The Joe Rogan ExperienceJoe Rogan Experience #2206 - Chamath Palihapitiya
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,094 words- 0:00 – 1:09
Viral media meltdowns to a deeper critique of partisan news
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music)
- JRJoe Rogan
Talking with Bill at live, it's like that- that will live in infamy. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) It is the best clip because he's like a totally different person.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's what he really is.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What he really is, yeah, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's like the Ellen thing. You know, it's like... (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) I mean, he really did lose his shit there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, uh, like, weirdly. You know? It wasn't like... I got the Christian Bale one-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause, like, he's in character, there's an intense scene. Some guy's fucking around in the background-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... like, "Goddammit, stop fucking around!"
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I get that.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, he's in this, he's in this frenzy of this intense scene. But what is fucking-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... what is Bill doing? (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
He's, Republican talking points on Fox News and he c-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, it was before.
- JRJoe Rogan
That was a different type, Current Affair, right?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It was when he was Current Affair. It's when he's doing like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... gossip and stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's right!
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
He was a gossip guy.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
He was like an Entertainment Tonight type guy.
- 1:09 – 4:06
The click-driven outrage economy and algorithmic anxiety loops
- JRJoe Rogan
They never go away. It's, um... It's- it's so- such a weird environment, the- the left and right. There's no, like, centrist news source on television. There's no like a, this is probably what's going on news source.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's always one or the other, and it's like you're living in a- a bipolar person's brain. You know?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think, like, part of what's happened is we used to have news and you could make a good living in news. And, you know, journalists were really sort of the top of the social hierarchy in some way, shape, or form because they were this check and balance. And then somewhere along the way, this business model focused people on clicks and nobody told the rest of the world that the underlying incentives were gonna change. And so, that's where you find yourself where there's very little news, I think. There's a lot of opinion. And then the problem with opinion is that feeds the outrage machine and that's the, you know, the clickometer.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The clickometer doesn't go high when you're like, "Hey guys, I studied this equation (laughs) and it shows."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) There's a 50% chance of this, 50%... Nobody cares about that. It's either like it's totally, totally bad or it's totally, totally good because it just, it amps people up. And that's- that's a real bummer 'cause it, I think, like, you- you don't know what to think anymore.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's also a completely novel new thing that we weren't prepared for. So, before there was social media and online news, no one was prepared for the world of the algorithm. No one was prepared for being like, l- l- j- literally everything that freaks you out is what you'll be shown because that shows that you're engaging, and that's how it's set up for it, which is just so contrary to the rest of history.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Totally.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, it was always i- it bleeds, it leads in the news because they wanted people, th- they wanted to win ratings news, but they only had so much control and it was only on for an hour.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
And now it's just this 24/7 anxiety fest.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's omnipresent and it's basically made to want, you know, to- to convince you that you need more of that thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And the pro-... It's like a bad diet, you know? Like the first-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... few shots of it, the first few bites of it tastes amazing. But, you know, if you- if you eat the full toffee cake every day for the next 300 and, you know, 65 days and then for the next year, I mean, you're gonna get diabetes (laughs) and heart disease.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah (laughs) .
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) So, the version of that is like your brain just gets totally fried and then- The bigger problem is then when you're presented with, maybe it's not even the truth, but an opinion that you should consider, you get totally shut out of it. And that's like the real problem. You build these antibodies in your body where this other version that says, "Take a step back and reconsider," it's not allowed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 4:06 – 6:22
Threads vs X: engagement farming, performative conflict, and “two plus two equals five”
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And, you know, then, if- if you said to yourself, "Well, how do you even start?" Where do you go? You know, like if you're... I- a- a friend of mine, um, works at, uh, Facebook and he showed me threads. We were playing poker last week and he showed me threads. And what's incredible is, like, threads and X are like the exact polar opposites in some ways. And he was showing me in the context of, like, how the outrage machine on threads works. And the way it works is like, and this woman wrote this article about it, but (laughs) what they'll do is they'll post something that says, "Two plus two equals five." (laughs) Just that one.
- JRJoe Rogan
That kind of thing?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And you'll get like a million views and then it'll first start with like, you know, folks that are, like, trying to gently nudge this person, "Actually, you know, I want you to reconsider. (laughs) Two plus two actually equals four." You know, and then it builds and it builds and it builds. And this, that, so there's this, like, this weird version of how people react to, like, information and it tends to be, um, kid gloves and then people just lose their mind at some point. So it's kind of like... And then over here, I think on X what you find is there's a lot more structural data, but then it can easily get lost in the noise because there's just a few things that just constantly consume, you know, what the algorithms want to amplify and what is important in the moment. And I think that finding a way to, like, probably blend the two is probably what is the best in the sense that there's probably some stuff over here that doesn't make it over here, and there's probably a lot of stuff over here that doesn't make it over here. A little bit of that diet for everybody probably goes a long way.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there heavy content moderation on threads? Is there-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I don't know. I don't use it.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't either.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I don't have it. I just saw it in that moment. But when he described how the- the engagement farming works-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... it just sounded- sounded kind of like ludicrously, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, to explain to people, two plus two equals five-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you just post that.
- JRJoe Rogan
... is- is a bizarre thing that was going around where they were talking about how math is racist.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Basically, that's where it gets to. Math is racist.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is- which is... (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Oh, no.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
If math is racist, we have a real problem-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause that means everything's racist-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause everything's math.
- 6:22 – 12:44
Education wars: AP math, gifted programs, and equalizing the starting line without lowering the ceiling
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You know, we had this thing in, um... I don't know if you saw this. In the Bay Area, in COVID, the City of San Francisco, you know, brought together their Board of Education or whatever, and they're... And they eliminated a bunch of AP classes, including, like, a bunch of AP math classes, and part of it was because of this reason, 'cause they felt it was exclusionary. And I think what it misses is that there's all this other stuff you could do to kind of, like, even the starting line for folks, but if you rip out things like AP math... Like, take- take a step back. Like, in eight billion people in the world, what are the odds that there's only literally one Steve Jobs or literally only one Elon Musk, meaning capable of that kind of execution? I suspect that there's maybe two. And so, like, part of the human ex-... Like, part of our social responsibility as adults is, how do you make it so that that second Steve Jobs can find the path to do stuff?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And I'm not saying AP math is the answer, but I'm saying there are people that... I remember when I was growing up, I wasn't particularly good at anything in school. Um, but there were a few subjects which I was just like, "Wow." Like, the little time I spent in school, I was like... I felt a little safe, you know? I could connect. It built up a little bit of my self-confidence, and I didn't feel so marginal. I'm sure there's a lotta kids like that. For some very small subset, maybe that's what that kinda class is. It pushes them to a boundary that they didn't know was possible. You're teaching them stuff. That's really cool. So, I understand what the intent is, but then the byproduct is there's a small group of folks that get shut out, and then that person that could be that Steve Jobs-like person, that Elon Musk-like person is held a little bit back. And I think that that hurts all of us. So, you gotta find a way where we're doing just a little bit better.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... i- isn't that the part of the problem with, uh, eliminating gifted classes? Right? There's- there's talk of... I think they're doing that in New York. Is that where they're doing that? Find- find out if that's the case. Uh, there's- there's some where there's this hot controversy about limiting the con-... Eliminating the concept of gifted classes. But the reality is there's some people that are going to find regular classes, particularly mathematics and some other things, they're- they're gonna find 'em a little too easy. They- they're more advanced. They're more advanced students. And those students should have some sort of an option to excel, and it should be inspiring, m- m- maybe intimidating, but also inspiring to everybody else. I mean, that's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... part of the reason why kids go to school together, to comm-... "Well, look how hard she works. She works so much harder than me. Look how much she's getting ahead. Fuck, I gotta work harder." And it really does work that way. That's how human beings in- in cooperation, that's how they grow together.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And I- and I think that it used to be the case that if you went to... In high school, you would be really cool with people that were going to, like, specific high schools to get really good at something. Remember, like, that show on TV, Fame?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right? And so... Well, that was more about the performing arts, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But that was amazing. It's like, you know, if you knew a kid that was going to one of those schools, what you'd say is, "Wow, you are incredibly talented in this one specific thing. Go push the boundary of that and see what happens." I think we owe it to ourselves to say that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right? There's 330 million Americans in the United States. Don't you think that if we created a bunch of different ways for people to figure out what they're super good at, things are better, not worse? Like, what is the answer? Do we think things- (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) Do you think things take a huge step back?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) You know, you have more Joe Rogans, you have more Kevin Harts. You know, you have- you have more great actors, you have more great directors, but you also have more engineers. You have more scientists, you have more doctors. And you created a way for them to just go deep in something where their curiosity took them. That's okay. What's wrong with that idea?
- JRJoe Rogan
There's nothing wrong-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
There's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It sounds optimal.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It sounds pretty reasonable.
- JRJoe Rogan
It sounds great.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It- it's just a matter of resources, and then also, like, completely revamping how you teach kids.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- 12:44 – 13:51
ADHD, devices, and attention: medicating kids vs changing environments
- JRJoe Rogan
Thi- this is my gripe with this whole ADHD thing. I, you know, I've talked to many people who have varying opinions on whether or not that's an actual condition, or whether or not there's a lot of people that have a lot of energy and you're sitting with 'em in a class that's very boring and they don't want to pay attention to it, so instead, you drug them and you- you give them medication that is essentially speed and lets them hyper-focus on things, and now all of a sudden, little- little Timmy's locked on. You know? It was really just the medication that he needed. And I think for a lot of those kids, if they found something that was really interesting to them, you know, maybe they're really bored with this, but they're really excited by biology.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Maybe there's something that, like, resonates with their particular personality and what- what- what excites them, and, you know, they could find a pathway. And instead, w- we have this very rigid system that wants to get children accustomed to the idea of sitting still for an hour at a time over and over and over again throughout the day, being subjected to people who, you know, aren't necessarily that motivated or getting paid that well.
- 13:51 – 32:07
AI reshapes what humans should learn: judgment, taste, and teachers’ new role
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, let's ... We're gonna probably talk about AI today-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... but let's just touch on this just in this one second for ... We are going to create computers that are able to do a lot of the rote thinking for us. What that means is, I think, the way that humans differentiate ourselves is that we're gonna have to have judgment and taste. Right? Those are def- those are very defining psychological characteristics, in my opinion. But what that means is, if you go back to, like, how school is taught, what you said is very limiting for what the world is gonna look like in 30 years. You know, in 30 years where you have a PhD assistant that's in your pocket that can literally do all of the memorization, spell-checking, grammar, all of the fact recall for you, teaching that today is probably not going to be as important as interpreting it. Like, how do you teach kids to learn to think, not to memorize and regurgitate? So, we have to flip, I think, this education system. We have to try to figure out a different way to solve this problem, because, like, you can't set a- a children, this generation up, our kids, to go and have to compete with a computer. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's crazy.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's crazy.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's crazy.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can make a Drake song in three minutes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The computer is going to win.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So, what can't the computer do is, I think, maybe a- a reasonable question. And I think the computer, in a lot of cases, can't express judgment. It'll learn, but today it's not going to be able to the same way that humans can. It's gonna have different taste, right? So the way that we interpret things, the same way that you motivate people, like all the psychology, all these things that are sort of like the softer skills that allowed humans to cooperate and like work together, that stuff becomes more important when you have a fleet of robots. And so, if you go all the way back to school, today, s- the school system is unfortunately in kind of a- a- a pretty tough loop. Like, look, teachers, I think, are, like, going to become the most, you know, the top three or four important people in society. And the reason is because they are going to be tasked with teaching your kids and my kids how to think, not to memorize. Don't tell me what happened in the War of 1812. I don't ... Like, you can just, you know, use a search engine or use a ChatGPT and find out the answer. But why did it happen? What were the motivations? If it happens again, what would you do differently or the same? And those kinds of reasoning and judgment things, I think, we're still far ahead of those computers, so the teachers have to teach that, which means you have to pay them more, you have to put them in a position to do that job better, and then back to what you said, you know, in my ... I've- I've lived this example of ADHD in my family. I have five kids. One of the kids was diagnosed with it. And unfortunately, what happens is the system a little bit closes in on you. So on the one side, they give you a lot of benefits, I guess. I- I- I put it in quotes because you get these emails that say, if they want extra time, if they want this, if they want s- you know, um, they'll give you a computer, for example, to take notes so that you don't hand write. So Th- those feel like aides to help you. Right? Um, but then on the other side, you know, one person was very adamant, like, "Hey, you wanna medicate." And my ex-wife and I were just like, "Under no circumstances are we medicating our child." That was a personal decision that we made with the information that we had knowing that specific kid. N- all kids are different, so I don't wanna generalize. And then the crazy thing, Joe, what we did was we took the iPad out of the kids' hand. And we said, you know, in ... We had these very strict device rules, and then COVID turned everything upside down. And you're just surviving. You're sheltering in place. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You got f- five kids running around. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They're not really being, you know, taught, um, by the schools. The schools won't convene the kids. Um, and so what do you do? You just hand them the device. Everything was through the device.... the literal class they got, through the device, the way that they would talk to their friends, through the device. So it reintroduced itself in a way that we couldn't control, and then we saw this slippage. And then what we did was we just drew a bright red line and we said, "We're taking it out of your hands. No more video games. No more iPad. We're gonna dose it in very small doses." And he had an entire turnaround.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But then here's what happened. Um, I took my eye off the ball a little bit this summer because it was like he had a- a great year. He reset. His self-confidence was coming back. I was like, "Man, this is amazing." And then I do the thing that, you know, a lot of people would do. "Oh, here, you can have an hour." "Oh, yeah, it's fine," you know, "Talk to your friends," you know? And then it started again, and then again now we just had to reset. So at least in our example, what we have found, and I'm not ... i- it may not apply to everybody, but for us, him not being bathed in this thing, um, had a huge effect, playing basketball outside, you know, roughhousing with his brothers, you know, uh, having to talk (laughs) to his friends, having to talk to us, watching movies, you know? Or we would just sit arou- ... because, by the way, what I noticed was, like, my kids had a hard time watching movies or listening to songs on Spotify for the full duration. They'd get to the hook and they'd be like, "Forward."
- JRJoe Rogan
Next.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And they'd be like ... you know, they'd watch, like, eight minutes, next. And I was like, "What are you guys doing?" Like, this isn't ... like, enjoy the fullness. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They couldn't even sit there for three and a half minutes. So w- what at least, you know, my son was learning was, right, to just chill a little bit, be there, be able to watch the show. And these- these shows move at a glacial pace relative to what they're used to if they're- if they're playing a video game.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or TikTok.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Or TikTok.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, yeah, because TikTok, they're like this, boom-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yep.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... boom, boom, boom, and it's helped. It's not a cure, but it just goes back to what you're saying, which is, like, if you give parents options, and I heard this crazy stat. I don't know if this is true. If you take your devices away from a kid, the kid will feel isolated from their other students. The critical mass, I don't know if this is true or not, but it's what I was told, so I'll go with it, was that (laughs) if you get a third of the parents, so, like, in- in a class of 20, if you get a third of the parents to agree as well, no devices, the kid feels zero social isolation because it becomes normative. It's like it's normal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah. We ... You got a flip phone. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 32:07 – 44:02
Near- to long-term AI: cancer surgery accuracy, new materials, and physical robots
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay, so I'll, I'll go from the most likely to like the craziest.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay, so most likely today, do you know if, um, if you know somebody that's had breast cancer, if they go into a doc, uh, a hospital, a random hospital in America, and the doctor says, "We need to do a, a lumpectomy," meaning we need to take some mass out of your breast to take the cancer out, what do you think the error rate today is across all hospitals in America?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's about 30%.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And in regional hospitals, so places that are poor, right, or places that are in far-flung parts of the United States, it can be upwards of 40%. This is not the doctor's fault, okay? The, the problem is that you're forcing him or her (laughs) to look with their eyes into tissue and try to figure out, well, where is the border where the cancer stops?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So for every 10 surgeries, what that means are a week later, so imagine this. You get a breast cancer surgery. They take it out. They send it to the pathologist. The pathol- pathologist takes between seven and 11 days. So you're kinda waiting. Seven of the calls come back clean margins, you're great. Now go to the next step. Three of the calls, "I'm sorry, there's still cancer inside your body." Three. So these women now go back for the next surgery, but the problem is one of those women will get another call that says, "I'm sorry, there's still cancer." And so what is that? That's a computer vision problem, right? That's not a, that's not necessarily a, um, a problem that can't not be solved literally today. We have models. We have tissue samples of women of all ages, uh, of all races, right? So you have all of the different boundary conditions you'd need to basically get to a 0% error rate. And what's amazing is that is now working its way through the FDA. So call it within the next two years there'll be an AI assistant that sits inside of an operating room. The surgeon will take out what they think is appropriate. They'll put it into this machine, and it'll literally, I'm gonna simplify, but it'll flash red or green. "You got all the cancer out. You need to take out a little bit more just right over here." And now you get it out, and now all of a sudden instead of a 30% error rate, you have a 0% error rate.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's amazing. That's today because you have this computer that's able to help you, and all we need is the will and the data that says, "Okay, we wanna do this, but just show me that it works, and show me what the alternative would be if we didn't do it." And the alternative turns out to be pretty brutal. 14 surgeries for every 10 surgery, like I mean, that's like, that's not what the most advanced nation in the world should be doing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay, so if you do it for breast cancer, the reason why breast cancer is where folks are focusing is because it gets so much attention, and it's like prime time. But it's not just breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, if you look at any kind of tumor. So if you're at the stage where you're like, "We need to get this thing, this foreign, growing thing out of our body," we should all have the ability to just do that with 0% error, and it will be possible in the next couple of years because of AI. Okay, so that's kind of like a, that's cool, and it's coming. I think between years two and years five, you're gonna see this crazy explosion in materials, and this is gonna sound maybe dumb, but it's, I think it's one of the coolest things. If you look at the periodic table of elements, um, what's amazing is like we keep adding, so there's like 118 elements. We actually just theoretically...... forecasted there's gonna be 119, so we created a little box. (laughs) It's gonna be, it's like, it's theoretical, but it's gonna show up. And they forecasted that there's gonna be 142. Okay? So, the periodic table of elements, quote-unquote, grows. But when you look at the lived world today, we live in this very narrow expression of all of those things. We use the same few materials over and over and over again. But if you had to solve a really complicated problem, don't you think the answer could theoretically be in this? Meaning, if you took, I'm gonna make it up, selenium and then doped it with titanium 1%, but if you doped it with boron 14%, all of these things are possible. It's like stronger than the s- strongest thing in the world, and wow, and it's lighter than anything. So now, you can make rockets with it and send it all the way up with less ener- like, it's all possible. So, why haven't we figured it out? Because the amount of energy and the amount of computers we need to solve those problems, which are super complicated, haven't been available to us. I think that is this next phase of AI. So, what you said, which is we're gonna have these PhD level robots and agents. In the next two to five years, we're gonna come up with all kinds of materials, you know, you'll have a frying pan that's like non-stick but doesn't have to heat up. Like, all, you know, whatever you want from like the most benign to the most incredible stuff, we'll just re-engineer what's on Earth. That's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be incredible. We, we all benefit from that. The kinds of jobs that that creates. We don't even know what job class that is to work with Selenium and Bor- I'm j- I'm, again, I'm making up these elements-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, right, right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... so please don't ... So, the point is that there's, so that's like in the, in the middle phase. So, our physical lived world is going to totally transform. Imagine a building that's made of a material that bends. You can just go like this and nothing changes to it. Why would that be important? Well, if you wanna protect yourself from, you know, the crazy unpredictability of climate, in the areas where it's susceptible to that, maybe you need, you can construct these things much cheaper.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, earthquakes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Earthquakes. You could construct more of them. Imagine in San Francisco, you could build buildings that solve the housing crisis, but do it in a way that was cheaper because the materials are totally different and you could just prove that these things are bulletproof. So, instead of spending a billion dollars to build a building 'cause you gotta go, you know, hundreds of feet into the earth, you know, the earth, you just go 50 feet and it just figures it out. So, that's like, so that's possible and I think there will be people that use these AI models to go and solve those things. And then after that, I think you get into the world of it's not just robots that are in a computer, but it's like a physical robot. And those physical robots are going to do things that today will make so much sense in hindsight. So, an example, I was thinking about this this weekend. Imagine if you had a bunch of Optimuses, like Tesla's robot, and they were the beat cops.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They were the highway patrol.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ooh.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay? Now, what happens there? Well, first, you don't put humans in the way. I suspect then the reaction of those robots could be markedly different. Now, those robots would be controlled remotely, right? So, the people that are remote now can be a very different archetype, right? Instead of the physical requirements of policing, you now add this other layer, which is the psychological elements and the judgment and ... So, my, my point is that if you had robots that were able to do the, the dangerous work for humans, I think it allows humans to do, again, judgment. You know, those areas of judgment which are very gray and fuzzy. It'll take a long time for computers to be able to replace us to do that. I, I, I really do think so. I think the biggest thing that we ha- have done as a disservice to what is coming is some folks have tried to say that AI is the end-all and be-all. And I think the better way to think about this is that, you know how like you used to have to get your spelling right in an email and now you just don't think about it 'cause like Gmail just fixes it?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It up-levels us, right? You used to have to remember the details of like some crazy theory, random detail fact. Now you can just Google it. So, you, you can leave your mind to focus on other things, right? The creativity to, to write your next, you know, to write your next set, to, to think about the next interview, to think about your business, because you're occupying less time with the perfunctory stuff. I think these models do, are doing that and they're gonna get complimented with physical models, meaning physical robots. And they're gonna do a lot of work for us that we have not done, um, or today that we do very precariously. You know, like should a robot go in and save you from a fire? I think it can probably do a pretty good job. They'll have multiple sensors. They'll have vision. They'll be able to understand exactly what's going on. If something is falling, they'll just be able (laughs) to put their hand up and just like stop. You know what I mean?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Like, if, if they encounter any person of any body weight, it's no problem. Pick that person up, transport them. Again, it, it allows humans to focus on the things that we're really, really differentiated at. Um, I do think it creates complications, but, you know, we have to figure those out. Um, so that's like a kind of like a short, medium, long term.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I see-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Uh.
- JRJoe Rogan
... what you're saying in the final example as the rosy scenario. That's the best-case option.... right? That it gives people the freedom to be more creative and to pursue different things. And I think there's always gonna be a market for handmade things. People like things ...
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I agree with that.
- JRJoe Rogan
... like, like, uh, like, they like an acoustic performance. They like stuff where it's, like, very human and very real. But there's a lot of people that just want a job, and these people maybe just, uh, aren't inclined towards creativity, and maybe they're very simple people who just want a job, and they just wanna work. Those are the people that I worry about.
- 44:02 – 51:22
AI displacement and UBI: safety nets, dignity of work, and historical adaptation
- JRJoe Rogan
What are your thoughts on universal basic income as a Band-Aid to sort of mitigate that transition?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm pretty sympathetic to that idea. Um, I grew up on welfare, and so what I can tell you is that there are a lot of people who are trying their best and for whatever set of boundary conditions can't figure it out.
- JRJoe Rogan
I agree. I grew up on welfare as well.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And so if I didn't have that safety net, you know, my, my parents' struggles, I think would've gotten even worse than what they were.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, so I'm a believer in that s- social safety net. I think it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, it's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... really important.
- JRJoe Rogan
... best-case scenario, right? Because your parents worked their way out of it. My parents worked their way out of it. But some people are just content to just get a check, and this is the issue, I think, that a lot of people have, is that people become entitled and just want to collect a check. And if it's a substantial portion of our country, like, if universal basic income... If, if AI eliminates, let's just say, a crazy number, like 70% of the manual labor jobs, truck drivers, construction workers, all that stuff gets eliminated, that's a lot of people without a purpose. And one of the things that a h- a good day's work in earning your pay, it makes people feel self-sufficient. It makes people feel valuable, and it gives them a sense of purpose. You know, they could look at the thing that they did, maybe build a building or something like that and drive their kids by, "Hey, we, we built that building right there. Oh, wow." You know, it's, it's, it's a part of their identity, and if they just get a check, and then what, what do they do, just play video games all day? That's the worst-case scenario-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... is that people just get locked into this world of computers and online and just receive checks and have the bare necessities to survive and are content with that and then don't contribute at all.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The, (clears throat) the jobs that, like, let's, let's put it this way. If, if we were sitting here in 1924, whatever, 100 years ago, you know, right in the midst of the turn of the Industrial Revolution, we would have seen a lot of folks that worked on farms, and we would have wondered, "Well, where are those jobs going to come from?" And I think that now when you look back, it was, like, not obvious, but you could see where the j- the new job classes came from. It's like all of these industries that were possible because we built a factory, and a factory turned out to be a substrate, and then you built all these different kinds of businesses which created different kinds of jobs on top of it. I would hope that if we do this right, this next leap is like that where we are i- in a period where it's hard to know with certainty what this job class goes to over here. But I think you have a responsibility to go and figure it out and talk it out and play it out because the past would tell you that we have a really good humans, when they're unimpeded, have a really good ability to invent these things. So I don't know. Maybe what it is is by, you know, 2035, there's a billion people that have traveled to Mars, and you're building an entire planet from the ground up. There'll be all sorts of work to do there. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Boy, what kind of people are gonna go first there (laughs) ?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think that there'll be a lot of people that are frustrated with what's happening here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, sure, just like the people that got on the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and made their way across the ocean.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It all, it all starts with, like, a group of people that are just like, "I'm, I'm fed up with this."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but to, to want to go to a place that doesn't even have an atmosphere that's capable of sustaining human life and to try to figure... and you can only go back every couple of years, like (gasps) those people are gonna be psychos. You're gonna have a-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... compli- completely psycho- it's Australia on meth, you know? It's like-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... the worst-case scenario, the, the, the castouts of society.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, well, sorry, like, just, just like what you say is, it, it, it's so true, but, like, if you think about...... what that decision looked like 400 years ago when that first group of prisoners were put on a boat and sent to Australia-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... that's probably what it felt like.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Most people on the mainland when they were like, "Ciao, ciao-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... were probably thinking, "Man, this is insane."
- 51:22 – 58:17
Energy to power AI: solar trends, grid failures, and nuclear’s promise and risks
- JRJoe Rogan
Well then also with quantum computing, and one of the things about AI that's been talked about is this massive need for energy. And so they're going, and they're, at least it's been proposed to develop nuclear sites specifically to power AI, which is wild.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I'm (clears throat) , I have to be... (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) You gotta dance around this?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, I'll tell, I'll tell, I'll tell you what I think. (laughs) Okay, well, maybe before I give you my opinion, can we... I'll tell you the facts.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, today it costs about 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Just don't forget the units, just remember the 4 cents concept. 20 years ago, it cost like 6 or 7 cents. If you go and get solar panels on your roof, basically costs nothing. In fact, you can probably make money, so it costs you like negative 1 cent because you can sell the energy in many parts of America back to the grid. But if you look inside the energy market, the cost has been compounding, and you would say, "Well, how does this make sense? If the generation cost keeps falling, why is my end user cost keep going up? This is like, this doesn't make any sense." And when you look inside, we have a r- regulatory burden in America that says to the utilities of which there are like less than 2,000 in America, "We're giving you a monopoly effectively. In this area of Austin, you can provide all the energy." Now Texas is different, but I'm just using it as an example. "But in return, I'm gonna allow you to increase prices, but I'm gonna demand that you improve the infrastructure. Every few years you gotta upgrade the grid, you gotta put up money into this, money into that. Over the next 10 years, we've gotta put a trillion dollars, America collectively, into improving the current grid, which I think will not be enough because it is aging and most importantly, it's insecure. Meaning folks can penetrate that, folks can hack it, folks can do all kinds of stuff." So, and then it fails in critical moments. I think that, you know, in Austin you had like a whole bunch of like really crazy outages in the last-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... couple of years people died. Like this is, in 2024, that's like totally unacceptable. So, I think as like people decide that they want resilience, you're gonna see 110 million power plants, which is every homeowner in the United States. Everybody's going to generate their own energy. Everybody's going to store their energy in a power wall. This stuff is going to become, I mean, absolutely dirt cheap, and it'll just be the way that energy is generated. So you'll, you have this, but this is not the whole solution 'cause you still need the big guys to show up.... when you look inside of, like, the big guys, so like now you're talking about these 2,000 utilities that need to spend trillions of dollars, they can do a lot of stuff right now to make enough energy to make things work. But when you look at nuclear, I would just say that there are two different kinds of nuclear. There's the old and the new. The old stuff, I agree with you, it's just money and you can get it turned back on. It's a specific isotope of uranium, you can deal with it, everybody knows in that world how to manage that safely. But then what you have are like these next generation things, and this is where I get a little stuck and I'm not smart enough to know all of it, but I'm close enough to be slightly ticked off by it, (laughs) which is ... There's a materials and a technical problem with these things, and what I mean, back to materials. Some of these next gen reactors need a material that will take you like 50 years in the United, in- in America, in the world to like harvest an ounce. The only place where you can really get it is the moon, in sufficient quantity. Are you really gonna ... H- w- what ... I mean, that's how it's gonna work? Like you're gonna-
- JRJoe Rogan
Go to the moon to harvest energy-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... you're gonna go to the moon, you're gonna harness this material then sh- you know, schlep it all the way, (laughs) all the way back to some place in Illinois to make su- ... I find that hard to believe.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the material?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I- I- I can, I can find it, it's in an email that one of my folks sent me. But it's like, it's a certain form of reactor that uses a very rare material to create the plasmonic energy that can generate all of this stuff, and it's just very hard to find on earth. So, I kind of scratch my head.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's the benefit of this particular type of n- reactor?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Enormous energy. So like, you know, a solar cell gets this much energy, you know, a nuclear reactor does this, and like this other thing does that. And it's super clean and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So my point is like, these next gen reactors, I think have some pretty profound technical problems that haven't been figured out. I applaud the people that are going after it, but I think it's important to not oversell that 'cause it's super hard and there's still some profound technical challenges that haven't been solved yet. You know, we just got past what's called like, you know, positive net energy, meaning, (laughs) you know, let's just like ... Y- y- you put, I'm making up a number, you know, 100 units of energy in and at least you try to get out like 100.01, and we're kind of there. So, that's where we are on these next gen reactors. The old generation of reactors, I'm a total believer in and we should be building these things as fast as possible so that we have an infinite amount of energy. By the way, if you have infinite energy, you know, the most important thing I think that happens is you have a massive peace dividend. There's ... Like, the- the odds of the United States going to war when we have infinite energy approaches zero.
- JRJoe Rogan
But isn't the problem with introducing this to other countries, and I- I believe it was India where they introduced nuclear power plants, then they realized very quickly they could figure out how to make nuclear weapons from that.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes. Yes. When you, when the, uh, when the uranium degrades, it can be used in weapons grade uranium.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the real problem would be if that is not a small handful of countries that have nuclear weapons, but the entire world, it could get very sketchy.
- 58:17 – 1:12:46
The existential fear: nuclear escalation, war incentives, and the military-industrial complex
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think you're, you're touching what I think objectively to me is the single biggest threat facing all of us today. Um ... Um ... I escaped a civil war, so I've- I've- I've had a lived experience of, um, how destructive war can be. The- the collateral damage of war is terrible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where were you?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
In Sri Lanka. And, you know, it was, uh, I was part of the ethnic majority, Sinhalese Buddhist, but, you know, we were, they were fighting Hindu Tamil minority, and it was a 20-year civil war. It flipped the whole country upside down from an incredible place with 99% literacy to just a, you know, a struggling developing third world country, and so we moved to Canada, um, we stay in Canada, um, you know, my parents do whatever they could. They really ... And they got run over by that war. They went from a solidly middle class life to my father, you know, had a ton of s- you know, just alcoholism and didn't really work, and my mother went from being a nurse to being a housekeeper and it was dysfunctional. It really crippled, I think, their dreams for themselves. And so, you know, they breed that into their kids. Fine. But that can't be the solution where hundreds of millions or billions of people have to deal with that risk. And I am objectively afraid that we have lost the script a little bit. I think that folks don't really understand how destructive war can be, but also that there are not enough people objectively afraid of this, and that's what sends my spidey senses up and says, "Hold on a second. When everybody is telling you that this is off the table and not possible, shouldn't you just look at, like, the world around and ask, 'Are we sure that that's true?'" And I come and I think to myself, "Wow, we are at, you know, the biggest risk of my lifetime." And I think the only thing that, that is probably near this is maybe at some point in the Cold War, I don't know 'cause I was so young, definitely, you know, Bay of Pigs.... but it required JFK to draw a hard line in the sand and say, "Absolutely not." So, will we be that fortunate this time around? Are we gonna find a way to eliminate that existential risk? This is why, like, my- my current sort of, like, vein of political philosophy is mostly that, which is, like, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans, there's just so much fighting over so many small stakes issues, in the sense that some of these issues matter m- more or less in different points. But there- there is one issue above all which where if you get it wrong, nothing (laughs) matters, and that is nuclear war. And you have two and a half nuclear powers now that are out and about extending and projecting their power into the world; Russia, China, and Iran. That wasn't what it was like 10 years ago. That wasn't what it was like 25 years ago. It wasn't even what it was like four years ago. I just don't think enough people take a step back and say, "Hold on a second. If this thing escalates, all this stuff that you and I just talked about won't matter." Whether, you know, our kids are on Adderall or not, or the iPad (laughs) or to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Don't give them so much Fortnite, or, you know, material science, or, you know, Optimus and goi- it's all off the table, because we will be destroying ourselves. And- and I just think that that's tragic. We have an enormous responsibility right now for the village elders of the world to tell people, "Guys, we are sleepwalking into something that you can't walk back from."
- JRJoe Rogan
One of the strangest things about us is the kind of wisdom that's necessary to sort of see the future and prognosticate and see where this could go, especially based on the- the- the history of human beings and how many times things have, like, you were talking about Sri Lanka, but there's many examples all over the world of civilizations that were thriving, that were pounded into dust. And because every day is similar for us, we have this inability to look forward and to see, make that leap, and see the potential for disaster that all these things have. And th- this is what freaks me out about when people talk openly about, you know, "We have to win with Russia versus Ukraine." Like, th- what are you talking about? Like, what does-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What is winning?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. What does that mean?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, this- this sounds insane. And then applauding the long-range attacks into Russia now, like, in es- this escalation. "Oh, you know, they're- they're attacking Russia now. They'll show them." Like, what ... Are you in a movie?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, are you- are you ... Do you think that this always ends up with the good guys winning? 'Cause that's not the case in human history-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... at all. And not only that, there is no good guy if s- people start launching nukes. Everybody's a bad guy-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and everybody's fucked.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that's on the table. It's on ... When you see long-range, uh, uh, Israel bombing campaigns in the Lebanon, and you see what's going on with Ukraine and Russia, like, who knows? Who knows how this escalates? Who knows what the retaliatory response is? Who knows what the response to the response is?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, I think- I think ... Like, let me add to this by saying, we know what the response will be not. It will not be measured. It will not be calm. It will not be, "Hey, let's get on the phone and talk about it."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Like, the thing is, there was a long period of time where, you know, America was the leading moral actor in the world, right? And I think that we spoke from a place of wisdom, but also, like, earned respect. But we forget that at the end of the Cold War, it's not that we vanquished the USSR as much as they imploded from within. Right? It was just an economic calamity. They just couldn't afford to keep up with us. And the reason was we had these two edges, right? We had a technological edge, and we had a, um, uh, an economic edge. And when you put those two things together, it created a lot of abundance. Now, we can talk about how some of that is not equal, which I also agree with, but it allowed America to be sort of effectively, for a long period of time, the top dog. The honest reality is that's not where we are today. We are one of two or three. And the problem with that is that you can't look back in history and try to live your life like what it was like in the good old days. You know, we're not the high school football star anymore. So, we need to live in a more modest way, in a more reliable and consistent way, with neighbors that have also, for themselves, done well, and just realize that they have their own incentives. And when you tell them to do something, they're not always gonna listen. So, if we don't understand that and find a way to deescalate these things, what you said is gonna happen. Something is going to be one step too far, a reaction, a reaction, a reaction, and then eventually, somebody will overreact. And that is all just so totally avoidable. And I th- and I- it just frustrates me that we objectively don't understand that. We sweep it under the carpet, and we talk about all the other things. And I understand that s- some of those things, all of those things, let's say, matter, at ... but at some point in time, nothing matters, 'cause if you don't get this right, nothing matters.... and I think we have to find a way of finding people that draw a bright red line and say, "This is the line I will never cross under any circumstance." And I think America needs to do that first, because it's what gives everybody else the ability to exit stage left and be okay with it.
- JRJoe Rogan
The other problem that America clearly has is that there are... there, there's an enormous portion of what controls the government, w- whether you wanna call it the military-industrial complex or military contractors, there, there's so much money to be made in pushing that line, pushing it to the brink of destruction but not past, maintaining a constant state of war but not an apocalypse. And that as long as there's financial incentives to keep escalating and you're s- you're still getting money and they're still signing off on hundreds of billions of dollars to, to funnel this i- and it's all going through these military contractors and bringing over weapons and gear, uh, and the, the windfall's huge.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Huge.
- JRJoe Rogan
The amount of money is huge, and they do not want to shut that off for the sake of humanity, especially if someone can rationalize. You know, you get this diffusion of responsibility when there's a whole bunch of people together and they're all talking about it, everyone's kinda on the same page and you have shareholders that you have to represent. Like, the whole thing is bananas.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So, I think you just said the key thing. This may be super naive... but I think part of the most salvageable feature of the military-industrial complex is that these are for-profit, largely public companies that have shareholders. And I think that if you nudge them to making things that are equally economically valuable or more, ideally more, they probably would do that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, like, what would be an example of that other than weapons manufacturing? Like, what would be equally economically viable?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So part of... When you look at the, um, the, the primes, the five big kind of, like, folks that, that s- you know, get all of the economic activity from the s- uh, Department of Defense, what they act is as an organizing principle for a bunch of subs underneath effectively. They're like a general contractor and then, you know, they have a bunch of subcontractors. Um, there's a bunch of stuff that's happening in these things that you can reorient if you had an economy that could support it. So for example, when you build a drone, okay, what you also are building, a subcomponent, a critical and very valued subcomponent, all the navigation, all the communications, all of it has to be encrypted. You can't hack it. You can't do any of that stuff. There is a broad set of commercial applications for that that are equal to and greater than just the, the profit margin of selling the drone, but they don't really explore those markets. If, for example, we are multi-planetary, I'll just go back to that example... I will bet you those same organizations will make two or three times as much money by being able to redirect that same technology into those systems that you just described. Hey, I need an entire communications infrastructure that goes from Earth to the Moon to Mars. We need to be able to triangulate, we need internet access across all these endpoints, we need to be real-time from the get-go. There's just an enormous amount of economic value to do that. So again, we have these very siloed parts of the economy that are limited by what we know, and what we know is part of what you just said, which is we built these things and then some people convince others to use the things that we built. And I think instead of saying, like, there's, like, some crazy nefarious plot to always go to war, instead if we say, "If you make the thing and you could sell it to a different market and make more money, would these people do it or are they hell-bent on war?" I think it's more that they would just do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
As long as there's not still a business for war.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So then it reduces war to a very different kind of business. I think it's smaller, I think it's more kind of drone-oriented. I'm not saying that war will ne- will go away. I'm not... Uh, there's no utopia where war goes away. But I do think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is a crazy thing to say, really.
- 1:12:46 – 1:36:14
Drugs, fentanyl, and legalization tradeoffs: Oregon, Portugal, and cartel power
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it ma- it makes that possible, and we're gonna have to deal with, uh, a few very uncomfortable factors, one of them being the illegal drug trade and another one being the consequences of prohibition.... and forcing people into doing things-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Prohibition of drugs?
- JRJoe Rogan
Of drugs, yes. Which is, I'm, I'm not comfortable with that, but I, I feel like the only way to disempower illegal drug manufacturing is to have legal drug manufacturing that's regulated.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
The only way to stop fentanyl overdoses is to have cocaine become legal. But the problem with that is you're gonna get a bunch of-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Can, can-
- JRJoe Rogan
... people that are addicted to cocaine.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay. So th- Can I ask you a question?
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm not, I don't do drugs, so I don't understand, but what's the step before it? Like, what causes you to want to do fentanyl? Or c-
- JRJoe Rogan
They don't do fentanyl on purpose.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
Most people-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They start it because of a prescription?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
Most fentanyl overdoses is fentanyl that's cut into other drugs, particularly party drugs like molly and ecstasy, cocaine, even heroin, things along those lines where people think that they're getting a pure thing, but they're getting it from the cartel and, you know-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's laced with this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
The, it's, the, it's cheap and it's very small amounts of fentanyl do incredible damage. Like, the amount of fentanyl that can kill you is like the head of a nail.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's very small. Have you ever seen it in relationship to a penny?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I saw, I've seen a picture of it, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. It's crazy. So the, the problem is if you have a drug and you've cut it with a bunch of other things because you want to sell as much of it as possible, you add a bunch of things into it and to increase the potency, they add fentanyl. And because that, it's all done illegally, it's unregulated, so a lot of people die. And the numbers in the United States, I think there are upwards of 100,000 people.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Can you... Is there something to do to motivate folks to not do the party drugs?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I think you're going to have to have a massive education campaign, and people are gonna have to understand it the same way they understand cigarettes. Like, cigarette smoking in young people is down quite a bit from the '80s, right? And I think that's because of people understanding the consequences of it. But you're always going to have people that wanna smoke cigarettes. And my belief is that they should be able to smoke cigarettes. I don't, I don't think you should do Adderall all day. But if you get a prescription, you can do it. But at least in my mind, you're getting Adderall from a pharmacy, and that pharmacy is going to give you actual Adderall and not some fentanyl-laced thing that's gonna kill you and y- you, you have no idea. You think you're taking the same thing you've always taken, and then one day you're dead.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that's the case with a lot of people today.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
Episode duration: 2:48:02
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Transcript of episode we-mZ-KTe-8
