Chamath Palihapitiya on Investing, Mental Health, Poker & SPACs

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Joseph Cass

Hello, everyone. My name is Joe Cass. I'm a Director at S&P Global Ratings. I'm also the creator and host of Fixed Income in 15. So today, I'm joined by two electrical engineers by trade, Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder of Social Capital; and Naveen Sarma, Senior Director in our Corporate Ratings practice, S&P Global Ratings. So today, we're talking investing philosophy, we're talking social media, movies, and also poker.

So a quick reminder, disclaimer, that the views of the external guests are their views alone, and they do not represent the views of S&P Global Ratings. 

Joseph Cass

Okay, let's go. Chamath, first question goes to you. So a lot of our viewers, a lot of our listeners, will be familiar with your journey as an executive, entrepreneur, and now an investor. But for those who aren't familiar, how did you go from University of Waterloo grad to this global tech investor?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, the path before, I think, is almost as important. So I was born in Sri Lanka, and at the -- and I grew up there until about the age of 6 or 7, and then my parents moved to Canada where my father worked in the embassy. And when it was time for us to go home, so 4 years later, when I was around 11 years old, he filed for refugee status because there was a civil war in the country, and we stayed.

And so I was very much a product of the Canadian public school system, which really taught us a lot about STEM. I think they really valued science and math and education and computer science. I was also the byproduct of a program that the Ontario government had to help at-risk youth get jobs, and they helped me get a job at a really great up-and-coming technology company in the area called Newbridge Networks, which was started by another -- by a very prolific entrepreneur, Terry Matthews.

And so all of that really bred in me a desire to do something technical, and I was really inspired by Silicon Valley. And so I would read all the magazines and understood all the characters. And so I did a degree in electrical engineering. I really had no idea how to get down to Silicon Valley. And so my first job was in finance actually, which doesn't make much sense, but at the time, I thought I'll learn how to invest, and I worked at an investment bank for a year trading interest rate derivatives. It was incredibly important for everything I did later on.

But then literally, what happened was I got 0 bonus 1 year or that year because my ego was a little out of control. And another huge blessing in disguise, and so I just applied to all these jobs. I said I have nothing to lose to stay here. And I got a job at TIPCO, I think, and eBay, and a small music startup, and it was a 11 or 12-person company. And I thought, the music startup, I'll have a better edge because I'm one of 11 24-year-olds, whereas everybody else, I'd be working for much older people; I didn't really know the political dynamics.

And so that's how my career started. I worked at a small company. It was part of AOL. I rose through the ranks at AOL. I ran the instant messaging business there. During that time, I did a big deal between AOL and Facebook. That's how I met Zuck in 2005, 2006 through my friend, Sean Parker. And then I joined Facebook, and I worked there for 11 years -- sorry, for 5 years until 2011.

And then in 2011, I said, I had learned at that point how to build businesses and how to build startups within businesses, but I had never started my own startup, and so I put these two passions together. I'd always wanted to be an investor, I'd always wanted to be in Silicon Valley, I really wanted to figure out how to start my own business. And so that's how Social Capital came together in 2011, June of 2011, and I've been doing it ever since now for almost 12 years.

Joseph Cass

Fantastic. Chamath, we've had -- we've been lucky to have, I suppose, a ton of legendary investors joining this podcast over the past 2.5 years, like Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, David Rubenstein, et cetera. So at a high level, what's your investing philosophy, and what are you really trying to achieve at Social Capital?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, I think that this answer may be a little counterintuitive, but it probably isn't. You have to be -- as an investor, I think, in order to be extremely successful, you have to understand both your strengths, but also your biases, and then you have to tune your style of investing to a type of market that benefits from those strengths and where you can control your biases.

So in my example, very early on at Facebook, and then in the early parts of Social Capital, what I proved to myself is that I had quite a bit of a knack of being early to things, early to trends, early to ideas, being able to iterate and build small versions of things that could then grow and become big things, and that gave me a lot of confidence that I generally could see a little bit around the corner before a lot of others. Not years before, but months before, and that's enough of an edge, right? So that was a strength.

My bias is really that I tend to be very dogmatic around certain ideas, and so I had to find a way where I could minimize my losses. And the different way of saying that is I had to always think about returns as the northern star, irrespective of what I invested in.

And so technology investing, early-stage technology investing, actually brings these two principles together into one art form or practice, which is you have to have this propensity to be slightly early before the mass market of other investors realize that something is important. And by being slightly early -- so that's one of my strengths.

And by being slightly early, you actually can do an incredible job of risk management by preserving an incredible amount of the upside of making an investment where you can generate these crazy returns, but where your downside is still 1x and you're really not losing that much money if you're wrong. And so it allowed me to manage to this tendency that I have to be a little sticky in things, and it allowed me to exploit the strength that I have of being a little bit early. And so that's how I run the business.

For me, the northern star is returns. You must generate best-in-class returns across vintages, across asset classes, across security types. And that is the key differentiator of people that are exceptional, and that's what I would aspire to be able to look back and say to myself is that I'm really good at this craft. And I think in another 10 years, I'll know whether I'm really good or not.

Joseph Cass

Fantastic. So Naveen, you're one of our senior analysts covering media in the U.S. So can you give us an overview of the state of the media industry at the moment, maybe focusing a bit on the big social media companies?

Naveen Sarma

Sure. Happy to do so. So that's a complicated question because at this instant, we're looking at a potential recession for next year. And so when we think about the media sector, media sector is obviously very exposed to discretionary spending, and so it's exposed to recession.

And so we're spending a lot of our time now thinking about what the impact is on -- from a recession on the media companies, especially the social media companies as they've matured, and I think it's fair to say that they're a lot more mature now than they were back when we had a previous recession back in 2008. We're looking at the impact on advertising trends for those companies. Growth is going to slow.

And the other thing that we're worried about is both regulation, which continues to hang over the space, and honestly, it seems to be the only thing that we can get Republicans and Democrats to agree on is regulation. Not that they can actually come up with any legislation, but that's obviously a concern that's going to continue to overhang the space, and we may never see resolution of that for some time to come.

And the other thing, I think, is competition as we've seen this from TikTok, which is taking share from Facebook, a little bit of share from Facebook. You're seeing competition in the space where historically, it was so dominated by two operators or two companies. Now, you're seeing more companies come in and offer alternatives to competing -- to advertising either on Alphabet or on Facebook.

Joseph Cass

Fantastic. Chamath, given what you previously said in the prior question, your involvement in Facebook in the earlier stages of the company, I'd be interested to know your current view of the social media ecosystem and the future of big tech.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, I think it's important to recognize that everything is impermanent. There really is nothing that you can point to that, as an institution or a company or a product, is exactly the same way that it was 10, 20, 30 years ago, 100 years ago. And I think in technology, the cycles of creative destruction are much faster. So when you apply that idea to big tech, I think that there are a couple of takeaways.

The first is that there was a moment, and I think that moment is roughly near its end, where they were the dominant way in which value was created and also captured inside of technology and in the public markets, frankly. But I think the reality is twofold. One, which is legislative, and the second, which is bottoms-up from users. On the first side, what you're starting to see now across every single country is each country taking their own independent view of what big tech's role should be within their borders.

I think in the next few weeks and months in the United States, the Supreme Court is going to hear an incredibly important case around the ability for big tech to be protected by what is called Section 230, which is the set of laws that essentially allow it to behave as a pipe versus behave as an editor and thus have liability. And so those were not things that we ever thought were going to be litigated 5 and 10 years ago, where these companies were really ascendant. So that's the first thing that's changing.

The second thing is if you actually just look at user counts, well, what was interesting is the first two things to get to more than 1 billion users were the platforms themselves, iOS and Android. Then the next few things to get to billions of users were the apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, et cetera.

Now, what's interesting is the thing that is about to crest and get to 1 billion users are actual individual people, right? There are creators that now have hundreds and hundreds of millions of followers, and so it stands to reason that the value is moving to the right. So it started in the platforms, it coalesced in the apps for a while, and now it's moving to these individual content creators.

And as those people build their businesses, they will become the new platforms, and they will become the new value sinks where value is created and trapped, and you'll see creators go public and you'll have incredible amounts of value created. And I suspect the aggregate market cap of that will rival the aggregate market cap of the apps, which rivaled the aggregate market caps of the platforms.

So whether it's top-down regulation or whether it's bottom-up disruption from the creator economy, I think that you're seeing a reallocation of value. And so again, it's naturally taking care of itself. There was a period where they were dominant, and now I think there's a period where they are important, but one of several.

Joseph Cass

Great. Chamath, you recently wound down two of your SPACs. So what's your journey been like over the past few years? And in your opinion, what do people get right, and also what do people get wrong in this space?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, I think it's really important to recognize that -- again, for me, I am a broad-based investor in technology. I do early-stage investments, late-stage investments, crossover investments, and in some select cases, public investments, but the unifying theme are twofold. One is that I try to partner with really compelling entrepreneurs that I believe have the potential to build something great, and number two is I try to underwrite a business that is early in a theme that is much, much bigger than themselves which can create a lot of value.

So SPACs, as an example, was in a moment where it was very clear to me that there are some exceptional businesses that needed a large quantum of capital to achieve their goals, and if they achieve their goals, it would be highly disruptive in their category, but that the IPO process and other capital raising processes were broken for these companies.

And so I took a product, a SPAC, off the shelf, dusted it off, learned about it, executed a transaction with Richard Branson for Virgin Galactic, which was quite successful, and gave that company the quantum of capital that they would need to build the space business that they had envisioned, and then I subsequently did it for a few more companies like Opendoor and SoFi and Clover.

The problem is that I think people misunderstood what I was doing and interpreted it as essentially a very simple mechanism to capture some economic value. And the minute that that happened, it made that asset class extremely difficult in order to transact, it had low investor trust, and frankly, it had low deal quality.

So we are now in the second phase of any market. Phase 1, there are the early kind of people that go and pioneer something. In Phase 2, you have a ton of fast followers, but at the end of Phase 2, you also have a washout. And we're in the middle of the washout period, where you have to get all of that fast money out of a market. And time will tell whether SPACs will have a Phase 3, but in Phase 3, you will slowly rebuild credibility with a handful of practitioners that know how to apply their craft.

By the way, just to make this point, Joe, you've seen this in other markets. Private equity is the perfect example. There was an early phase of private equity where there was a handful of pioneers, and then it culminated in Phase 2 when there were these regulatory hearings and folks like Henry Kravis were dragged in front of Congress. Now he was a good practitioner, but there were all kinds of less than great practitioners who then were flushed out of the system.

And then what did you see? You saw Carlyle, KKR, Blackstone -- you had a handful of these phenomenal organizations slowly rebuild an entire industry. I don't know if SPACs have that potential, but I think it's important to view it as yet another toolkit in the capitalists' toolbox to help companies be successful.

So that's the role I think it played, and in that, I tried to play an early role. When I saw that the market was perturbed and perverted by all these other players, I stepped back. And we will see over time whether we can rebuild this in a more structurally repeatable way.

Joseph Cass

Great. Naveen, you also cover the entertainment industry, so like movies, movie studios, the streaming platforms. So I always hear these buzzwords, so cord-cutting, cord nevers, moviegoers, movie knowers. So what are the post-pandemic trends in these areas, and how do you think they could evolve over time?

Naveen Sarma

Sure. So look, all of these trends started developing before the pandemic, but when we all got locked up at home, it really accelerated a lot of those trends. And I'll talk about it near term and short term -- or near term and longer term.

So near term, what's interesting is we're looking at these trends and wondering if there's a little bit of a reversal back to the mean. People are going back to movie theaters. People seem to be a bit more -- not skeptical, but they're not migrating as quickly to streaming services and cutting the cord as maybe we thought they were going to do coming out of the pandemic.

But I think longer term, all of these trends are going to continue, right? Linear TV will eventually die. It will take time, probably longer than most people think, but that will eventually die, and the streaming services are going to become the distribution mechanism for distributing content. I don't think that's going to change. And so the question that we constantly debate internally is how long is that process going to take?

What's interesting, I think, is the media companies, the legacy media companies that we cover, have historically complained about not having access to consumers, not having a direct link to consumers. That was always done through a middleman, whether it was a cable company or a movie theater, and so they never quite had the data that they wanted in terms of knowing who is watching or consuming their content.

And in a way, the streaming services they've all launched now gives them that venue to be able to closely monitor, know exactly what consumers are doing with their content. Having said that, it's also opened up them to the fickleness of consumers. So consumers cut the cord, will drop streaming services.

Frankly, consumers don't really want to pay a lot of money for content, and so I think media companies and entertainment companies are suddenly discovering that -- or discovering over time that consumers -- that maybe -- that having this direct link to consumers may not be the greatest thing in the world. We're not going back anywhere, but it's interesting to note that they're discovering that consumers are basically difficult people to deal with.

Joseph Cass

Sure, sure. Thanks, Naveen. So Chamath, changing the subject slightly, I wanted to get your take on ESG and climate investing. So what's your view on how ESG investing has evolved over the past, say, 3 years? And do you take it into account when looking at your own investments?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think economically, the energy transition that we're going to go through from hydrocarbons to renewables is a multi-decade and multi-decatrillion dollar opportunity just because you're talking about basically completely changing how the world works: infrastructure, transportation, construction. These industries are just too large, there's too much sunk cost, there's too much CapEx, there's too much OpEx for it not to be measured in trillions.

So from that perspective, I think energy transition is probably one of the richest and most intellectually stimulating and economically remunerating ways to spend one's time as an investor, so I'm really dedicated to it. It's probably 40% to 50% of my time just because I'm really convinced that this is something very, very important. So I'm a big believer in that.

I just think that what ESG has been to date has been more of a corporatist marketing veneer that essentially greenmail people to get their money. I think these ESG filters started off in a good place, but I think that they, again, have been morphed and changed by middlemen and organizations that want to essentially apply attacks to sources of money, and then other people who want to run business models that take advantage of that.

It's not clear to me, and I think the data has been very clear that, for example, a simple example, an ESG fund actually owns energy transition stocks. You can look inside of any of the large ETF players, and it's kind of a joke. It's basically an S&P 500 proxy hugging strategy. Other times, you have ESG funds that own big tech in size. Some of them even own the big hydrocarbon businesses.

And so if you're really intellectually honest, it's a bit of a head scratcher what these labels are and what they actually mean because they're not effectively used. Despite that, the actual pure energy investing business, energy transition, is incredibly vibrant and super opportune, I think.

Joseph Cass

Thanks, Chamath. So Naveen, a couple of months ago, I had a guy doing the podcast called Jared Isaacman. So he's a SpaceX Astronaut Commander and the CEO of a company called Shift4. So that is the closest thing I've got to a link to your first job out of college, which was at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. So very interested to know what you were doing there, and how was the work you were doing plugged into the NASA space missions?

Naveen Sarma

Sure. Good question. I'm glad you dug that up. It's been a long time since I've talked about that. So Draper Laboratory was my first job, as you pointed out. I was getting my master's degree in electrical engineering, and so it was my first job out of college. And we worked on something that was really interesting, and it was a JPL mission called Cassini.

And if you go and look that up, Cassini was a mission that was supposed to fly to Saturn. It did. It was supposed to fly through the rings and study it, and then eventually, it crashed into Saturn. And it did that, I'm going to say 4 or 5 years ago. And we were tasked with Draper to come up with a brand-new cutting-edge guidance system that would be used on that mission.

Ultimately, they chose not to do that, and they went with a different vendor, but it was really interesting because I got to do real-life engineering. I got to go out to JPL and spend time with the team out there and see the mission and go through the requirements. And I did follow that afterwards, even though it wasn't a product that I worked on. It was something that I was interested in, and the day that the Cassini crashed into Saturn, it was a good day and a sad day, but it was nice to see that the mission actually worked out.

Joseph Cass

Cool. Thanks, Naveen. Chamath, there's going to be lots of viewers of this podcast who might just be starting out in their careers. So I've heard you talk before about the value of personal equity in the company you're working for. So interested to know how you discovered the power of personal equity, and also, if you had any general advice for those early on in their careers.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, I think there are a bunch of different ways to answer this question, but maybe the most general way of saying it is I think there's a very stark separation that's happening inside the workforce of people who are employees and have an employee mindset, and people who are owners and have an owner mindset. And I think that those attitudes, in my experience, are independent of seniority and they are independent of compensation.

One category, the owners, tend to not make excuses. They tend to do the extra work. They tend to go the extra mile. There's an incredible passage in Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs where he talks about the back of the drawer, the back of the armoire, depending on where you're from. But essentially, Steve's dad made these things, and he would make sure that he finished the back of the drawer, and Steve asked him, why do you do that? And he said, well, because I would know that it was unfinished.

That's an ownership mentality. Whereas most people, particularly if you've graduated from topflight schools, are indoctrinated in this form of victimhood that makes them less effective than they could be, and unfortunately, I think that the more and more people that just deem themselves as the system happens to them are relegated and doomed to frustration.

So personal equity just means realizing that you are in control of your own decisions, your time, that there is real tremendous value in going the extra mile, and you should endeavor to find an opportunity that allows you to do that where you don't feel resentful for doing it.

A different way of saying this is it's important for young people to figure out what they're good at and then what their biases are because whatever they're good at is also what creates a bias. It's very much an offsetting thing. And you got to find an opportunity that speaks to those strengths and not try to virtue signal and chase after labels that society gives you. So if you do that and act like an owner and stop being a baby, you'll succeed.

Joseph Cass

Cool. Thanks, Chamath. Chamath, you're part of the All-In podcast. So for anyone who doesn't know, it's a weekly podcast including yourself and three friends. They're all very influential in their specific fields. So you're talking about markets and issues you think traditional media isn't really covering in a great amount of detail. Very interested to know how the podcast popularity has impacted your professional, your personal life, and how do you stay engaged versus it just becoming another job, another thing to do?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, the most important thing is these are three of my best friends, two of them I've known for 20-plus years and one I've known for 10 years. And so through the ups and downs of that, we've always been able to cut through the BS and remain friends, see each other on a semi-regular basis. Some of us we see each other much more regularly because I also host a poker game.

So it's rooted in friendship, which allows it to be very kind of a normal thing that we all look forward to just to see each other. It feeds into my job. I'm reading probably, I don't know, 15 to 20 hours a week of random stuff constantly, and so it gives me an opportunity to sound out what my current thinking is.

And this is another thing that I think is very misunderstood. I have opinions and they're very strong opinions at times, but they're very loosely held, and I'm constantly changing my mind. I could say something today, and then by tomorrow, I will be on the exact opposite side. So I try to remain intellectually flexible, and so that podcast is a great way to just talk things out loud and help myself.

In terms of the business, I think it's been great just to be able to connect with individual people and build a brand that's known to tell the truth and cut through the clutter. I think that's what we've -- the four of us have been known for just in our own careers, and so to marry that to a product that gives an alternative to people, I don't think it should replace what everybody else would otherwise consume, but I think as a complement, it could be a very useful thing to add into one's media diet.

Joseph Cass

Sure. So Naveen, as someone who's worked analyzing the media and the entertainment business for more than 20 years, what's your view on VR, virtual reality? And how do you think you can play a role in the entertainment universe, and realistically, how far are we away from a mass adoption?

Naveen Sarma

Sure. It's a great question, and it probably could also apply to things like, more broadly, the metaverse. And the answer I'm going to give is driven more from a credit standpoint, which I think we'll have probably a more conservative bend to it, which is I think all of these things are distribution, right?

When I break up media, I look at media as in content creation and different ways to distribute it, and distributing it also has an effect on the type of media that's being made. When I look at all these future technologies or even these current technologies, they will all evolve over time and have an influence on media. We're seeing the decline of the cable distribution, for example, for television. We're seeing the rise of -- I mean, we're seeing money that Facebook is spending on metaverse.

All of these things will eventually influence the way people consume content. I personally think it's going to be a number of years away, and for the companies that I pay close attention to, the impact to earnings and to revenues is one that's going to be a number of years away. And so it's something that we'll monitor closely, but it isn't going to be a driving force in the way we think about ratings for a number of years only because it's not going to be a significant part of that revenue stream for a long time.

But these are really fascinating things to pay attention to because it is the way that distribution is going to evolve over time. The question is, is it 5 years or 10 years? And that's the healthy debate in the industry right now is, when do these things become more important in the revenue streams and cash flows for the media sector?

Joseph Cass

Thanks, Naveen. So Chamath, the road as an investor, as you know better than most, is sometimes a rocky road. So how do you manage your physical and your mental health when dealing with these big successes and also failures as an investor?

Chamath Palihapitiya

It's a really good question. So physical health is actually, for me, very important because it helps me modulate my mental health. So on the physical side, I try to exercise 4 days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 8:00 to 9:00. I have a trainer. It is a religious part of my schedule because it really gets all of the energy out right at the beginning of the morning so I don't do anything stupid. So I don't walk into the office and buy or sell something out of complete emotion.

No, but all kidding aside, so then it allows me in a really balanced way -- for an investor, I think what's really critical, for me at least, is to understand why I've made certain decisions, when those decisions led to success that were not attributable to me, and when those decisions led to failures that were attributable to me.

Those are the two modes that are the most important. The first one allows you to see that there are a lot of market dynamics that are much bigger than you, and so it allows you to stay humble and realize that you are a participant of a very large system, and sometimes the dynamics of those system very much benefit you.

In the case -- in that specific instance, what I would tell you as an example, is I have been enormously lucky for two decisions: one, which is my own, which is I wanted to be a tech and tech investor; but two, which is the Federal Reserve, which is zero interest-rate policy. My entire sector, this entire area, has overwhelmingly benefited from ZIRP, and so it would be really derelict that we would strut around thinking that we were better than everybody else. We're not. We benefited from zero interest rates, which was a decision that the Fed implemented and broke the glass on a decade ago and just kept going for political reasons.

The second is when I've made a mistake and we've lost money, I need to understand what was it that I did that caused us to lose money, so I always keep a track. There's a table that I have, and on the left-hand side of the table are all the biggest deals I've ever made money on, right? And I count the top 20. And there are some big wins, billion dollar wins. I made $1.2 billion here, $1.8 billion there, $2 billion a year, whatever, all the way down to several hundred million dollars. We've been very successful. But again, a lot of that success, I would say, is some good decision-making, but the benefit of a tailwind that the Federal Reserve gave us.

But on the right-hand side, I count my 20 biggest losers, and I add them all up and I create a ratio. In the case of Social Capital, over 12 years, we've compounded money at 32%. Our ratio of winners to losers is 23:1, and what's important is I've never lost more than $28 million in a deal, ever, across any security type asset class, anything.

But even when I make -- when I lose money, I have to go inside and figure out, why did I do that? What blind spot did I have? How much of this was my own ego? And so that allows me to manage my mental health because mental health is really just the clarity to understand that you are part of a huge system, that you're not that important, that everybody else is going through their own stuff. You got to be kind to people. Hopefully, people will be kind to you.

So it's that humility of understanding that you're just one of 8 billion people in a system is really important to anchor yourself so that you can keep making good decisions. And so I look at these wins and losses so that I can remind myself that the wins are really not us, but the losses, there are parts of our thinking that could get better, and that helps me stay grounded and rooted in reality.

Joseph Cass

Great. So Naveen, who in the world of finance and investing do you look up to? So that could be personal mentors or people more in the public eye.

Naveen Sarma

Sure. So I don't think there's any one person that I look up to or that has influenced me. I think it's -- I've been in the space for over 20 years, and I've had a number of mentors and a number of -- not just bosses, but also equals and colleagues who have given me really solid advice that I admire over the past 20 years, and it's something as simple as somebody on the sales side sitting down with me and going through my handout and explaining what's the right approach to take when talking to investors, and so I went back and redid my investor deck because of that.

Probably the biggest piece of advice that somebody gave me, and it was one of my old bosses who was very influential in my career, was -- he said, listen to what investors ask for. We far too often as analysts go into meetings, and we've got an opinion, and all we want to do is say what our opinion is and then walk out of the meeting.

And I think what I've taken away from throughout my career is you listen to people, you listen to what the investors are saying, you listen to what companies are saying, because you're going to learn from them what they're thinking, and it might -- it will definitely influence a lot of your own opinions. It will definitely influence research that you go back and you do a lot of digging on. And so what I've really tried to do with my career was spend a lot of time just listening to what people say rather than come out with my opinion first and talk over them.

Joseph Cass

Yes. Great. Great. Thanks, Naveen. So Chamath, I know poker is one of your greatest passions in life. So what appeals to you about the game, and what would an all-time dream game look like? So that would include the three or four bucket list people you'd really want to play with.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Let me answer the first question because I think it's really, really important. So you asked a very important question before about how do you think about mental health. So let's think about the opposite side of mental health. Let's just say that you are an investor and you suffer a loss. The most important thing if you don't have a good toolkit to deal with loss is that now you have a loss aversion that may affect the next decision. You may actually become emotional, which could affect the next decision.

In combination or even in any one of those two alone can cause bankruptcy, right? You lose money. And poker is a great microcosm of that because that dynamic can play itself out in a 2- or 3-hour session. So the reason I love it so much, obviously, there's camaraderie and I love the competition.

I mean, look, I'm an extremely competitive person. There's no doubt about it. And I love crushing people, and I love crushing souls at poker, but I love the challenge of maintaining mental equilibrium and equanimity through wins and losses. And there is a strategy around poker that is extremely mathematical and very market-oriented where you have limited information, and you're trying to make educated guesses, and you're trying to size bets in an educated manner. So the theory is incredibly beautiful and dynamic.

So I would encourage everybody to learn to play the game, especially anybody who's interested in investing because it will test both sides of your brain, the quantitative part about how to think about risk and risk management, and the emotional part about how to deal with loss. And if you can get to a good place on those two dimensions, you can be an incredible investor, I think. And poker is a great way for me to test where I am in that at any given point in time.

In terms of the dream game, for me, it's pretty straightforward, which is there are some legends in the game, current and past, current who I'm friends with, who I've played with for many, many years, who I think are exceptional, folks like Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, who are just -- Daniel Negreanu, who are incredible players.

And then the last earlier generation of them, Stu Ungar, Doyle Brunson, these names may not mean to folks unless they really into poker. But my dream team would be a cast of characters from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, just like the lights out players, and me playing no-limit hold'em, that would be incredible.

Joseph Cass

Cool. Well, Chamath, the last question of the podcast goes to you. So on Fixed Income in 15, I usually interview leaders, influential individuals, CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders from across the world of finance and investing. So who would you recommend I ask to be a guest on a future episode of the show?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Well, I think -- look, to me, I think there are a handful of people that are extremely generous with how they share information about how they think. One is Stan Druckenmiller. He shares an enormous amount of information. He does podcasts, he does speeches, he does interviews. Increasingly, more and more of that stuff is available online, which is just an enormous gift to those of us who want to learn from somebody like him.

And the other person is Peter Thiel. Same situation, although his venues for sharing information tend to be more policy forums and organizations that are more attuned to his political perspectives and ideas. But both of them represent incredibly unique independent thinkers. One is a person that has a very unique way of seeing politics in the world and its interactions; that's Peter.

And another one is a person that has just, frankly, crushed it for 30 years, is extremely self-aware in the way he describes himself and talks about his journey, and his understanding of the economy, to me, is pretty unparalleled. I mean, then obviously, there's the GOAT, but the GOAT is pretty old, so I don't think you're going to get him, but Buffett is obviously awesome.

Joseph Cass

Yes. He's on the list, but I mean, the probability, if we're looking at it from a poker perspective...

Chamath Palihapitiya

Tough one to get. It's a tough get when he's in his 90s now.

Joseph Cass

Yes, totally. Well, great. Thank you so much, Naveen and Chamath. It's been totally fascinating. Great conversation. For everyone watching, everyone listening, see you next time on Fixed Income in 15.