The Skill a Child Learns Under a Tree Is How to Calibrate Violence

A boy of ten or eleven is sent downstairs to snap a branch off the tree outside the apartment. What lands on him next will be that branch. Under the tree he has to run a calculation: how thick is this one, how much will it flex before it breaks, and where is his father's anger on the scale right now. Bring back something too thin and he is sent out again. Bring back something too thick and the consequences are worse. There is also a belt whose buckle sticks out; if that face hits skin, it really hurts, so he has to remember which side is turned in.

That is the first story Chamath Palihapitiya tells Lex Fridman. He is founder and CEO of Social Capital, an early senior executive at Facebook, and one of four hosts of the All-In Podcast. He talks about the beatings the way someone might recap a closed project. Asked for the hardest moments of a childhood on welfare in a dysfunctional home, he declines the question as posed. In a house defined by physical and psychological abuse, he says, you are hypervigilant all the time. The state is continuous. Against that background, the rare minutes of safety get carved in much deeper.

He offers one of hundreds of small examples. You walk up to the door, you push it open, and the only job in your head is getting back out. "You walk into this house and you're just basically trying to get to the point where you leave the house." Once that system is installed, it is hard to uninstall. The skill a child masters in that moment is not endurance. It is how to calibrate the intensity of violence so the next few minutes are survivable.

In fifth or sixth grade he volunteered in his school's kindergarten, cleaning up after the little kids. At the end of the year the teacher took him and two others to Dairy Queen. He had never been to a restaurant; the family had no budget for it. Hamburger, fries, a Coke, a Blizzard. Sitting there, he thought: what is this? "I felt so special," he says, and the second half of the sentence is the point. Most people treat a Sunday fast-food run as ordinary. For him it was the first time the world had handed him something it hands other children without thinking.

The second frame is more specific. There was no car. He shopped with his mother, learned coupons, and hunted the specials. Near where they lived, the grocery chain Loblaws marked a cheesecake down from $7.99 to $4.99 at the end of every year. His parents bought it once a year, maybe six or seven times in total. He and his two sisters sat in front of the New Year's Eve broadcast and cut the cake into five pieces. It felt like having everything. Happiness, in that arithmetic, has little to do with the sticker price and everything to do with how far the thing sits from daily life.

Both frames were built by other people's kindness: a kindergarten teacher, and parents who, in extreme scarcity, still remembered to buy the cake. His summary of those years is a hypervigilant loop, interrupted by a few visceral moments of compassion. Lex asks whether the loop is still with him. Put yourself in the mind of a young child, Chamath says, and the core lesson is that you are worthless. No child in the world deserves that, so if it happens to you, the only available explanation is that you must not be worth treating well. Once that verdict is written, adult behavior is mostly a set of patches.

Letting go of blame, he says, took a long time. For the first thirty-five years he compartmentalized, avoided the memories, and went looking for external validation. Get into a great college. Get a good job. Make a lot of money. Demonstrate, with the car and the clothes, that you deserve to be cared about, and try to fill a very deep hole. The hole did not fill. Then, in the span of six months, he lost his best friend and his father. The dam broke, because compartmentalization only works while the person who reminds you why you built the walls is still around. When the reminder vanished, the mechanism failed, and he was forced into a stretch of disharmony.

What he did next was unsentimental. He steelmanned his father's life: walked through everything from the other side until he could find a foothold of compassion. Then he turned the same process on his mother and decided she was not purely a victim. She had been of sound mind and body, and she had been in the room. "I never justified what they did but I've been able to forgive what they did." The reason he offers is that they did the one thing that mattered. They emigrated, gave up everything, stayed in Canada, and clawed together enough money that he and his sisters got a shot.

By his mid-thirties he was, by any ordinary measure, successful. His father did not care. Titles, money, press clippings: none of it registered. What the older man cared about was character, how Chamath treated his family, and whether he was ready to lead the family when this man was gone. That bothered him. He thought he had reached a finish line that came with a medal. He tells Lex, quietly, that his father never said "I love you." He does not know if that is normal; it was his normal. He kept waiting for a gold star that never appeared. Later he decided his father had been apologizing in his own way, holding his hand with the fingers interlocked. The relationship was repaired, though the repair was posthumous.

Does money buy happiness? It does not, he says, but it buys a layer of comfort that lets you turn the volume up on the question. Imagine a hundred things on a table, with a sign that says find happiness here. The world cords those experiences off behind a velvet rope, so that higher prices look like more happiness. The person in an apartment admires the person with a house; the house admires the bigger house; that person admires the private island. Drivers admire fliers, who admire business class, who admire first, who admire the private jet. Most people reach items five or six and assume that seven through a hundred is where happiness actually lives. "I've tried a hundred and back and then I've tried to 400," he says. Happiness is not there.

He cites a study, and flags that he is not sure it is true, putting the peak correlation between money and happiness around $50 million. Past that, you can have a home, creature comforts, and a family that is taken care of, and you are left to ponder what you actually want. "More and better is not the solution." You are on a precise journey unique to yourself. "You are playing a game of which only you are the player. Everybody else is an interloper," and designing the gameplay is your job. He still reverts, he admits, to running around asking other people what would make them like him more. That path is a dead end. It has never worked.

The worst thing money does, in his account, is amplify a 360-degree view of your personality. Society hints that more money makes you a better person, factually more worthwhile than people with less. That is also a lie, but the attention makes it easy to become a caricature of yourself. He then flips the claim. In Silicon Valley, when someone gets a lot of money, they tend to become exactly who they were meant to be: kinder, more curious, more of a jerk, cheaper. Society has handed them a get-out-of-jail-free card. Masks remain, but the expectations drop, and you see someone's innate personality. That is useful. It lets you sort, quickly, who is additive to your game and who is a detractor.

Lex asks whether money puts him out of touch, as a human being and as an analyst of civilization. Chamath says it can, because money is an abstraction that lets you stop caring. He then reaches for René Girard's mimetic theory: we compete for scarce things we have been told are worthwhile — Twitter followers, money, acclaim, notoriety — and the only exit Girard offers from that loop is a scapegoat. Right now, he thinks, mere success is enough to make someone the scapegoat that is supposed to release the world's tension. He finds the move misguided. If you become a caricature and feed yourself into that structure, you have not advanced anything.

His nickname is the Dictator, and it comes from poker. Their home game is chaos: big egos, people always watching from the rail. Somebody has to establish hygiene and rules. He cares about the integrity of the game, and somebody has to be willing to say enough. People told him to stop dictating, and the name stuck. Asked who the greatest player of all time is, he does not hesitate: Phil Hellmuth. Heads-up is the spot where computers give you the largest edge, because it is the most GTO-solvable. Add a third player and the value of those recommendations falls off a cliff. Hellmuth, Chamath says, has beaten nearly all of a run of heads-up matches against top-twenty regulars who train like AIs. That means he is playing orthogonally to game-theory optimal, overlaying human judgment: in this spot I should do X, so I will do Y. Magnus Carlsen does a version of the same thing in chess, taking weird lines until, by move six, there is no GTO reply left. Then Chamath names someone he thinks is still stronger. Phil Ivey, he says, is the most well-rounded, cold-blooded, bloodthirsty animal in the game. Ivey sees into your soul until you want him to stop looking. They have played. "He crushes the games."

What does being crushed feel like? Chamath treats poker as a miniature of other systems: running a company, investing. Success is positive expected value. You will play some hands perfectly and still make mistakes; so will he. "Your mistakes minus my mistakes is the edge." If he makes fewer than you, he wins money. Translate that into a company: you have a pool of human capital, and you will mis-fit the product, misprice it, or staff it too heavily. Your customers face alternatives that are also erring. Their mistakes minus yours is the expected value of Google, Facebook, Apple. Translate it into investing: every time you buy, someone is selling. Someone sold you Google at forty dollars a share and you held it. Their huge mistake minus your small ones is the money you made.

What can you do about other people's mistakes? Almost nothing. That is somebody else's game. You can try to influence them, even theoretically sabotage them, but those are edges. Life success, he says, boils down to how you control your own mistakes, and the way you control them is by making a lot of them. You have to take risks. You want a deeply connected relationship: you do not get there by staying home. You go out, you are authentic, you give yourself a chance to get hurt. If you get hurt, that is their mistake. If you are inauthentic, that is yours. Society tells you not to make mistakes because it will judge you. Successful people realize it is the cycle time of mistakes that gets you there. You observe them, figure out whether the source is psychological or cognitive, and you fix it.

Lex presses: when you say mistake, are you always comparing against some platonic GTO path? Chamath admits "mistake" is a bad proxy. He uses it because it is the word society uses, the word that resonates. The real name is learning. Lex offers the analogy of a neural network's loss function. The side effect of the word "mistake" is that it makes people conservative. Flip the language toward maximizing successes and people take more risk. What is corrosive, Chamath adds, is that society rewards traditional choices and often never even puts people in a position to fail. Elite schools are the example. There is no counterfactual in which the same Lex goes to MIT and to Ohio State. Without that control, the system cannot seek truth. It can only tell you that if you do not get in, your life is over.

He had almost no friends in high school, only a few acquaintances. Hypervigilance came with shame. He did not want to bring anyone into that house, and he could not imagine being accepted. The unexpected dividend was that nobody around him defined what to expect, so he escaped into his own head to set targets. He grew up in Ottawa during the telecom boom — Nortel, Newbridge Networks, Mitel, Bell Northern Research — and read Forbes and Fortune, looking at the rich-people lists and telling himself he would be like them. Maybe those were not the people he actually wanted to become. They were a lifeline that kept his mind relatively whole by giving ambition a direction. If he had had a close friend in a functioning middle-class home, he probably would have aspired to that. He never saw it, so he never wanted it.

In their best year his parents made $32,000 Canadian between them, for a family of five. Most years it was the low twenties. He had been working since he was fourteen. The worst job, which was also the best, was Burger King on the closing shift, 6 p.m. to about 2 a.m. Ottawa sits on the Quebec border. Ontario's drinking age was 19, Quebec's 18, and that one year made all the difference. Kids he knew from school would get drunk across the line, come back, vomit, and wreck the place. After closing he cleaned all of it. It taught him he did not want that job. It did not push him toward middle-class security, because he had no working example of that life. His desires were framed by two local rich men he had never met, and by magazine profiles of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

At Facebook, during the years the company was defining Web 2.0 as it went, he and Mark Zuckerberg filed patents for things that now sound obvious, including cookies and cross-site JavaScript. He coined "data scientist" because a particle-physics PhD from Google would not take a title that said data analyst. People You May Know, Facebook's first real scaled machine-learning product, harvested address books, guessed at missing ties, and densified the graph with simple joins. Naming was Zuckerberg's: a feed of news would be called News Feed, not a pharmaceutical-sounding invention. After things work, Chamath says, citing Jeff Bezos, people write a narrative fallacy because it feeds the ego. The honest version is that they were good probabilistic thinkers trying to make mistakes as fast as possible. "Move fast and break things," in societal language, meant make mistakes quickly. He ran a weekly meeting whose only goal was to see a thousand experiments, from the dumbest to the most impactful. People were celebrated for trying. Twelve experiments, twelve failures: you're the best.

Lex asks him to steelman both sides of "move fast and break things," a phrase that has since been captured as shorthand for a toxic Valley. The pro case, Chamath says, is that the space of things we do not know is growing faster than the space of things we do, so the failure mode has to be treated as the nominal state. Velocity of knowledge acquisition wins, and it does not imply carelessness if you aggressively pick up the lessons. The con case is that once a system is big enough, open-ended experiments have societal impacts that are not clear up front. If Lipitor worked for everyone except South Asians, ten thousand experiments might kill millions. Boeing does not reshape a wing for two percent efficiency the way a startup ships a feature. When an industry becomes critical, you slow down. Facebook and Twitter, Lex worries, scaled on one piece of low-hanging fruit before exploring the rest of the space.

If Chamath ran Facebook for a day, the big opportunity would not be the metaverse. It would be getting as close as anyone could to AGI. Three and a half billion monthly users, cognitive plus emotional signal, and the best shot at a multimodal model that intuits how a system should react to stimuli. How would that make money? Over time you become the reasoning layer under Spotify, television, even the car that knows where you should eat, and you license it. The companies that last, he says, quietly move down the stack. You never move up the stack to survive. Apple went from software toward bare metal. Google organized information into a substrate. If you are lucky enough to be an app in front of people, start digging. By disappearing you become much bigger, and much harder to usurp.

Two tectonic shifts, in his view, make this possible over the next ten or fifteen years: the marginal cost of energy going to zero, and the marginal cost of compute going to zero. Solar plus a battery wall is already the cheapest it has ever been; the gap between that cost and the bill is regulatory capture by roughly 1,700 U.S. utilities sitting on a brittle grid. Upgrading power lines over the next decade is a two-trillion-dollar job. Meanwhile a hundred million homeowners can become little power plants, in all weather, and sell surplus back to the data centers. Crossing the chasm, in Clayton Christensen's language, happens either by crashing the price or by making the product indispensable. Battery EVs and rooftop solar are the former, now that subsidies have made the math a money-making proposition. Amazon or Home Depot, he thinks, will want the relationship with those hundred million homes. If energy no longer has to be imported, a large class of resource wars loses its rationale.

On compute, he is unimpressed by the claim that two- and three-nanometer transistors mean Moore's Law is over. Watch teraflops, he says, especially GPUs and ASICs. A billion dollars five years from now buys racks that can train models today's billion cannot. That is why, if he ran Twitter or Facebook, he would put them on AWS. In the 2020s and 2030s, everybody should be in the public clouds, because the guts — databases after Snowflake, analytics with an AI layer — now iterate with more than a hundred billion dollars of market cap behind them. Rolling your own data centers puts the organization under pressure to match a whole industry. Tesla is the exception that proves the rule: like the iPhone, the best car has to be controlled down to the metal. A systems integrator will not win the next twenty years.

He would not build a social network at all. The first decade built platforms that captured trillions of dollars and billions of users for Apple and Google. The next wave — Facebook, Tencent, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat — atomized those platforms and captured another round of the same. The next atomic unit, hiding in plain sight, is the creator. Lex Fridman and MrBeast, he says, will approach a billion people in five years; they have not yet captured trillions, and maybe they do not want to. Creators already run their own curated feeds and communities. That is where the puck is going. If AGI becomes the reasoning layer, creators can still pay a tax for a smarter producer. First, though, something broken inside the networks has to be solved, and he does not think it is technical. Brigading happens. The real problem is psychological. People have lost belief in themselves, and that shows up as a virulent form of rejection in the comments.

You can post that you saved a dog from a burning building, he says, and still draw hate. Steelman the commenter: I played by the rules, I worked hard, I am not being rewarded in a system of value you recognize, and that is making me mad. His father used to drink and send him out for a branch. Today you go to Twitter and vent. A network that wants density has to design for that corner case, because toxicity ruins the product even if the pixels are perfect. He sees two levies. Real-world identity puts a cost on being caustic, but it also chills speech through fear of retribution. An economic overlay — the more you want to say, the more you spend — keeps more free speech while making it not costless. He leans toward the latter. Lex offers a third option: a personalized algorithm that maximizes long-term growth, with just enough criticism and just enough dopamine. Chamath says that is an empathetic, well-rounded AGI friend. Cognition, he thinks, is already a solved problem for computers. The hard overlay is empathy, the ability to forgive without excusing.

Should Trump have been removed from Twitter? No. Chamath steelmans both sides. The case for removal: a man who promotes confrontation, lacks decorum, flirts with law-breaking, and, if cornered, could confuse believers into acts that wound the democracy for years. The case against: a duly elected voice using extremity to show how insular institutions protect their own class, and silencing him confirms that the First Amendment was a rigged game. Lex imagines Twitter looking at a metric of how miserable the product felt and blaming Trump. Chamath's objection is measurement. The platform overweighted active commenters, maybe one or two people out of a hundred consumers, and treated that as overall happiness. There was no scientific method behind deplatforming, and the move exposed deep institutional bias. In general he wants presidents and controversial voices kept on the platform.

On Kanye West's antisemitic outbursts, Chamath again takes both sides. One: a tastemaker whose words travel the world, and there is no room for that racism, especially from someone whose comments will be amplified. Two: life goes from harmony to disharmony to repair. Anyone who has been through a complicated divorce knows how disharmonious that moment is. Because Kanye is famous, the public is watching a person who may need help. The words are not excusable. Friends still owe him help. Chamath's own divorce, he says, was gut-wrenching. The worst part was telling the children. In that moment there is no fame and no money, only the death of the idea of a nuclear family. He is fiercely proud of how resilient those three kids were.

When he has felt meaningfully less-than, the unproductive loop was to throw away internal validation and do something that would get other people to look. The repair came from meeting a partner, Nathalie, who has both empathy and accountability. She can stand in his shoes when he is hard to be around, then refuse to let him off the hook. He calls her the LeBron James of friendship, the GOAT on that distribution. An African proverb he had never understood — go fast, go alone; go far, go together — finally landed. Since birth he had coped alone with a bad toolkit. In five or six years she moved him from sticks to a sharpened rock to fire to a forged knife. He also has a friend, Rob Goldberg, who loves him unabashedly and barely holds him accountable. Most people, he thinks, have zero such people. Kanye, as he reads it from the outside, is in a moment of feeling lower than low, reaching for attention the way people do when they did not grow up in a healthy house. Self-worth, a doctor once told him, can be a knot inside a tangle of knots. The work is to loosen them slowly, unpredictably, over a long time.

That is the backdrop for All-In. Jason Calacanis, he says, is loyal past the point of sense: the friend who shows up to help with the proverbial body. The other side is that J Cal does not trust that people love him back as much as he loves them, and that gap drives the others crazy, which is part of why the show is listenable. David Sacks is the one Chamath has the deepest emotional connection with; they can go a year without talking and then talk for four hours. David Friedberg, who also had a turbulent upbringing, earns respect for the journey more than the outcomes, and for making his kids the center of gravity. Sacks reasons from philosophical and historical nuclei; Friedberg abstracts systems. The secret to arguing without murder, Chamath says, is strong opinions, weakly held, and a willingness to steelman positions you may not believe. They sometimes edit out the "let us steelman" preamble, which is how fans should hear the fights.

The energy-to-zero claim is not a riff. He has spent two years on it. The logical tree is a mosaic whose root is that the incremental cost of energy goes to zero; households versus utilities is only one branch. He tests the short lines with investments from tens of millions to a hundred million, sized by probability, downside, and how many mistakes he can afford. Then he re-underwrites. He got there by accident. Drew McKnight at Fortress asked him to anchor a rare-earth mining IPO. Chamath expected to be tarred and feathered in the Valley for backing a mine. Jim Litinsky walked him through energy, supply chains, and the United States versus China. He did that deal, then seven others, made money, and more important, made enough mistakes to see a thesis. "The minute that you try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet either on yourself or a company, a girlfriend, whatever, it's too late."

Through that lens he reads the war in Ukraine. The United States has known energy surplus. Solar that is capex-efficient and climate-efficient is a tailwind. We are also in a regime of non-zero rates. World War II, he notes, was financed at roughly 1.07 percent on the ten-year; other wars tend to open and close quickly because long fights are hard to fund when money is not free. President Biden's discretionary budget, as Chamath cites it, is about $1.58 trillion, with interest payments the next year around $455 billion — 29 cents of every budget dollar. Hurtling toward domestic energy while unable to underwrite trillions for war at five percent rates makes a U.S. fight with Russia, short of a moral override such as nuclear use, look unlikely. Steelman Putin using a tactical nuke: India and China, his two largest energy buyers, are already telling him to slow down, and he would be the first person since World War II to cross that line. X of the military-industrial complex's clamor, financial and resource reasons make war less likely. In a world of zero rates, he thinks, we would already be in it. Jerome Powell, ratcheting rates, is "probably doing more to prevent [war] than anybody else."

Why did Putin invade in the first place, if the invisible hand is so strong? Chamath says he does not know. There are no experts here, he adds, not even Phil Hellmuth. There is a theoretically optimal set of decisions, but the minute an opponent takes you off the GTO path you have to adjust. A tactical nuke would be an incredibly sad moment; he thinks the world and the Ukrainians are resilient enough to overcome it. He suspects the Biden team, for all the costs of gerontocracy, has a break-glass plan of financial sanctions not yet used, coupled with a European recession that eases the energy bind while the U.S. ships LNG. Lex feels civilization hanging in the balance. Chamath hopes Putin is spending time with his young twins. It is hard, he says, to look at your children and not think about protecting the future.

Advice for someone who wants to build the next Facebook or Apple starts with a warning. If your precondition is to start something successful, you have already failed, because you are playing somebody else's game. Success from the outside is a brittle definition. He knows people much richer than he is who are completely broken. He sees TikTok cul-de-sacs of kids on bikes and flashes back to what he did not have, and that looks like success. If you set out to make a million, a hundred million, a billion, you are going to fail. Focus on impact and you may end up deeply unhappy; it can be a byproduct, but you should strive for personal happiness first. Elon Musk is the example of someone tested into sacrificing that happiness. Chamath bought the Burnt Hair perfume on a whim, emailed the receipt, and got a smiley face in eight seconds. He wants those ordinary gestures seen, because the rest of Musk's life is brutally hard. Why so few Elons? Maybe fifty people on earth even face the choice; maybe ten have to sleep on the factory floor. Chamath would not take that seat for any amount of money.

Work-life balance, for a company trying to do big things, is in his view kind of dumb. It will make you limited. You need to immerse, and you need to define that immersion with strict boundaries. His process is monotonous and regimented, all the time except when it is not, and that exception is also regimented. Investing, reduced, is an annual compounding rate, the way basketball greatness is points over a career. He has compounded above 30 percent for a long time, as have the heroes on his pedestal, and he now thinks the next jump is philosophical: a system created by a philosophy, which he is scratching at and cannot break through without letting go. He is always home for dinner. Vacations and weekends are prescribed. He woke up at 6:45, made the kids an imperfect breakfast and a latte pulled to a 20-gram-in, 30-gram-out, 30-second ritual, worked out from eight to nine on a split (push, quads, pull, hamstrings), then talked to his therapist from nine to ten about loosening childhood knots. Lunch at home with Nathalie and their one-year-old. Wednesdays are reading, no meetings unless it is an emergency. Fridays end with couples therapy, an official checkout into the weekend.

Meetings are often ten or fifteen minutes. The valuable ritual is not the meeting; it is respect for the unit's time, so other people can also get home for dinner. He respects the person who says nothing for two years and then says something that is not obvious more than the person who talks constantly. After Facebook he built Social Capital. He is loath to give advice, but he thinks there are only three kinds of hiring mistakes that determine success or failure: the average performer who is a really good person; the person who was not candid about who they are, whose ethics surface late; and the highly performant person who is not a good human. The first group he compares to cartilage. You would not replace it if you did not have to, as long as they are not more than half the company and they sit one or two degrees from a generational talent — a LeBron, a Kobe — so they can feel what excellence looks like. The other two groups, he says, inject poison. Fire them. When he meets a CEO raising money he never asks for a résumé and barely looks at the business. He says eight to ten words for hours and listens for the biases that will make the person fail. Momentum, of course, throws the rulebook out; then the Valley clamors in.

His own scoreboard is a form of self-inflicted discipline. Winners to losers over eleven years, on billions of dollars, sit at 23 to 1. Correlation with Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark, Kleiner and the rest is as close to zero as he can get, which is lonely in a roaring market and precious when markets are crushed, because correlation is what turns one blow-up into contagion. Public mistakes are part of the job. Even the best shooters, he notes, hit about 52 percent. You cannot control the defense. You can control preparation. Asked who the world's first trillionaire will be, he still says energy transition. Most wealth, in his philosophy, is not you: birthplace, age wedged between boomers and millennials the way Buffett sat between the silent generation and the boomers, and stumbling into electrical engineering just as Silicon Valley's wind picked up. Direct contribution is the last variable. Clean, abundant energy reshapes tens of trillions of GDP; capture a third of a company that captures 30 percent of a $10 trillion shift, and you are at a trillion. He wants more work in "the suburbs of the periodic table," is not convinced today's nuclear scales past the bench without materials-science leaps, and has been wandering for a year around room-temperature superconductors. Zero energy and zero compute, he thinks, will also let computational biology replace wet chemistry.

Silicon Valley is not over, but it is in a challenging moment. His cohort — Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Musk, Sacks — has not done a good job of becoming statesmen, of showing empathy for broader systems. Survival means transitioning from move fast and break things to getting the right answer and taking the time. He considered a run for governor of California and decided against it; he still thinks tech people should work with Washington rather than thumb their noses. On woke activism he returns to Girard: copy, compete for a scarce resource, then organize to expel a scapegoat. Unless that person is truly to blame, the cycle continues. Extreme left and extreme right are both competing for something scarce, and the bulk of people in the middle already know the scapegoat is not the cause. The mechanism is decaying. Jordan Peterson, on Lex's show, said he had been canceled some enormous number of times and was still there. Chamath has been canceled on a scale that did not feel small. A CEO friend sent a step-by-step manual. The core idea was to apologize for what is in your control, not for other people's mistakes, and to make the apology authentic, because people can see through the hollow version — and through the mob that accepted it.

He does not like giving advice, then gives the sentence he wishes someone had told him. "We are all equal." You will fight a demon inside you that says you are less than a lot of other people, for reasons that will be hard to see until you are much older. Find people far away, the way he found magazine archetypes, or one or two people really close, who will remind you that it is not true. Otherwise you will give in to that beast. It is not the end of the world, and you will recover, but it takes a lot of energy, and sometimes it is easier to stop. If you had wonderful parents, go hug them. Then do work that validates you, where you feel mastery, and who cares what anyone else thinks. If you were not that lucky, believe your friends, or believe him. Preserve optionality by regulating your reactions in the moments when you feel less than. He is still fighting it. He never thought he was better than other people; he manifested better-than as compensation. The goal is just to feel like everybody else feels, on the presumption that they had a normal life.

Does he trust himself with absolute power? No. He is still riddled with bias and does not want that weight. In a big home game he once had to rule on a million-dollar pot in his own favor. He wanted to shoot himself. He plays to be pushed to the edge of his capabilities against pros, and he likes to win by a small amount. Winning that way, because it was his game, felt gross. The gentleman on the other side of the ruling made it worse. Those are the people you actually want in power, Lex notes, and it is a weird system that then fails to produce them.

The meaning of life, as he takes it, is a chance to enjoy the ride. He does not believe much in legacy. He hopes to be forgotten. A few people are remembered for positive things; the surface area of being remembered is mostly negative, and he will be gone anyway. Steve Jobs's sister wrote that his last words were "oh wow, oh wow, oh wow." Chamath reads that as family in the room, a flash of the cool things you got to do, and then the simulation starting over. On the off chance that is true, he does not want to take this too seriously. He has been really in love, has felt like everybody else, has had deep joy with his children and giggling fun with friends, wine, food. At some point asking for more would make him a crappy human being. "It's enough." Millennials and Gen Z, he warns, are about to inherit a boatload of money, and they had better figure out how to be happy before it arrives. Otherwise they will be miserable. Get a lot of Dairy Queen, Lex jokes. That only worked the first time, Chamath says. The second year the teacher, Miss Bruni, did it again. The third time it faded. Scarcity is what makes the ice cream delicious.