Lex Fridman Podcast #338 – Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness
Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors.

The following is a conversation with Chamath Palapatiya, a venture capitalist and engineer, founder and CEO of Social Capital, previously an early senior executive at Facebook, and is 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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Bambi for HR services, Inside Tracker for biometrics, Netsuite for business management software, Simply Safe for home security and Indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor called Bambi, an outsourced and automated human resources HR solution for businesses. I think in the video on their website it says that many businesses would need to hire an HR person and that's like seventy k a year plus. So what they're offering is super cost effective because it's just ninety nine bucks per month, and they take care of the HR compliance and all the complexities involved with that. It's important to hire people that can take care of human resources. HR is one of those things that when done poorly it can really hurt and when done well it just makes everything work beautifully. And so you should use the best tools for the job and a really cost effective one is Bambi. You can schedule your free conversation today. Go to bambi dot com and type Lex under podcast when you sign up. It's spelled B A M B E E. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. It's kind of interesting to think of the human body as just the source of signals. You got a hierarchy of living organisms, millions of them, billions of them, depending how you define the atomic organisms. That make up the human body, and so all of them are sending signals—tiny signals, big signals—and all of those that conglomerate that orchestra sends just a huge amount of data, which is used by the brain and the nervous system and the immune system and all the different systems that make up the anatomy and the physiology of the body to sort of coordinate everything. And for us to plug in and collect some of that data in order to make lifestyle and health recommendations, I think that's the future. Recommendation should be done based primarily on your body, grounded of course in the wisdom that science provides for the population. Anyway, Inside Tracker is a step into that direction. It's a preview of the future. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker dot com slash lex. That's insidetracker dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Netsuite, an all in one cloud business management system that manage financials, inventory, e commerce, all the different business related details. The ad reads today, and it's funny because it's on the Chamath episode. And Chamath is one of the greatest business leaders and minds and investors and VCs and technologists engineers and just intellectuals honestly. That I've ever listened to and gotten a chance to interact with is really a brilliant guy. Anyway, just first principles thinker, bold thinker. You know even when he's wrong, he'll he'll he'll push forward and then realize through first principles thinking that he's wrong and he'll admit it. I mean just really honest brilliant person. Anyway, it's funny that on this episode we got all kinds of business related advertisers and I think that makes perfect sense and that's great because running a business is not just about great leadership or about hiring a great team. All those are obviously exceptionally important, but it's also running and taking care of all the glue that ties everything together. So that means human resources, but that also means managing the inventory, the e commerce, managing all the financial stuff, automating everything. That you can automate, making it easy, efficient, using the best tools for the job. That's where Netsuite fits in. Go to netsuite dot com slash lex to access their one of a kind financing program. This show is also brought to you by Simply Safe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It took me no time. I don't remember how long it was, maybe thirty minutes, maybe less. I don't remember, but they say it takes you thirty minutes to set up. You can customize the system for your needs. I have it set up in my place. I love it. It's the first layer physical security to my place. I have many layers of physical and cyber digital emotional psychological security. Although probably the biggest vulnerabilities to me. Is psychological security because I really try to wear my heart on my sleeve and really take the world in the opinion of the world. The pain of the world, the struggle of the world, and not in the way where I want the approval of the world. I really don't, but I want to empathize with the experience of others and understand it. And when you do that, what you find is your mind can be hacked. This complicated psychological landscape to operate in is so tricky, but of course that's way more complicated than physical security. Physical security should be taken care of. That's the smart thing to do. Should use a simple system for that and effective system. Easy to set up, easy to use. That's what Simply Safe is. Go to simplysafe dot com slash lex and get fifty percent off any new system. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. Like I told you, Chamath episode we're talking all about business. I I don't know maybe it's just to me, but I think the most important thing for successful business is building a great team. That's also the most important thing for your own personal happiness and growth and psychological flourishing. Anyway, the process of hiring the early stage of selecting a great pool of candidates quickly then from those candidates selecting it down to to a good fit, good resume, good skill, good personality, diversity all those elements that make up a great team. There is a stepwise process that's really painful that's really difficult to turn into a science. I really do think it's part art part science, just like conversation. And whatever can be made easier, more efficient, more organized, you should do. Indeed does that? It's a great tool. They have an instant match tool that does that first step of finding the the set of candidates that fit the job description. They do that immediately. Anyway, they have a special offer only available for a limited time. Check out at indeed dot com slash lex terms and conditions apply. This is the Lex Freedom podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here is Chamath Palapatiya. You grew up in a dysfunctional household on welfare. You've talked about this before. What were 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 are 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. And so you can imagine if you are a ten eleven 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 effect of 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, or you know there was a certain belt that he wore that had this kind of 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 are just so on edge. Right, and you walk into this house and you are 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. Um, 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 grade 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 Coke, and a a blizzard, and I was like, "What is this?" And I felt. So special, you know because you are getting something that most people would take for granted. Oh, it's a Sunday or it's a you know or I am 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 are 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 La Blazs, and La Blazs would discount. A cheesecake from seven ninety nine to four ninety nine, 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 vigilant loop is that still with you today. What are the echoes of that that's still with 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 are 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 sorry to interrupt? Let go of that blame. That was a really long process where, for I would say the first thirty five years of my life, I compartmentalized and I avoided all of those memories. And I sought external validation. Right, going back to this self worth idea, if you are taught as a child that you are worthless because why would somebody do these things to you? It's not because you are worth something. You think to yourself very viscerally you are 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 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 steal 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 whatever it took between the two of them. To sort of claw and scrape together enough money to live so that my sisters and I could have a shot, and I am very thankful for them. Could they have done better? Obviously, but I am okay with what has taken place. But it's it's been a long process of of that steel maning so that you can develop some empathy and compassion and forgive. Do you think if you talk to your dad shortly after he died and you went through that process or today you'll be able to have the same strength. To forgive him, I think it would be a very complicated journey. I think I have learned to be incredibly open about what has happened and all of the mistakes I've made. I think it's it would require him to be pretty radically honest about confirming. What I think he went through because otherwise it just wouldn't work. Otherwise I would say let's keep things where they are, which is I did the work. You know with with people that have helped me obviously, but you know it's better for him to just you know kind of hopefully he's looking from some place and he's thinking. It was worth it. I think he deserves to think that all of this because you know I think the immigrant challenge or not even the immigrant challenge the lower middle class challenge anybody who really wants better for their kids and doesn't have a good toolkit to give it to them. Some of them just they choke up on the bat. They just get so agitated about this idea that all this sacrifice will not be worth it. That it spills out in really unproductive ways, and I would put him in that category. And their self evaluation introspection they have tunnel vision so they're not able to often see the damage that did. I mean I I know like yourself a few successful people that had very difficult relationships. With their dad, and you take the perspective of the dad, they're completely in denial about any of it. So if you actually have a conversation, there would not be a deep honesty there. And that I think that's maybe in part the way of life. Yeah and you know I remember pretty distinctly after I left and in this you know in my middle thirties where. You know by all measure I had roughly become reasonably successful, and my dad didn't particularly care about that, which was so odd because I had to confront the fact that you know. Whether it was a title or money or press clippings, he never really cared. He moved on to a different set of goals, which was more about my character and you know being a good person to my family and really preparing me to lead our family when he wasn't there. And that bothered me because I thought I thought I got to the finish line and I thought there was going to be a medal, you know meaning like I can tell you Lex, you know he never told me that he loved me. I am not sure if that's normal or not. It was my normality, and I thought there is going to be something some gold star which never appeared. And so that's like a hard thing to kind of confront because you are like well now what is this what is this all about? Um, was this all just kind of a a ruse? But then I realized well hold on a second there were these moments where in his way again putting yourself in his shoes. I think he was trying to say he was sorry. He would hold my hand, you know, and he would interlock the fingers, which I felt that's a really intimate way of holding somebody's hand. I think. Um, so I remember those things so. You know these are the things that are just etched in at least in my mind and. At the end of it, you know I think I've done a decent job in repairing my relationship with him, even though you know it was posthumous. It does make me wonder in which way you and I we might be broken and not see it, and might be hurting others and not see it. Well I think that when you grow up in those kinds of environments and they're all different kinds of this kind of dysfunction, but if what you get from that is that you are not worthwhile, you are not you are less than many many other people. When you enter adulthood or you know semi adulthood in your early twenties, you will be in a cycle where you are hurting other people. You may not know it. Hopefully you find somebody who holds you accountable and tells you and loves you enough through that. But you are going to take all of that disharmony in your childhood and you are going to inject that disharmony into. Whether it's your professional relationships or your personal relationships or both, until you get to some form of rock bottom and you start to repair. And I think there's a lot of people that resonate with that because they have each suffered their own things that at some point in their lives have told them that they're less than. And and then they go and cope, and when you cope, eventually those coping mechanisms escalate and at some point it'll be unhealthy either for you but oftentimes it's for the people around you. Well from those humble beginnings you are now a billionaire. How has money changed your life or maybe the landscape of experience in your life? Does it buy happiness? It doesn't buy happiness, but it buys you a level of comfort for you to really amplify what happiness is. I kind of think about it in the following way, let's just say that there's a hundred things on a table, and the table says find happiness here. And there are different prices. The way that the world works is that many of these experiences are cordoned off little bit behind a velvet rope. Where you think that there's more happiness as the prices of things escalate. Right, if you live in an apartment, you admire the person with the house. If you live in a house, you admire the person with the bigger house. That person admires the person with you know an island. Right. Some person drives their car admires a person who flies who admires a person who flies business class who admires a person who flies first. You know to private. There's all of these escalations on this table, and most people get to the first five or six. And so they just naturally assume that items you know seven through a hundred is really where happiness is found. And the just to you know tell you the the finish line I've tried a hundred and back and I've tried two more hundred to it. And happiness isn't there. But it does give you a level of comfort. I read a study, and I don't know if it's true or not, but it said that the absolute sort of like maximal link between money and happiness. Is around fifty million dollars, and there was it was just like a social studies kind of thing that I think one of the Ivy Leagues put out, and underneath it the way that they explained it was because you could have a home you could have all kinds of the creature comforts you could take care of your family, and then you were left to ponder. What it is that you really want? I think the challenge for most people is to realize that this escalating arms race of you know more things will solve your problems. Is not true. More and better is not the solution. It's it's this idea that you are on a very precise journey that's unique to yourself. You are playing a game of which only you are the player. Everybody else is an interloper, and you have a responsibility to design the game play. And I think a lot of people don't realize that because if they did I think they would make a lot of different decisions about how they live their life. And I still do the same thing I mean revert. To basically running around asking other people what will make you like me more, you know what will make me more popular in your eyes and I try to do it and it never works. It is just a complete dead end. Is there negative aspects to money like for example it becoming harder to find people you can trust. I think the most negative aspect is that it amplifies a three hundred and sixty degree view of your personality. Because there are a lot of people and society tells you that more money is actually better you are a better person somehow. And you are factually more worthwhile than some other people that have less money. That's also a lie. But when you're given that kind of attention, it's very easy for you to become a caricature of yourself. That's probably the single worst thing that happens to you. But I say it in the opposite way I think all I've ever seen in Silicon Valley as an example. Is that when somebody gets a hold of a lot of money it tends to cause them to become exactly who they were meant to be. They're either a kind person, they're either a curious person, they're either a jerk, you know they're either cheap and they can use all kinds of masks but now that there's no expectations and society gives you a get out of jail free card. You start to behave the way that's most comfortable to you so you see somebody's innate personality. And that's really interesting thing to observe because then you can very quickly bucket sort. Where do you want to spend time and who is really you know additive to your game play. And who is really a negative detractor to your game play. You're an investor but you're also a kind of philosopher. You analyze the world in all its different perspectives on all in podcasts on Twitter everywhere. Do you worry that money makes puts you out of touch. From being able to truly empathize with the experience of the general population, which in part first of all a human level that could be limiting but also as an analyst. Of human civilization that could be limiting. I think it definitely can for a lot of people because it's just a it's an abstraction for you to stop caring. I also think the other thing is that. You can very quickly especially in today's world become the scapegoat just to use a Girardian like Rene Girard if you look if you think about like mimetic theory in a nutshell. You know we're all competing for these very scarce resources that we are told is worthwhile. And if you view the world through that Girardian lens, what are we really doing? We are all fighting for scarce resources. Whether that's Twitter followers, money, acclaim, notoriety, and we all compete with each other and in that. Competition, you know Girard writes like the only way you escape that loop is by scapegoating something or somebody. And I think we are in that loop right now where just the fact of being successful is a thing that one should scapegoat to end all of this you know tension that we have in the world. I I think that it's a little misguided because I don't think it solves the fundamental problem. Um and we can talk about what the solution to some of these problems are but. That's I think the loop that we're all living and so if you become a caricature and you feed yourself into it. I mean you're not doing anything to to really advance things. Your nickname is the dictator. How did you get the nickname? We're talking about the corrupting nature of money. That came from poker. In a poker game you know when you sit down it's chaos especially like in in our home game. There's a ton of big egos. There's people always watching you know rail birding the game all kinds of interesting folks. And in that somebody needs to establish hygiene and rules. And I really care about the integrity of the game and it would just require somebody to just say okay enough. And so and then people were just like okay stop dictating and that's where that's where that nickname. So who to you speaking of which is the greatest poker player of all time and why is it Phil Hellmuth. Exactly you know Muth probably knew this question was coming. Here's what I'll say I think Hellmuth is the antidote to computers more than any other player playing today. And when you see him in a heads up situation so I think like he's played nine or ten heads up tournaments in a row. And he's played like basically call it ten of the top twenty people so far. And he's beaten all but one of them. When you're playing heads up you know one v one. That is the most GTO understandable spot meaning game theory optimal position that's where computers can give you an enormous edge. The minute you add even a third player the value of computers and the value of their recommendations. Basically falls off a cliff. Okay, so one way to think about it is Hellmuth is forced to play against people that are essentially trained like AI's. And so to be able to beat you know eight out of nine of them. Means that you are playing sort orthogonally to what is considered game theory optimal and you're overlaying human reasoning. The judgment to say well in this spot I should do X but I'm going to do Y it's not dissimilar in chess like what makes you know Magnus Carlson so good. You know sometimes he takes these weird lines he'll sacrifice positions you know he'll overplay certain positions or certain you know. Bishops versus knights in all of these spots that are very confusing. And what it does is it throws people off their game I think he just won a recent online tournament and it's like by move six. There is no GTO move for his opponent to make because it's like out of the rule book maybe he read some game you know I read the quote it was like he probably read some game in some bar in Russia 1954 memorized it. And all of a sudden by six moves in the computer AI is worthless so that's what makes Hellmuth great. The there is one person that I think is superior. And and I think it's what Daniel also said and I would echo that because I played Phil as well but Phil Ivy is. The most well rounded cold blooded blood thirsty animal. He is he's just and he he sees into your soul Lex in a way where you're just like oh my god stop looking at me. Have you ever played him? Yeah yeah we played we played and you know he crushes the games crushes the games. So what what does feeling crushed mean and feel like in poker is it like that you just can't read at all you're being constantly pressured you feel off balance you try to bluff and the person reads you perfectly that kind of. So it's it's a this is really really excellent question because I think this has parallels to a bunch of other things. Okay let's just use poker as a microcosm to explain a bunch of other systems or games. Maybe it's running a company or investing. Okay so let's use those three examples but we use poker to explain it. What does success look like? Well success looks like you have positive expected value. Right in poker the simple way to summarize that is your opponent. Let's just say you and I are playing are going to make a bunch of mistakes. There's a bunch of it that's going to be absolutely perfect. And then there's a few spots where you make mistakes. And then there's a bunch of places in the poker game where I play perfectly. And I make a few mistakes. Basically your mistakes minus my mistakes is the edge right. That's that's period that's how poker works. If I make fewer mistakes than you make I will make money and I will win that is the objective of the game. Translate that into business. You're running a company, you have a team of employees, you have a pool of human capital that's capable of being productive in the world and creating something. But you are going to make mistakes in making that. Maybe it doesn't completely fit the market. Maybe it's mispriced. Maybe it actually doesn't require all of the people that you need so the margins are wrong. And then there's the competitive set of all the other alternatives that customer has. Their mistakes minus your mistakes is the expected value of Google Facebook Apple etc. Okay now take investing. Every time you buy something somebody else on the other side is selling it to you. Is that their mistake? We don't know yet. But their mistakes minus your mistakes. Is how you make a lot of money over long periods of time as an investor. Somebody sold you Google at forty dollars a share you bought it and you kept it huge mistake on their part minimum mistakes on your part. The difference of that is the money that you made. So life can be summarized in many ways in that way so the question is. What can you do about other people's mistakes and the answer is nothing. That is somebody else's game you can try to influence them you could try to subvert them maybe you plan to spy inside of that other person's company to sabotage them I guess there are things at the edges that you can do. But my firm belief is that life success really boils down to how do you control. Your mistakes now this is a bit counterintuitive. The way you control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes. So taking risks you have to is somehow you have to you have to minimize the number of mistakes. Let's just say you want to find love. You know you want to find some go on deeply connected with. Are you do you do that by not going out on dates and yes. Sorry sorry. You're the only person that thinks that's the answer. No I'm joking I'm joking. No but you know what I mean like you have to date people you have to open yourself up you have to be authentic and like you put you you give yourself a chance to get hurt. Yes but you're a good person so you know what happens when you get hurt that is actually their mistake. Okay and if you are inauthentic that's your mistake. That's a controllable thing in you you can tell them the truth who you are and say here's my. Pluses and minuses my point is there are very few things in life. That you can't break down I think into that very simple idea. And 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. So the implied thing there is that there is in in business and investing in poker and dating in life is that there's this platonic GTO game theory optimal thing out there. And so when you say mistakes you're always comparing to that optimal path you could have taken. I think slightly different I would say mistake is maybe a bad proxy but it's the best proxy I have for learning. But I'm using the language of what society tells you. Sure got it. Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn't work it's a mistake. So I just use that word because it's the word that resonates most with most people. Got it. The real thing that it is is learning. Yeah it's like in neural networks it's lost. Neural network it's lost exactly. Yeah all right so you're using the mistake that it's most the the word that is most understandable especially by the way people experience it I guess most of life is a sequence of mistakes. The problem is when you use the word mistake and you think about mistakes it actually has a. Counterproductive effect of you becoming conservative in just being risk averse. So that if you if you if you flip it and say try to maximize the number of successes somehow that leads you to take more risk. Mistake scares people. I think mistakes scare people because society likes. These very simplified boundaries of who is winning and who is losing. And they want to reward people who make traditional choices. And succeed, but the thing is what's so corrosive about that. Is that they're actually not even being put in a position to actually make a quote unquote mistake and fail. So I'll give you if you look at like getting into an elite school. Right society rewards you for being in the Ivy Leagues. In a way that you know in my opinion incorrectly doesn't reward you for being in a non Ivy League school. There's a certain level of status and presumption of intellect and capability that comes with being there. Um but that system doesn't really have a counter factual because it's not as if you both go to MIT and Ohio State. And then we can see two versions of Lex Friedman so that we can figure out that the jig is up and there was no difference. Right and so instead it reinforces this idea that there is no truth seeking function there is no way to actually make this thing whole. And so it tells you you have to get in here and if you don't your life is over you've made a huge mistake. You know or you failed completely. And so you have to find different unique ways of dismantling this. This is why you know part of what I've realized. Where I got very lucky is I had no friends in high school. I had a few cohort of acquaintances. But part of being so hyper vigilant when I grew up was I was so ashamed of that world that I had to live in. I didn't want to bring anyone into it. I could not see myself that anybody would accept me. But the thing with that is that I had no definition of what expectations should be so they were not guided by the people around me. And so I would escape to define my expectations. It's interesting but you didn't feel like your dad. Didn't put you in a prison of expectation. Or we because like that's if you don't have friends like so the flip side of that you don't have any other signals it's very easy to believe like when you're in a cult that. Well he you know, he was angry, he pushed me, he used me as a mechanism to alleviate his own frustration, and this may sound very crazy but he also believed in me. And so that's what created this weird duality where you were just I was always confused about you could be somebody great he believed that you could be. He did I didn't believe him because I couldn't reconcile than the other half of the day you know those behaviors. But what it allowed me to do was I escaped in my mind and I found these archetypes around me that were saviors to me. So you know I grew up in Ottawa Ontario Canada I grew up right at the point where the telecom boom was happening companies like NorTel and Newbridge Networks and Mytel Bell Northern Research these were all built in in in the suburbs of Ottawa. And so there were these larger than life figures entrepreneurs Terry Matthews Michael Copeland and so I thought I'm going to be like them I would read Forbes magazine I would read Fortune magazine I would look at the rich people on that list and say I would be like them. Not knowing that maybe that's not who you wanted to be, but it was a lifeline and it kept my mind relatively whole. Because I could direct my ambition in a direction. And so why that's so important just circling back to this is I didn't have a group of friends who were like I'm going to go to community college. You know I didn't have a group of friends that said well you know the goal is just to go to university get a simple job and like you know join the public service have a good life. And so because I had no expectations and I was so afraid to venture out of my own house, I never saw what middle class life was like and so I never aspired to it now if I was close to it I probably would have aspired to it because I my parents in their best year made 32,000 Canadian together. And if you're trying to raise a family of five people on 32,000 it's a complicated job, and most of the time they were probably making 20 something thousand and I was working since I was 14 so. I knew that our station in life was not the destination we had to get out, um but because I didn't have an obvious place it's not like I had a best friend whose house I was going to and I saw some normal functional home. If I had had that in this weird way I would have aspired to that. What was the worst job you had to do? The best job, but the worst job was I worked at Burger King when I was 14 years old and I would do the closing shift, and that was from like 6 p m till about two in the morning. And in Ontario where I lived Ottawa borders Quebec in Ontario the drinking age is 19 you can see where I'm going with this the