#2206 - Chamath Palihapitiya

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. I was like, that will live in infamy.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:15)
It is the best clip because he's like a totally different person.

**Joe Rogan** (0:18)
Well, it's what he really is.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:19)
But he really is, exactly.

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
It's like the Ellen thing, you know? It's like.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:25)
I mean, he really did lose his shit there.

**Joe Rogan** (0:28)
Oh, it looks like weirdly, you know? Was it like I got the Christian Bale one because like he's in characters, intense scene, some guys fucking around the background like, God damn it, stop fucking around. I get that.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:40)
Yeah, yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:40)
Like he's in this he's in this frenzy of this intense scene. But what is fucking, what is Bill doing?
Republican talking points on Fox News.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:52)
That was a different story. It was when he was current affair. It's when he's doing like gossip and stuff.

**Joe Rogan** (0:57)
Oh, that's right. He was a gossip guy. He was like an Entertainment Tonight type guy.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:02)
Inside Edition.

**Joe Rogan** (1:03)
One of those deals.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:04)
Inside Edition.

**Joe Rogan** (1:04)
That's what it was?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:05)
That's what it's called.

**Joe Rogan** (1:06)
Ah, yeah. And fucking those things, they never go away. It's such a weird environment, the left and right. There's no centrist news source on television. There's no like, this is probably what's going on, news source. It's always one or the other, and it's like you're living in a bipolar person's brain.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:30)
I think like part of what's happened is we used to have news, and you could make a good living in news, and 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 going to 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 clickometer. The clickometer doesn't go high when you're like, hey guys, I studied this equation. There's a 50 percent chance of this. Nobody cares about that. It's either like it's totally, totally bad, or it's totally, totally good because it just amps people up. And that's a real bummer because I think like you don't know what to think anymore.

**Joe Rogan** (2:32)
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 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. I mean, it was always, it bleeds, it leads in the news because they wanted people, they wanted to win ratings news, but they only had so much control and it was only on for an hour.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:10)
Exactly.

**Joe Rogan** (3:11)
And now it's just this 24-7 anxiety fest.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:14)
It's omnipresent and it's basically made to want, you know, to convince you that you need more of that thing. And it's like a bad diet, you know, like the first few shots of it, the first few bites of it tastes amazing. But, you know, if you eat the full toffee cake every day for the next 365 days and then for the next year, I mean, you're gonna get diabetes, you're gonna get heart disease.
So the version of that is like, your brain just gets totally fried. And then the bigger problem is, and 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.

**Joe Rogan** (4:05)
Right.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:06)
And then if you said to yourself, well, how do you even start? Where do you go? Like if you're, a friend of mine works at 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 what they'll do is they'll post something that says, two plus two equals five. Just that.