Podcast Notes Playlist: Latest Episodes

• “Forecasts are pretty worthless because everybody gets them wrong, no matter how much data you have” – Chamath Palihapitiya
  • High-quality investors understand the fragility of forecasts
• “Integrity compounds infinitely, and capability always decays”  – Chamath Palihapitiya
• “IPOs are a little bryzantine and broken, direct listings are bryzantine and broken, they both take 18-plus months to pull-off and then low and behold there’s this tool called a SPAC” – Chamath Palihapitiya
  • The SPAC is only a 90-day process and you go public via a merger 
    • “There’s all these archaic rules you can work around that a SPAC solves. It’s very transparent.” 
• Investing, in the broad sense, is an infinite game
  • “The only real competitor is yourself because the only thing you’re really fighting…is your own psychology. And if you can manage your own psychology, you have the ability to survive.” – Chamath Palihapitiya
• Be a first-principle thinker: Keep asking why until you get to the root cause of a problem
• Chamath keeps a piece of paper on his desk that says: Calm. Humble. Focused. Kind to myself. Vulnerable, Authentic. 
  • “It’s a way of reminding myself everyday who I’m battling and I’m battling myself” – Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya is Founder & CEO @ Social Capital, the organisation on a mission to transform society by using technology to solve the world’s hardest problems. Social's portfolio includes the likes of Slack, Yammer, Front, Intercom and Carta to name a few. As for Chamath, prior to founding Social, he spent an incredible 4 years at Facebook including as the original exec in charge of FB Platform as well as being responsible for overseeing core growth components and overseeing FB's mobile efforts. If that was not enough, Chamath is also an owner @ The Golden State Warriors & Chairman @ Virgin Galactic.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Chamath made his way into the world of tech and startups, came to be a VC with Mayfield before joining Facebook and then starting Social?

2.) What were Chamath's biggest takeaways from his team building the growth team at Facebook? Why does Chamath believe that forecasts are worthless? What should founders focus on instead? What did Facebook teach Chamath about defensibility and moat building?

3.) What was the realisation moment for Chamath that the venture firm he was building with Social was not what he wanted to build? Why does Chamath believe the biggest mistakes he made were "compensation and partner selection"? How would he do them differently now? What does he look for most in partners today? How does he detect for integrity?

4.) Why has Chamath doubled down on the SPAC model? What are the core benefits both to the founders and investors? What are the core challenges with both direct listings and IPOs? How does Chamath think about scaling his SPAC strategy? What are the core challenges in doing so?

5.) Facing alcoholism and psychological challenges with his parents, how did Chamath deal with becoming a carer sooner than expected? How has becoming a parent changed Chamath's operating mentality today? How does Chamath analyse his relationship to money today?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Chamath’s Fave Book: Liar's Poker: From the author of the Big Short

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• James Nestor (@MrJamesNestor) is a journalist who has written for Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, Scientific American, Dwell magazine, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle magazine, and others. He is the author of a new book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art available now.

This episode features the profile of Coach Christopher Sommer from Tools of Titans, which is now available as an audiobook. This chapter's narrators are Kaleo Griffith (bio) and Ray Porter (profile). To check out the full audiobook of Tools of Titans with 100+ chapters, visit audible.com/ferriss. 

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The audiobooks of Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors can be found at audible.com/ferriss

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•  “I think that it’s inevitable that if you’re good at something, you just find it all the more enjoyable” – Hannah Fry
• If schools want students to like math more, teachers should put in the effort to demonstrate just how useful it is in the real world
•  Algorithms can be incredibly useful but they can also backfire
  • “The real danger of relying too much on algorithms to detect those cancerous cells is that if you are too good at detecting them, you’re not just good at detecting the ones that then go on to be a problem, you’re also going to be good at detecting the ones that are nothing to worry about” – Hannah Fry
    • “Hence potentially causing huge numbers of people to have very serious and very invasive techniques like double mastectomies” 
• “Maths is really the biggest weapon we have on our side. We don’t have pharmaceutical interventions, we don’t have a vaccine yet and all we have really is the data and the numbers” – Hannah Fry
  • The epidemiologists and mathematicians have been raising the alarm and helping drive government policies
    • “We don’t have a crystal ball to look into the future but really maths is the only thing that’s there guiding us” 
• According to math, spend the first 37% of your dating life having fun and playing the field
  • After that period has passed, settle down with the next person that you find who is better than everyone else you’ve dated
• The best relationships are the ones with low negativity thresholds, or couples who speak up quickly about the things that annoy them
  • “It’s couples where you’re continually repairing and resolving very, very tiny issues in your relationship because otherwise you risk bottling things up and then not saying anything and then coming home and being totally angry” – Hannah Fry

Mathematician and author of Hello World and The Mathematics of Love, Hannah Fry discusses the role of maths in society, the dating world and we explore what it means to be human in the age of algorithms.

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