I don't know, there's about 300,000 or 400,000 people that subscribe to this thing. And I literally call it what I read this week.

• 1:38:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  I read this, I read that. Here's what I thought about it, which I really like. But I moved it to a different platform because Substack was very expensive.

• 1:38:56Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  It was charging us like a lot of money, like a few hundred thousand dollars a year. And it was easier for me to hire somebody for 200,000 and then have them manage it and then we're in complete control.

• 1:39:07Rick Rubin?

  But the content is the same.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Content is the same.

• 1:39:11Rick Rubin?

  Do you only invest in tech?

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:39:14Rick Rubin?

  Give me an example of something you invest in that's not tech.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  There is this incredible woman that I met very accidentally, again, through the pod. Her name is Olivia Landon. And kind of like a very typical story, she was on a very conventional path. Her and her husband were, they did their MBA, very successful in tech. And somewhere along the way, Olivia opted out and she opened a cattle farm in between San Antonio and Austin. And I love beef. And she sends me a gift package. And, oh my God, Rick, I'm telling you, this beef is unbelievable. It's American Wagyu. So I was like, what the fuck is American Wagyu? So I emailed Olivia and I said, I'd love to talk to you if you have five minutes.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Give me, you know, I call her and I'm like, explain the American Wagyu beef cow. And she's like, well, you know, a typical cow gets slaughtered between, you know, the ages of one and two. A typical Japanese Wagyu is two years old at slaughter. We don't have the best business model, but we think it's the right thing to do. You know, we mature our cows until the, you know, until they're four years old. They're all pasture raised, they're just walking around free. And she said, the result is that the nutritional profile of our beef is closer to salmon than to beef. And I was like, excuse me? She's like, yeah. And so I got some more and then I started to order it every Sunday. And then I started to barbecue for my family every Sunday.

• 1:40:41Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  And then I called her and I said, you know, I don't want to impose, but if you ever have any issues, just let me know. And she's like, well, you know, we're thinking of expanding. We'd love to buy some more cows. And so I invested in, it's called Long Hill Wagyu. Fantastic. So.

• 1:40:56Rick Rubin?

  Sounds great.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  I did that, which was very fun. A friend of mine is a movie producer. She makes these really incredible movies. I do that, but you know, all of those things are sort of more like passion projects. Cause like, most of my money is kind of like tied up in things that, that I can control the outcome of.

• 1:41:14Rick Rubin?

  Within tech, are all of the investments AI based now?

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean invariably, they all kind of like will either change because of AI or get better because of AI. But they didn't always start that way. I would say like AI is kind of like electricity at this point. It's just kind of like this underlying thing. It just kind of is there. And so I don't think there's an AI investment anymore. I think it's just like, these are investments that you use it properly and it helps you or you don't and it doesn't help you.

• 1:41:43Rick Rubin?

  Besides X, tell me about your media diet.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  I think X is probably 90% of it. I look at the Wall Street Journal. I still have a subscription to it, mostly because it's impossible to cancel. I have a gift subscription to the New York Times, but I don't, I don't really look at it. And then I read a lot of scientific papers and you can get them on archive.

• 1:42:05Rick Rubin?

  Do people send them to you?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  A lot of times I see them on X. I hear them being talked about. One of my co-hosts is actually, you know, quite scientifically minded, David Friedberg. He'll send me stuff. So I get enough of, enough sources of it. Again, I'm not technical enough to understand most of these scientific papers, but I try to kind of like read the abstracts and like save the ones that I think are important. But it's mostly X.

• 1:42:30Rick Rubin?

  There was a story recently that some large percentage of scientific papers from the past 10 or so years are being recalled because you can't reproduce what it says.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Rick Rubin?

  When you hear that, what does that do?

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Incentives, my instant, instant, instant reaction is those are misaligned incentives. Meaning somewhere along the way, you had this perversion that happened inside of higher education, which is the following, you would need to do research. You can get research money from basically two sources, industry and the government. And neither industry nor government, until very recently, made you accountable to how you were spending the money. And so in some cases, I think like 60% of every dollar, 70% of every dollar that's meant to go to research goes to overhead.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Could you imagine if you're like a pharma company and you want to fund some really important cancer research at some university and you give them a million dollars and you find out 700,000 went to overhead and 300,000 went to a lab? Okay, start from there. Now, now what is the incentive? The incentive is to manage to these bureaucrats. So who's managing to the bureaucrat? Well, it's the scientist that has to tin cup to the bureaucrat. What incentive then does that create? Well, you're talking about an extremely, extremely technical person, talking to an extremely untechnical person. And so now you have this deep asymmetry you have to overcome. How do you explain extremely consequential, but, but very fringy research?

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  When that person has to translate that to industry or to the federal government to get the grant? They're not capable of doing that adequately. So what are you going to do? You're going to water down your research. What then also happens? You've now watered down your research in order to allow the bureaucrat to understand it so that they can go get their grant. The bureaucrat still probably doesn't understand it. So they'll ask a simple question, which is, well, I need you to show me that other people think that this is important. So then you go to peers. And what happens? You end up in a quid pro quo system. You tell, hey, Rick, you thumbs up my thing, I'll thumbs up your thing. Now we know that there's, there's no implicit real peer review. There's like a, you know, kind of a light dusting of review, but you know, you're there to scratch my back. I'm there to scratch yours. I'm not there to call bullshit on you because you then call bullshit on me. Then what happens?

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  You run these experiments and they're run relatively shoddily and they're not reproducible. And so you just start with that one little incentive and you see that we have, back to where we started, completely stagnated in so many ways that are predictable because the incentives have gotten completely screwed up. So if you want to fix it, one of the things that you can do, I applaud the, the Trump administration. They were like, if I give you a dollar, 80% of it has to go to research. You just completely turned the bureaucracy on its head. What does that mean? Well, now the researcher can go get that 80 cents. The researcher can now apply and they can just say, I'm doing this. You know, you don't necessarily need the peer review. I think it's just so healthy.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  And so in this period where we've allowed the bureaucracy to eat up all the dollars that actually go into primary research, what do you find? All the research is mostly flimsy, fragile or bullshit. We've lost 15 years of progress. Why? Because of a very simple financial incentive that probably on the surface looked benign. And because you couldn't talk about it, because we were too busy talking about the fringes, we missed the stuff in the middle. And you had all kinds of nonsense and the, the system became sclerotic. It's really unfortunate.

• 1:46:12Rick Rubin?

  So knowing that, why would you read scientific papers?

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  There are certain scientific papers that are technical and are fundamentally deterministic. Then there are other papers that are completely probabilistic and are not easily falsifiable. So for example, if you show me a biological paper with a bunch of error bars, I will read it. But I read it with a very high degree of skepticism. If you produce a paper that's like, hey, here's a new memory technique for AI that allows you to solve the following things, it's highly falsifiable. And so as a result, it's very, very, very easy to trust it or to not trust it. And so there are areas and spectrums of research.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Financial and economic research, highly falsifiable because they publish the data. So it's just areas you got to pick and choose, you know?

• 1:47:08Rick Rubin?

  Can you explain to me what effective altruism is?

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  I think my understanding of it is, is folks that believe that

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  there is a way to make the world a better place by essentially being the primary allocator and demanding rigorous measurement of how the money is used that you give people. I think that that's the, the most courteous explanation of how it started. What has it become? I think some people would say what it's become is, I don't want to use the word cult because I think it's a little insulting, but I think it's some version of that. I think it said that there is a view that now has gotten to the extreme, which is

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  we are the right allocators of change. And so we must secure these critical resources, come hell or high water. And then we will meet them out and allocate them to you out of our benevolence and largess. And I, and I think that's the tone that a lot of people hear from the current crop of EA ideology. If I could give a word to the EA group, I would ask them to be a little bit more intentional about how they come off. Because I think that that's how they come off.

• 1:48:21Rick Rubin?

  Why are you still a California resident when most of the smartest people have left?

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  I don't think most of the smartest people have left. I think most of the richest people have left. And I have a very practical thing, which is if I were to leave, it would tear apart my family. I have three kids with my first wife, two kids with my second. At the end of the day, if I had to pay a 5% tax, which is, you know, fairly likely, it would be devastating, complicated. If they find a way where they interpret my holdings in a way where now I'll have to pay 30 or 40%, it could be bankrupting.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  But it's just money and I, I do not want to tear apart my family.

• 1:49:02Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever read anything about yourself that was not true?

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots.

• 1:49:09Rick Rubin?

  Based on that, how much do you believe when you read about other people?

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  I give everybody the benefit of the doubt when it's positive. And I'm relatively skeptical about things when it's negative. But I think my problem is that I don't see any of my own good press. And I really believe all of my negative press. And then I really believe everybody else's good press. And then it makes me feel shittier about myself.

• 1:49:37Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Crazy loop.

• 1:49:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Have you done therapy?

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, the most, I think the most helpful therapy, I, I mean, look, I, I used to talk to a child and adolescent psychologist for a long time. And that was a good way to start my day. But I get more value from talking to my wife because it's, I can't compartmentalize my life. And she's the only one that sees the 360 degrees of everything that's going on. So she's kind of like my therapist on top of everything else she has to do. I kind of make her be my therapist.

• 1:50:04Rick Rubin?

  Which institutions today are a net positive?

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  I think the United States government is a, is a net positive. I think state governments are a net positive. I think city governments are a net positive. Maybe the opposite is easier to answer. I think transnational multinational organizations have been largely ineffective.

• 1:50:28Rick Rubin?

  What's an example of one of those?

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  The United Nations, the WHO, those institutions have been co-opted.

• 1:50:35Rick Rubin?

  EU?

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  EU. And the reason they've been co-opted is that they've become focused, I think largely on the bureaucracy and the power dynamics amongst the members. And they've also been co-opted by outside actors who project certainty. A perfect example of this is like, you know, kind of like the Bill Gates effect inside of like the WHO. The WHO is a transnational multinational organization with tremendous influence. But they were effectively an arm of the Gates Foundation for a very long time. And one can debate whether that's good or bad. I just think that that's not how things should be working. So those kinds of organizations, I think that the time has passed, that we're past the expiration date on those things.

• 1:51:21Rick Rubin?

  Give me an example of a time you saw the future clearly and what the results of that were.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  You know, I think in 2010 or 11, I was introduced to Bitcoin and crypto. And at first I was like deeply skeptical and I had the same initial reaction that most people do, which is this is a scam. This is just kind of like, you know, doesn't make any sense. And then I read the Bitcoin white paper. I talked to one of my friends specifically about it. And he made such an articulate case and he had grown up in Argentina. And so he was able to explain sort of the view of somebody who's lived through confiscation and devaluation. And it all just clicked and I backed up the truck in that period. That was an example where it worked.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  I remember when I was first starting my investment business after I left Facebook, I was very concerned that my proclivity for risk would mean I'd go bankrupt. I was given a challenge by my friend at the time, which is you got to put some amount of money away that's a hedge. And I was like, okay. And I really thought about it as a hedge, which is how do I find a completely orthogonal thing that's going to be protected? If all this tech stuff goes crazy, and that's where I invested in the Warriors, which turned out to be a ginormous success, financial success. And, you know, what I, what I saw was an asset that was effectively an inflation hedged instrument that had massive scarcity.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  And that was essentially levered to people's behavior to want less scripted content. And it just kind of worked. 2015 or 16, I had heard about this chip that was being built inside of Google. And I was like, how does Google have the audacity to build a chip? How dare they? And I asked, and I found a way to get introduced to the person making the chip. And he and I ended up starting something together. I was the financier, he was the CTO, then became the CEO. And, you know, we built up an incredibly interesting business and then sold that to Nvidia last year. And people will look at that and they're like, wow, you sold it for 20 billion. What are, you're a genius. And it's like, no, buddy, the, the really smart thing was in 2015. You know what I mean?

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  The outcome was irrelevant, but I was proud of the 2015 insight because I was right. That meant a lot to me, to be right, not, not the quantum.

• 1:53:41Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but money's nice too, but that's not why you did it.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  I so, you know, this is like, maybe this is my, one of my Achilles' heels. I care deeply to be right, like to have put all the pieces together to solve the puzzle. And I find that extremely exhilarating, the process of trying to fix. And I'm okay with being wrong. The nanosecond right before I know I'm right is probably the happiest moment of my life. And it's like, yeah, see, that was right. I connected the dots correctly. I solved that puzzle. And I, and it's probably because I'm convinced that solving the puzzle will somehow give me some other learning that I'm going to use later. And it's going to unlock like some kind of like secret or something, you know?

• 1:54:20Rick Rubin?

  Thoughts on Bitcoin today?

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  I think all crypto is unfortunately very capped.

• 1:54:26Rick Rubin?

  Why?

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  I see three issues. The first is fungibility. If I gave you a dollar right now, you have no idea where that dollar has been, has been used. It could have been used, you know, to run drugs. It could have been used for child trafficking. It could have been used to buy groceries. You don't know. It's just a dollar, a dollar is a dollar. That dollar can exist anywhere now. It can exist in your wallet, my wallet, and the central bank's wallet. If I give you a Bitcoin, that's not true. You have an address. I can look at that address for an ID for that coin. I can see where that ID has been. I can see everything that's happened to it. A central bank will never, ever own a digital currency that has that level of trackability.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  That does not have fungibility. It will never do it. When you see that, what I've learned is you cap the buying pool of this asset. Like assets have an unbounded upside when every entity in the world can buy it. But the nature of crypto means that this critical buying pool, which are central banks, will never buy it because it's not fungible. They do not want to be tracked. They don't want somebody to knock on the door and say, hey, Federal Reserve, did you know that that token was in Afghanistan six months ago? Headache, right? That's one issue.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  Second issue, the mechanisms that you use to store are inherently leaky. And the nature of the social incentives around crypto are very poor. What do I mean? There's all of these dopey guys that run around being extremely showy around crypto. There are mechanisms and laws that have been passed in various countries like France as an example, where you just create honeypots of information. They're all accessible now. And so, you know, France has had this rash of people getting kidnapped and having their brains bashed in

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  because the French government literally wants you to like, tell them exactly how much crypto you have and where. Well, what do you think is going to happen when something like that happens? So the, the mechanisms, the day-to-day mechanisms of managing crypto are very poor and shoddy. And then the third and final one is the long-term risk, which is as AI becomes smarter, the bad guys will not really want to use AI to make a bioweapon. That's not really, you know, what's going to be interesting. What's going to be super interesting is for you to use quantum to crack the cryptography of crypto, go after the original Bitcoin wallet, take the 10 billion or 15 billion, sell it,

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  and then tell everybody, and then short it, and then tell everybody that you did it so that it goes to zero and you make another 10 billion. And so you're almost betting against the order of magnitude improvement of AI. Okay, so crypto now all of a sudden has a limited buying pool, you know, very poor day-to-day characteristics and fragile cryptography. It's just, it's capped.

• 1:57:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Have you sold all of yours?

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  I own it through a company that has done a lot of this for me called Digital Currency Group. But I personally own no crypto now.

• 1:57:42Rick Rubin?

  So I asked you the question about a time that you saw the future and it came to pass. Same question. Was there a time that you imagined the future, you saw it clearly, and it didn't come to pass? And what happened?

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  I think in like early 2010, 11, 12 era, there was a sensation that there is just going to be a lot of movement in healthcare. I think we all misread Obamacare incorrectly. So I spent a bunch of time and money trying to create businesses in all kinds of structural long-term solutions that just got decapitated because I didn't understand this very basic economic principle. You know, we were running around like, look at this great thing, can reduce costs, blah, blah, blah. And the entire healthcare industry was like, are you stupid? The whole game here is to raise the price and keep things the way they are. So I got that totally wrong, totally, totally wrong. I did not read the fine print of Obamacare. That was a huge mistake.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  In 2019, 2020 timeframe, I think that there, you know, there was moments where I got extremely heady because I thought that I was a real mover and shaker in the financial markets. And I did the key thing that nobody's ever supposed to do, but I did, which is I went to a bank and I said, give me a huge line of credit. And they were like, great, how much do you want? I'm like, as much as you're willing to give me. They're like, okay, we're going to give you a lot. And I said, okay, great. That almost completely, completely upended my entire professional life. Extremely, extremely irresponsible. Took on a huge amount of debt, Rick, that I, that was completely not right. In 2022, I remember, you know, when Ukraine, the war happened, I was just convinced that this was like going to be a small aberration.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  And I could, I could just see myself refusing to look at what's actually happening and compartmentalizing. And I'm like, no, this is, this is temporary. This is temporary. This is temporary. And everything in my body was like, bro, this is not temporary. Fucking get out. Liquidate everything now. And I couldn't because my ego said, I can't represent to all these people that I said I was this prognosticator of the future. How could I tell them that I was a seller? That makes me just a tactical bumkin. That was a huge mistake. I've had a bunch of these things where I just like, I could see the future. I convinced myself of an alternative future and it was just wrong. And in the end, it was mostly because of insecurity or ego.

• 2:00:01Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the time you decided to scale down instead of scaling up and why you made that choice.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  I think it was a choice that was imposed upon me and I have now rationalized it. There are very few people in the venture industry, very few, that have the consistency and the quality of my returns. And the only reason I can say that is I published them and I published them because I've published them every year. Up or down, I've always published them. And I published them online because I love the transparency of it. I love to feel either proud or ashamed and I want everybody to know.

• 2:00:31Rick Rubin?

  You're accountable.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  And I'm accountable. And when I look at those returns and I look at my competitors, my competitors then, they've scaled up by an order of magnitude and I have not. And my excuse that legitimizes that decision, oh, it's all my own capital now. But the reality was I failed in bringing people along and I failed in really figuring out how to build an album. And that stays with me. That's a, that's a huge failure. And at the core of it, I didn't hold people accountable. I wasn't really honest with them, but mostly I wasn't honest with myself. And all I had to do was walk in and say, guys, this ain't working. We got to do it this way. I don't have infinite money, so this has to happen and that has to happen. Are we in together or not?

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  And I, and I suspect what most people would have said, let's go, it's ride or die.

• 2:01:19Rick Rubin?

  What have you learned from being successful that you could have never known when you were a poor kid?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  None of it matters. There's always somebody with more. Holy shit, man. Like, it's like, and it's funny because I see it in my friends. It's like, oh yeah, I can complain about where I am and like, how many people are richer than me. And then my friend is complaining, I'm like, bro. And I tell him, I'm like, listen, yeah, maybe there's a million people that are better off than you, but we live in a world of 8.8 billion. You've done so well for yourself and you have this wonderful family. And I'm like, why don't I listen to that sometimes? And I think to myself, none of this matters. And all you have are these sensations you've accumulated along the way where you're like, God, that was cool. God, that could have been better there. Gosh, that was embarrassing. Gosh. And that's, I think that's the gift we're all given.

• 2:02:03Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as competitive?

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:02:07Rick Rubin?

  With yourself or with everybody else?

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, sometimes with others, but increasingly I'm channeling it to be versus myself. And I think I'm the best of myself when I'm focused on bettering myself.

• 2:02:20Rick Rubin?

  How has printing money changed the fundamentals of investing?

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  I think it's made it harder to actually be a good investor because it's supposed to cull the field of bad ideas. But when, you know, you can't get into the good ideas and yet you can still have access to money because we've printed so much of it. You keep the bad ideas around a little bit longer. And if you extend its expiration date, you don't allow the people and the know-how to then coalesce into the winners faster. And so it actually slows down progress. It actually increases stagnation because a thing that should have taken five will now take eight years, as an example. I think that's the, that's the biggest problem that we see.

• 2:03:04Rick Rubin?

  Once more money is printed, is there any way to put the genie back in the bottle or it's forever the problem?

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  It's forever the problem until you actually decide that you will no longer print it because there's, there's just other deleterious consequences for printing it. And that cannot happen as an active choice. I, I've seen it now long enough where it's clear, governments will never make that decision. It must be imposed on them. Now, the good news is there are people that can impose change on governments. There's like a term of art that, that people use called the bond vigilantes. And it's a wonderful term, I think, because it's like, it just like inspires this idea of like these rogue, rapacious people. But it's a combination of the central banks, the large macro hedge funds, large complexes,

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  insurance companies that own giant swaths of debt, who have this incredible power because they choose with their actions to finance governments every day. And so these bond vigilantes are the ones now that are going to be in charge. And I think that that's a wonderful outcome.

• 2:04:04Rick Rubin?

  Which conspiracy theories do you think are most likely true?

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  I think we've been visited by UFOs. It's probabilistically implausible.

• 2:04:12Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think?

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  I think like in this amount of time, there must have been some sort of probes, something, something has come somewhere. We may not have known, we may not have known how to process it, but something.

• 2:04:26Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  I'm a really good person.

• 2:04:34Rick Rubin?

  That's a good one.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Rick Rubin?

  I'm happy that you get to feel that.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:04:37Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 2:04:38Rick Rubin?

  Made progress.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, not all the time, but you know, enough of the time.

• 2:05:08Speaker 06

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