Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #338

Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist, engineer, CEO of Social Capital, and co-host of the All-In Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Bambee: https://bambee.com and use code LEX to get free HR audit - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off

in terms of your mistakes Society tells you don’t make them because we will judge you and we will look down on you and I think the really successful people realize that actually no it’s the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success because your error rate will diminish the more mistakes that you make You observe them you figure out where it’s coming from is it a psychological thing is it a you know cognitive thing and then you fix it following is a conversation with your mouth a venture capitalist and engineer founder and CEO of Social Capital previously in early senior executive at Facebook and is uh the co-host of the all in podcast a podcast that I highly recommend for the wisdom and the camaraderie of the four co-hosts also known as Besties this is the Lux Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here’s chamath balajapatia you grew up in a dysfunctional household on welfare you’ve talked about this before what war for you personally psychologically some difficult moments in your childhood I’ll answer that question in a slightly different way which is that I think when you grow up in a household that’s defined by physical abuse and psychological abuse you’re hyper Vigilant all the time and so it’s actually easier for me to point to moments where I was happy or I felt Compassion or I felt safe otherwise every moment I’ll give you a couple of examples like you know I was thinking about this a while ago there was a tree outside of my apartment where we lived when I was growing up and my father would sometimes would make me go outside to take the tree branch that he would hit me with um and so you can imagine if you’re a 10 11 year old kid and you have to deal with that what do you do well a hyper Vigilant child learns how to basically estimate the strength of these branches right how far can he go before it breaks you have to estimate his anger and estimate the effective strength of you know branches and bring back something because you know I remember these moments where if it was he would look at it and then he would make me go out again and get it right get a different one um or you know there was a certain belt that he wore that had this kind of um belt buckle that stuck out and you just wanted to make sure if that if that was the thing that you were going to get hit by that it wasn’t the Buckle facing out because that really hurt and so you became hyper aware of which part of the Buckle was facing out versus facing in in those moments and there are like hundreds of these little examples which essentially I would I would say the through line is that you’re just so on edge right and you walk into this house and you’re just basically trying to get to the point where you leave the house um and so in that microcosm of growing up any moment that’s not like that is seared in my memory in a way that I just can’t describe to a person I’ll give you an example I volunteered when I was in grade five or six I can’t remember which it was in the kindergarten of my school and I would just go and the teacher would you know ask you to clean things up and at the end of that great five year she took me and two other kids to Dairy Queen and I’d never been I’ve never I’d never gone to a restaurant literally because we just we didn’t have the money and I remember the first time I tasted this you know this Dairy Queen meal it was like a hamburger fries a coconut a blizzard and I was like what is this and I felt so special you know because you’re getting something that most people would take for granted oh it’s a Sunday or it’s a you know or I’m really busy let me go take my kid to to fast food I think that you know until I left High School I think and this is not just specific to me but a lot of other people it’s you’re in this hyper Vigilant Loop punctuated with these incredibly visceral moments of compassion by other people you know a different example um we had such a strict budget and we didn’t have a car and so you know I was responsible with my mom to always go shopping and so I learned very early on how to you know look for coupons how to buy things that were on sale or special and we had a very basic diet because you have to budget this thing really precisely but the end of every year where I lived there was a large grocery chain called Loblaws and Loblaws would discount a cheesecake from 7. 99 to 4. 99 and my parents would buy that once a year and we probably did that six or seven times and you can’t imagine how special we felt myself my two sisters we would sit there we would watch the you know the New Year’s Eve celebration on TV we would cut this cheesecake into you know five pieces it felt like everything um so that’s sort of how you know my my existence when I was at that age is For Better or For Worse that’s how I remember it the hyper vigilance Loop is that still with you today what are The Echoes of that that’s told you today the good and the bad if you put yourself in the mind of a young child the thing that that does to you is at a very core basic level it says you’re worthless right because if you can step outside of that and you think about any child in the world they don’t deserve to go through that and at some point by the way I should tell you like I don’t blame my parents anymore it was a process to get there but I feel like they did the best they could and they suffered their own issues and enormous pressures and stresses and so you know I’ve really for the most part forgiven them how did you start to interrupt let go of that blame that was a really long process where I would say the first 35 years of my life I compartmentalized and I avoided all of those memories and I saw external validation right going back to this self-worth idea if you’re taught as a child that you’re worthless because why would somebody do these things to you it’s not because you’re worth something you think to yourself very viscerally you’re worth nothing and so then you go out and you seek external validation maybe you try to go and get into a great College you try to get a good job you try to make a lot of money you try to you know demonstrate in superficial ways with the car you drive or the clothes you wear that you deserve people to care about you to try to make up for that really deep hole but at some point you it doesn’t get filled in and so you have a choice and so for me what happened was in in the course of a six-month period I lost my best friend and I lost my father and it was really like the dam broke loose because I the compartmentalization stopped working because the reminder of why I was compartmentalizing was gone and so I had to go through this period of disharmony to really understand and Steel Man his perspective and can you imagine trying to do that to go through all of the things where you have to now look at it from his perspective and find compassion and empathy for what he went through and then I shift you know the focus to my mom and I said well you were not the victim actually you were somewhat complicit as well because you were of sound mind and body and you were in the room when it happened so then I had to go through that process with her and steal man her perspective and at the end of it I never Justified what they did but I’ve been able to forgive what they did um I think they did the best they could and at the end of the day they did the most important thing which is they gave me and my sisters a shot by emigrating by giving up everything by staying in Canada and doing wha