Joe Rogan Experience #2206 - Chamath Palihapitiya

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music)

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      Talking with Bill at live, it's like that- that will live in infamy. (laughs)

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:15

      (laughs) It is the best clip because he's like a totally different person.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      Well, it's what he really is.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:20

      What he really is, yeah, exactly.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      Yeah, it's like the Ellen thing. You know, it's like... (laughs)

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:24

      (laughs) I mean, he really did lose his shit there.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:28

      Oh, uh, like, weirdly. You know? It wasn't like... I got the Christian Bale one-

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:34

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:34

       ... 'cause, like, he's in character, there's an intense scene. Some guy's fucking around in the background-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:37

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:37

       ... like, "Goddammit, stop fucking around!"

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:39

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       I get that.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:40

       Yeah, yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan0:40

       Like, he's in this, he's in this frenzy of this intense scene. But what is fucking-

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:46

       (laughs)

   18. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       ... what is Bill doing? (laughs)

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:50

       (laughs)

   20. JRJoe Rogan0:50

       He's, Republican talking points on Fox News and he c-

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:52

       No, it was before.

   22. JRJoe Rogan0:53

       That was a different type, Current Affair, right?

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:53

       It was when he was Current Affair. It's when he's doing like-

   24. JRJoe Rogan0:56

       Right.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:56

       ... gossip and stuff.

   26. JRJoe Rogan0:57

       Oh, that's right!

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:58

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan0:58

       He was a gossip guy.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00

       Yeah, yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       He was like an Entertainment Tonight type guy.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   (laughs) …

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:00

      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)

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:15

      (laughs)

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:15

      That's crazy.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:16

      It's crazy.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:16

      That's crazy.

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:17

      They can make a Drake song in three minutes.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:19

      The computer is going to win.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:20

      Yeah.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:20

      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)

   10. JRJoe Rogan18:02

       Right.

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:02

       You got f- five kids running around. (laughs)

   12. JRJoe Rogan18:04

       (laughs)

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:04

       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.

   14. JRJoe Rogan18:41

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:41

       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."

   16. JRJoe Rogan19:45

       Next.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya19:45

       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)

   18. JRJoe Rogan19:53

       (laughs)

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya19:54

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:12

       Or TikTok.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya20:13

       Or TikTok.

   22. JRJoe Rogan20:14

       Yeah.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya20:15

       Um, yeah, because TikTok, they're like this, boom-

   24. JRJoe Rogan20:17

       Yep.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya20:17

       ... 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.

   26. JRJoe Rogan21:01

       Mm-hmm.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya21:01

       Yeah. We ... You got a flip phone. (laughs)

   28. JRJoe Rogan21:03

       Yeah.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya21:04

       And you're texting (laughs) like this to your parents, or you're calling, you know. Um, and I don't know. It- it may be worth trying. There was a crazy thing. I don't know, Jim, if you can find this, but there was a crazy thing, Eton College, which is like the most elite, if you will, private school in the UK. It's kind of where like all the prime ministers of the United Kingdom have matriculated through Eton College. It's like- it's like high school, fancy high school. Uh, they sent a memo to the parents for the incoming class, and the headmaster said, "When you get on campus with your child, we're going to give you, like, what is basically a Nokia flip phone. You are going to take the SIM card out of this kid's iPhone or Android. You're gonna stick it in this thing, and this is how they're gonna communicate with you and communicate amongst each other while they're on campus at Eton."

   30. JRJoe Rogan21:57

       Wow. Mandatory?
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Well, it seems it's…

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:00

      economic. And again, I think, you know, this is like the problem, I'm gonna sound like every other, you know, nerd from central casting from Silicon Valley telling you this, but I do think that there's a- a version of this AI thing which blows the doors wide open again.... and I think we owe it to ourselves to figure out how to make that more than, more likely than not likely.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:22

      Well, it seems it's inevitable, right? AI's emergence and its, w- where it goes from here on is inevitable. It's gonna happen, and we should probably try to steer it at least in a way that benefits everybody. And I agree with you. There is a world I could see where AI changes everything. And, um, one of the things that makes me most hopeful is, uh, a much better form of translation so that we'll be able to understand each other better.

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:49

      Totally.

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:49

      That's a giant part of the problem in the world. It's, you know, the Tower of Babel. So we really can't communicate with each other very well, so we really don't know what the problems are in these particular areas or why, how people feel about us, how we feel about-

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:02

      Can't empathize.

   6. JRJoe Rogan31:03

      Yeah. It's, uh, it's... Yeah, we can't. And it's very easy to not empathize with someone where you can't even, you don't even know what their letters are.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:10

      Have you, have you been in a, like a situation where you have a translator with the thing in your ear?

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:14

      No.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:15

      Empathy zero. Because the problem is you, y- you, you're, the person there is giving it to you in a certain tone because it's first person.

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:23

       Oh, I've had that with-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:24

       Yeah, and then but-

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:24

       ... with, when I interview fighters.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:25

       But like, but-

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:26

       I've had translators.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:26

       Yeah, but like when you're here, it's very hard to feel empathy for this person 'cause it's this person that you're focused on-

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:32

       Right.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:32

       ... 'cause you're trying to catch it, so-

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:33

       Right.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:34

       ... you hear the words. I think somewhat of the meaning is a little bit lost. (laughs) And then you go back to this person, and you say something, and they're in the same problem that you are. So I agree that the translation thing is, is cool. I think that there are, there's so, like there's just so... There's going to be some negative areas, and I think that there's going to be a lot of pressure on certain jobs, and we gotta figure that out. So it's not all roses. But some areas, if you imagine them, I'll give you a couple if you want, are just bananas, I think.

   20. JRJoe Rogan32:06

       Okay.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:07

       Okay, so I'll, I'll go from the most likely to like the craziest.

   22. JRJoe Rogan32:12

       Okay.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:12

       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?

   24. JRJoe Rogan32:36

       Oh.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:36

       It's about 30%.

   26. JRJoe Rogan32:38

       Wow.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:38

       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?

   28. JRJoe Rogan33:05

       Mm.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya33:05

       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.

   30. JRJoe Rogan34:43

       Mm.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      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-

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:48

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:48

      ... 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.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:00

      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-

   5. JRJoe Rogan47:43

      Boy, what kind of people are gonna go first there (laughs) ?

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:47

      I think that there'll be a lot of people that are frustrated with what's happening here.

   7. JRJoe Rogan47:51

      Yeah, sure, just like the people that got on the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and made their way across the ocean.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:58

      It all, it all starts with, like, a group of people that are just like, "I'm, I'm fed up with this."

   9. JRJoe Rogan48:02

      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-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:17

       (laughs)

   11. JRJoe Rogan48:18

       ... compli- completely psycho- it's Australia on meth, you know? It's like-

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:23

       (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan48:23

       ... the worst-case scenario, the, the, the castouts of society.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:27

       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-

   15. JRJoe Rogan48:41

       Right.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:42

       ... that's probably what it felt like.

   17. JRJoe Rogan48:44

       Yeah.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:44

       Most people on the mainland when they were like, "Ciao, ciao-"

   19. JRJoe Rogan48:47

       Yeah.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:47

       ... were probably thinking, "Man, this is insane."

   21. JRJoe Rogan48:50

       Right.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:50

       Um, so it'll always look like that. It'll be easier to rationalize it in hindsight, but I do think that there will be a lot of people that wanna go when it's possible to go. And, like look, uh, you know, we're in this studio. We could be anywhere. We could be in Salt Lake City, right? We could be in Rome, right? We could be in Perth. You don't know.

   23. JRJoe Rogan49:12

       Right.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya49:12

       It's all the same.

   25. JRJoe Rogan49:13

       Especially today.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya49:14

       (laughs) So you, you could be on Mars- (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan49:16

       Yeah, you could, you could.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya49:17

       ... and you wouldn't know.

   29. JRJoe Rogan49:17

       Yeah.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya49:18

       You know? Um-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Right. …

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:00

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:02:12

      Right.

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:12

      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."

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:02:38

      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-

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:27

      What is winning?

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:03:28

      Yeah. What does that mean?

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:29

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:03:29

      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?

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:42

      Right.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:03:42

       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-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:49

       Right.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:03:49

       ... at all. And not only that, there is no good guy if s- people start launching nukes. Everybody's a bad guy-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:54

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:03:54

       ... and everybody's fucked.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:03:55

       Yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:03:56

       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?

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:15

       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."

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:04:27

       Right.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:28

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:07:07

       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.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:52

       Huge.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:07:53

       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.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:08:10

       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.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:08:46

       Well, like, what would be an example of that other than weapons manufacturing? Like, what would be equally economically viable?

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:08:53

       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.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:11:03

       As long as there's not still a business for war.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:08

       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-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:11:28

       Which is a crazy thing to say, really.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:30

       Unfortunately, I think that we're always going to be fighting for some resource. So th- the last 30 or 40 years, all these forever wars, we were fighting over energy effectively.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:11:39

       Well, this is my one bright spot that I think about with AI as well. It's like everyone's terrified of the open border situation and criminals coming across the border and... wouldn't the solution be d- not have a place like a desperate third-world country where people are trying to escape on foot with their families? If we were living next door to another United States and you could just travel freely back and forth between the two of them 'cause it really didn't matter-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:24:12

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:15:00

      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.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:15:19

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:15:19

      And that's the case with a lot of people today.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:15:21

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:15:21

      Especially with party drugs. I don't think you should do heroin. I don't think you should do cocaine. I don't think you should fuck your life up, and I know too many people who have fucked their life up. But I also don't think that I should be able to, to tell you what you can do, especially when there's all these drugs that are readily available, particularly alcohol, which is one of the most destructive drugs to your health, to relationships and families, to societies. How many alcoholics, how many drunk driving accidents, how many dr- dr- drunk people murdered other people? There's just horrible consequences of alcohol, but I completely support alcohol being legal.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:15:57

      Yeah, same.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:15:57

      We, but we have learned how to consume alcohol as a culture.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:01

      What about... What about what happened in Oregon? You know, like Oregon went-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:16:04

      Yes.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:04

       They passed, they legalized it-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:16:06

       Yes.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:06

       And now they-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:16:07

       Right. Well, first of all-

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:08

       ... un-legalized it?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:16:08

       (laughs) They were already off the rails.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:11

       (laughs)

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:16:11

       Okay? This is not like legalizing, uh, drugs in a very... It's not like legalizing drug in San Francisco in the year 2000. It's, it's a completely different scenario. So you have these people that are really... They're accustomed to tents and subsidizing drug addicts, and they're, they're accustomed to this very bizarre breakdown of civil society where you're seeing open-air drug markets and everyone's fine with it, and it's somehow or another kind and compassionate to allow this to take place everywhere. And that's what you have in Portland, right? Portland is probably one of the most liberal cities that we have, the most leftist cities that we have. So for Oregon to do it that way, I think it's a, like an, an awesome libertarian notion to say, "You know what? We shouldn't l- make any of these things a crime." These are personal choices, and you can make good personal choices or bad ones, and we'll have everything. But the problem is the fabric of society, the, the, the encouragement of discipline and of hard work and of accomplishment had been eroded to the point where-

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:17:22

       Right.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:17:22

       ... accomplishment meant that there was something wrong with you.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:17:25

       Right.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:17:25

       Like, if you were a person that was eat the rich, tax the rich, if you're a person that had accomplished something great, it wasn't because of some extraordinary effort you put in. Even if it was, it was you did something to fuck over other people, and that's the only way you get rich in this world. And it's just b- bizarre.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:17:41

       It's bizarre. That's bizarre.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:17:42

       And it, it permeated Portland.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:17:45

       Right.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:17:45

       So when you (laughs) introduce free heroin to that, like, you're gonna get more problems. It's just... And you're subsidizing people for living on the streets, which they do. I mean, I, I watched this interview where they were talking to these people in the Pacific Northwest where they moved there specifically so they could be homeless because they knew that they'd get money. And they, there's no incentive to get out of those tents. There's no incentive. There's free food and free drugs, and they give you money. And they're like, "Okay."

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:11

       Right. So that didn't fail because of the actual drug policy-

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:18:14

       Right.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:14

       ... but more of the other social policies.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:18:16

       I think f- Have you ever heard of Dr. Carl Hart?

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:19

       No.

Episode duration: 2:48:02