Investor Chamath Palihapitiya Breaks Down Business Into 'Disrupters And The Disrupted' | CNBC

Jamaa I'll have to you thanks for sitting down for Fort Knox that's clock-out yeah although various things that we do like a CNBC brand aficionado yeah we just got more brains new brands every day so a lot of people certainly the CNBC viewer familiar with what you do but explain it for the average run-of-the-mill person who's interested in business and companies I think the way that I think about it is there are really two kinds of companies now in the world there are the disruptors and then they are there are the disruptive and increasingly it's really crucial to be able to understand who the disruptors are and then also the implications of what they're building so that you understand how to fix the disrupted and the reason why I think that's important is that you know too often now we go to the lowest common denominator of this like dystopian world where the robots and the cyborgs all have jobs and the rest of us are kind of you know trundling from one random task to another and it doesn't have to be that way and so for me what I'm trying to build is an organization that invests in some of these receptive technologies but channels them in productive ways that creates new classes of jobs that allows people to be trained in those jobs that allows us to have an economically vibrant fabric but at the same time learns from those companies that would otherwise be considered part of the disrupted class and to help them frankly be more sustainable how's it going I would say that it's early days you know the one I when I left Facebook in 2011 to start social capital I actually drew myself a 50-year plan and 15 years 50 years I was kind of you know I was in my mid-30s at the time and I said well you know knock on wood with good health care and and good health I'll be productive into my 80s and 90s hopefully have you ever drug yourself like a 15 year plan when you got a college that took you through because to be honest that Facebook didn't exist I didn't I didn't even have a 15 minute plan but you know I had I had the benefit of the ability to sort of really map out what I wanted to do with my life on my own terms and that's the first time I'd really ever had that you know the way that I grew up it was not that I was very much chasing and living very day to day particularly frankly and so I thought I just wanted to be around things that I thought were so secular in nature that when you look back on them decades from now they would seem obvious and then I wanted to be around those things and so when I drew this plan up for myself I said the first step is building the capability of creating a lot of these disruptive technologies or identifying them or being around them and to me that was probably going to take the first 15 years of this 50-year plan just to be able to identify them just to get good at it become repeatable at it you know it's like it's like anything else right it's like if you take professional sports like the people that are the best are the ones that practice at it and divorce the result from the practice and the Act because the the the actual product of scoring happens in all kinds of random ways but the act of purposeful practice in preparation is what gets you to that moment you say about like a partial owner of the Garden State Warriors exactly I do say that that way and so how is that I mean is that something that you knew before watching how Steph Curry and others practice or something your knowledge that has deepened by being up close to that organization that's a it's a it's a great question I think it's very much the latter it's you know people want very crisp clean narratives to describe really grandiose things that happen in the world whether it's winning championships or whether it's starting and building great companies and the actual facts underneath are much more complicated in nuance there's all kinds of tension physical emotional mental that go into creating something excellent and so you know when I like I said the first 15 the first goal was be good at one thing which is to identify and incubate a nurture disruptive technology what I would say is actually you know I gave myself a 15-year target and I think that in the first seven years we've come to a place where I have high confidence that we know how to do that and so now in many ways the next chapter starts and in Chapter two does that mean you did it in twice the time you expected in half the time yeah I thought it would be like a 15-year thing and I think you know by year seven I think we have a good handle on how to do that part of the business and so in many ways now chapter two is started and in Chapter two what it's about is now being able to take those technologies and apply them constructively to change markets for the better but at the same time take all the knowledge that you learn from them and apply it to some of the legacy businesses and see if you can't improve those as well and the reason why that's important is I think like true knowledge will come from understanding both sets of sets of companies meaning you know sometimes people want to be very dismissive of how things have been done and in other cases people want to be very dismissive of new ways of doing things neither are the way that you have maximal impacted success so what I mean by that is there are many things that you know when I was at Facebook that we did that were pioneering but frankly there were many things that we did that were just copies of things that were tried tested and true and so acknowledging the fact that that the the nuances of doing anything great will rely on both sets of information and knowledge and so for me when now what I'm trying to do is say okay on the one hand can we build the next great chip for machine learning yes but on the other hand can we actually help a company that employs hundreds of thousands of people in the world how to leverage that technology to keep those employees fully employed that's a great challenge and and I think the answer to those questions will allow us to both profit from being at the seat of creating these disruptive technologies but frankly also making sure that they're allocated in humane and ethical ways it sounds like you're saying you you've isolated the genetic code the DNA for disruption in a sense and is that what gave you incorrect correct NIR I'm oversimplifying and is that what give you the confidence to take social capital public in essence and say okay we can we can now do this at scale for lots of different types of companies yeah in many ways yes I mean like look a lot of this frankly is a rehash of the things that we did at Facebook and what my team and I did there as it's very simplest essence was collect lots of data we were able to invalidate a lot of lore and anecdote and replace it with fact-based decision-making unemotional nominally reasonably sounding decisions sounds simple but Twitter gets and it's your point like it's a very hard thing to do because emotions in ego can be a really destructive force inside of companies especially when you know the social capital of an organization is built up on gut level decision-making you know this idea that you know you went off someplace and you had a vision you know people always talk about these visions people are described as visionaries in reality what the best people at least that I've seen that have changed the world have done is just quietly iterated but that's not again an elegant narrative that society likes society wants to hear about a pithy antidote or one very precise intuition on something that turned out to be massively right sure let's do that scene in The Princess Bride with the ìokay and powder right like what not to spoil I don't know if it's a spoiler at this point but basically building up an immunity over time - I okay and it's what really allows you to win yeah yeah so I just think that we're in these situations where particularly in technology because so few people really understand it they want to believe in this idea of divine intervention and it's just not true and so a lot of our success at Facebook was about the the diligence of working every day again back to the the process the practice not the outcome and so when I started this organization a lot of it was about rebuilding that kind of infrastructure and that capability to have very unemotional fact-based decision making and so how that manifests is that whenever we invest in a company or we have an idea about starting a company we try to implement tools and systems that allow us to understand what's really happening on the ground meaning the actual atomic level data that the business is generating while it's trying to do whatever it's trying to do so for example you know my family is riddled with diabetes and so myself and two other people started a diabetes business seven years ago that helps large populations manage the disease and how we think about its success is actually the the data from the glucometers themselves and when you have it what it allows us to do is realize that you can predict when somebody's about to have a hypo or hyper glycemic event and with those insights then you can now have a nurse a diabetes educator an endocrinologist an entire support system within a hospital intervene on behalf of the patient and make sure that they don't suffer from the debilitating effects of diabetes that wasn't divine intervention that's just being able to collect ground truth data being able to apply in that case all kinds of interesting machine learning then being able to take that and productize it and then sell it into an organization who desperately wanted a solution and just keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away and that took seven years and that company almost went out of business but now you know it manages 1.2 million patients lives and I saw that in a board that just this past week and I thought to myself my dad died of the disease so I started it in large part in reaction to a helplessness that I felt around my whole family 11 of my 17 aunts and uncles have it amputations glaucoma the whole thing and so you know my dad isn't here but I think to myself is there a kid like me who has a dad like him who maybe now at the edges is probably closer to living than dying that feels really great and how we got to that point was not you know going to the top of a mountain and coming up with some you know idea that just came to us it was just chipping away chipping away chipping away in an uncelebrated manner but but having the the discipline and the and commitment to keep doing it you emigrated to Canada at age six with except from Srilanka yeah tell me about your family of origin and the story how did you guys end up moving the kya my father came from a pretty intellectual class of writers and thinkers but economically not successful and Sri Lanka is a predominantly Buddhist country ninety some odd percent Buddhist but very much like India in every other way a very deeply entrenched caste based system a lot of hierarchy my mom came from a much more commercially successful family and they may they met late in life in their mid-30s so it doesn't sound late in life but you know you can imagine in the 60s in Southeast Asia that's not what people do they got married in their early 20s quite uneasy in any event they they got married my mom was a nurse my dad was a civil servant and my mom's brother helped get my dad relocated to work at the High Commission in Canada was that controversial at all their relationship at that age and being from different backgrounds yeah you know it's so funny like I mean I've never actually told anyone this but I found out subsequently after my father died like he had been married once before all the stuff that I'd never known so I don't know the complexity of his life quite honestly again in that culture it's not the things those aren't things were never shared with you so what little I knew of him was you know preceding getting married to my mom was just a very headstrong willful person who largely sacrificed his education in his path in favor of his brother who went to college became a lawyer who then they became quite estranged in any event so my dad was younger brother older brother older brother yeah and and my dad was like whip-smart guy but in any event he threw the benefit of a relationship with my mom's brother got got stationed in Ottawa Ontario Canada working for the High Commission there and we all went over myself and my sister and then we had another sister born in Canada and then we were there for the full duration of his tenure but in that the civil war between the Buddhist majority us and Tamil Hindu minority really really escalated and during that period filed for refugee status to stay in Canada because we just didn't felt like it was safe from her for my father particularly to return and part of the reason was in this really weird kind of Twisted Fate not only was the stream single E's majority fighting the Tamil Hindu minority they were also fighting an extreme nationalist wing of the buddhists who also felt like there should be zero tolerance of this insurrection and so if you were caught in the middle you were being attacked by both sides and so Canada except us has accepted us as refugees and you know and then it's a kind of a pretty typical hardscrabble story at that I mean sure many many many others um so I by no means that I had the worst of it but you know you you do what you need to do you my mom became a housekeeper she never really became a nurse she became a nurse's aide eventually you know my dad kind of stumbled from job to job worked at a photocopy store you know sold encyclopedias sold vacuum cleaners just did whatever they you know they tried to kind of survive and and then basically told me and my two sisters like hey you better you know get your together cuz there's they're there there's no soft landing here did you internalize that at the time I mean so many so many you know children of immigrant families do and absolutely focus in on studies and saying hey my parents sacrificed all this for me I can see it up close looks well I mean like like it wasn't the words it's the actions and it's not just the good actions but it's the negative actions you know my dad became pretty dependent on alcohol it became a way to kind of like deaden the pain I think lessened his frustration but that also created really turbulent life inside the house and so you had to be really vigilant and aware of what was happening at all times you know those are the the negative things the positive things were that you know they would find money for music lessons and it's like how did they do that in hindsight I don't know but like I learned to play the piano I learned to play the violin they exposed us to art and to culture but to do that when you're sort of like you know welfare is like that takes a unique personality it takes a unique kind of vision yeah so so I I felt that you know I I didn't have a bedroom I don't have a bet I had a mattress and we used to keep it in the closet of the kind of like the hallway and you should take it out sleep in the living room take put it back you know and in it and it comes in stark contrast to where I went to school because like by high school I was going to the best high school that was a public school called Lisgar collegiate in Ottawa and everybody that went there was you know quote-unquote rich in Canadian standards you know successful stable families and so I was at hyperaware it was it in a way that made you uncomfortable or had you internalized so much your uniqueness and what you were you had set out to do that it didn't matter yeah I was less less about how maybe special I was but I wanted what they had not in a zero-sum way where I wasn't I didn't begrudge them the life's that they had the lives that they were living but I just wanted it as well you know like we never went on vacations we never learned to do some of the things that cost money skiing or whatever I mean that was fine with me but I wanted to understand what that was like and I wanted to be around it if I could and mostly because you know you kind of want what you don't have sure but I never put that back on my parents I mean because I knew that they were it was visible like they were grinding and you know they had their own sets of issues and so I was like you know I'd like I'll just I'll just try to take care of this for myself when I have a chance what was your escape well your favorite subject favorite activity that you really know I mean to be honest like you know I I ran a little casino during the lunch hour because all these little rich kids you know wanted to play blackjack was pretty obvious that you made more money being the house and so I was the house you know you could bet anywhere from 25 cents for 50 cents to a buck you know so I take that money during the week and I would kind of go to these charity casinos and play blackjack and I was a card counter back and so I'd be spinning up my money I was working at Burger King at the time too and I mean I listen like I mean I'd love to tell you I was a good kid but I was kind of like it was a little shady like you know Burger King I figured out what everything on the menu cost with tax and you'd have at least 10% of the population most people don't know this who live an extremely precise life or when they come and they're like I'd like a you know a whopper combo and you say five 12 five dollars and 12 cents they literally take out five dollars and 12 cents and so all you need to do is be in cahoots with a guy in the back for him to make the whopper and you don't put it in the till you know so like we would come up with all these little things because I got the edges he would just make us feel a little bit more like empowered like an extra five bucks made that made a difference for us back then so that's kind of like the kid I was I was kind of like you know not that great in school reasonably clever when it came to like risk and you know things like card-counting math I was quite good and just kind of trundling along and then the riots in Los Angeles happened and that was a huge moment in my life 1991 yeah it would have been 91 Rodney King riots and this is why it's so great to be Canadian you know nothing happened in California nothing happened in America you know but in Canada we took notice and in Ontario the government said any minority kid who can get a job we will subsidize and pay for let's get these kids working and so I applied for a job through this program it was called jobs Ontario youth Jo Y joy and you know typically what would happen is they would place you at like a Kmart or Sears or something and I said no and my dad had been applying for jobs his whole life and he had literally like a huge binder of like hundreds of rejection letters and just started the first one I call him and I said listen there's this thing called jobs Ontario youth and you know it helps minority kids get jobs and you know you don't have to pay anything and I'm a hard-working kid and I'm smart and someone said okay and and so I got a job at a at a place called Newbridge networks which is a high-flying telecommunications company and you know it was kind of like a test of my will because it was a crosstown and it literally I mean it did now I sound like a cliche it took an hour by bus to get there but it really did I mean it really did take an hour nap and so I was just grinding this job and that drove you up paid ten bucks an hour yeah and it and it grew me up because you know I met this guy who lived maybe about two miles away but in a much nicer part of town who was the controller of Newbridge and he could see that I was struggling to take the bus every day and he stopped one day and he was like here come on I'll give you a ride he drove me for like that whole summer and so like I would just listen to this guy and it's like wow this guy's name is Sam like I was like man this guy's like this is a real person and then when you're around the success of that place because it was a kind of high-flying telco stock back in the 90s and you see all of this wealth being created and people driving around and BMWs and stuff and you're like oh my god what is all of this about and so that's when I kind of kind of got clued into you know there's an escape here in technology that could be really profound mmm and so I should be paying attention and so I took a couple computer science classes as a result in high school never really stuck like I was just not that low level like I tried to get in the weeds and write code and I was okay I was great by any means and frankly I didn't have a passion for it but I had a passion then for what it meant to build companies like that because it sounded quite interesting to me you're studying the science of disruption now but it's interesting to me you come from the land of the disrupted in a way right around where blackberry you know through big and then you went to work for AOL yeah early in your career yeah running it's the messenger yeah which is now dying yeah yeah I mean it's like officially being end-of-life - right and at the end of this year yeah did you learn anything in particular from being in those places that you know in retrospect yeah everything I mean everything I had that I think I apply in success I learned in failure or hardship you know the problem with like success is that it's so easy to conflate luck and skill you don't really know whether it was you whether it was timing whether it's the moment and then unfortunately that stuff is really corrosive because it gets into your mind it drives your ego and it defines you know your sense of self-worth and in a way that's just not sustainable or accurate whereas in failure what happens is you just like you're you're basically like at zero and you have to really unpack what was you what was the moment and then you have a really if you decide to do it have these moments of clarity where you can really figure out what your powers are and what you're really good at and where you can affect change in an otherwise difficult circumstance and when you internalize that you become really powerful when did you do that for Chama and how did you end up at Facebook well you know that period so I mean after I graduated from college I I actually took a very traditional job I was a derivatives trader I had kind of even though I went through Electrical Engineering I had kind of you know managed to get that job and the reason I liked that job again it kind of like it played on my desire to take risk and you know quote unquote gamble although I realized later on that this you know calculated decision-making and gambling look really similar on the outside and even though they're not the same thing but I have to leave that job because I just felt like I was gonna get trapped by money trapped by money trapped by money because I was poor and I needed the job and I needed the money and then I needed their perspective on what making a lot of money meant and all of the encumbrances that it came with with respect to your behavior your personality with respect to sort of like the things you can do and can't do I would have just become a slave and in a gilded cage and I don't want that I wanted to be I wanted to be emancipated I wanted to like find my own path to being able to like not have to be a subject of the man and working at a bank just didn't seem that path for me so so I moved to Silicon Valley and I work for a company that small company that they all had bought called Winamp and you know that was like it was crazy because it was at a moment in time where it was part of the AOL Music Group AOL was trying to get a very complicated merger with Time Warner done there was all this antitrust scrutiny around the music space and so we were handcuffed there's many things we couldn't do then separately there were all these things that we tried to do so nobody knows this but like we created the first 99 cent download store and we were able to do it because we had all these credit cards on file from all of the customers of AOL and it performed beautifully but then when you try to go to the to the powers-that-be within the AOL infrastructure and convince him to launch a 99 cent download store they all said no for political reasons so you deal with this failure none of it made any sense but then you become really resilient and then you figure out how to get great ideas to win and how to get great ideas to market because you wanted them to win yeah I I thought for a moment you're gonna say you become really resentful but you said resilient now you know honestly like I'm pretty much like I'm not a bitter person like you know there's like it's just like we all have like 90 years okay let's just say plus or minus let's god bless us so be all of 90 years but take nine years and / that's the numerator the denominator is the length of the universe which is what some odd trillion years so like that's this is us so I just don't have time to be bitter I like like life is just too short to be like glass half-full or glass half-empty whatever it is you know I'm kind of less of anything it's too short like I'm just like hey man there's water in that glass I'm gonna drink it and so I just like I just want to do it and go for it and I just like I am blessed by not having that mental baggage so yeah I didn't I didn't get resentful I got more resilient I got more creative I tried to figure out different ways of telling myself I became a great communicator because I needed to divorce myself from the emotion from the politics I tried to present facts you know I became great at the time of like you know telling narratives understanding true sort of like consumer desire because in the practice that well in the moment I was able to practice it because I was looking at the data of what what the product we were trying to build and then trying to articulate it to the powers that be and you know kind of chip away at all kinds of reasons to say no and and it's never happened and then you know I remember getting this call in 2000 and I think it was three or four where somebody said Oh Steve Jobs just launched a 99-cent down the store well there you go that's that's just brutal but uh but it was in that process that I just got really good at just trying to figure out what mattered and then try to tell people the truth so in retrospect this experience of failure you never did get them to run with what was a great idea yeah you've internalized as a learning exercise that taught you to be a much better communicator communicator you know motivator how to sort of like lead versus do how to manage through adversity yeah it was a great training run a was amazing training the other thing that I had which is much more practical as I had a mentor and a person who took me under his wing his name is Kevin Conroy he runs big swath of MGM now and he kicked my ass I mean up and down every day you know that was when I was so afraid of him I used to keep my phone by my bedside and he just call at 6:00 in the morning 9:00 a.m. Eastern but at 6:00 a.m. Pacific and I just and I just like trained myself and I could pick up that phone at 6:00 in the morning deep in sleep and it was I was so coherent where at least I thought I was you know but he taught me how to think how to be disciplined how to market and then you know in return for my loyalty I think and reasonable work done he gave me a shot and that's what a lot of people need he's just a shot and I got a shot and that's when he promoted me to run a man I seek you and you know I was in my late 20s 20 26 27 it's like go and you know for the 18 months that I had control that thing I tried to do the best I can before I left for Facebook I was gonna say meanwhile on a dorm room at Harvard so how did you end up at Facebook I had known a guy who was at the time the founding president Sean Parker okay and Parker and I had known each other in the kind of that 2002 2005 or 6 timeframe when you got to Silicon Valley yeah you know he was running a business called Napster when I was at when and you know we were all in the same circles none of us had made it right and he brought mark and himself to Washington DC where AOL was headquartered Dulles Virginia actually just outside Washington DC had a meeting with them and I went and I told Jim Bankoff I remember those who who now runs Fox media but at the time Rania Wallis audience business I said we should really try to buy this company and you know Bangkok said there's just you know no chance in hell he can buy this business because just the you know the capitalization structure of AOL Time Warner at the time and you know just the downward pressure on the stock and there was a very turbulent time people were getting fired all the time there was a lot of management churn and so in that moment you know he and then Kevin said don't see if there's an operating deal to be done and we did a deal where we integrated Facebook a name together and then very quickly thereafter Shawn exited Facebook and Mark called me to unwind the deal and at the end of that process he said you know you should really think about working here and then I kind of met the other senior guys and I said yeah let's take a shot yeah why because you hadn't ever worked for a really small outfit before I mean he went into this prestigious technology company in Canada and cut your teeth there I mean yet you were doing delivered derivatives training for a bank decided yeah it was gonna eat your soul so you wouldn't you to work there but it was big you ended up at AOL which was huge at the time what gave you the guts to go with this little company run by this Tina I mean maybe he wasn't a teenager anymore but just literally it was nineteen yeah I don't know that gut indecision one of the few that work sector no actually you know it was it was it was about risk management I remember thinking to myself you know I had left AOL at the time and I'd been recruited to work at a venture firm Mayfield and I was getting paid what felt to me like all the money in the world at the time I'm happy to tell you 250,000 bucks here a huge amount of money for me this was like line of sight to you know getting completely out of student debt getting my parents completely sort of like into a situation where they could afford a house you know help subsidizing some my sisters and I had been you know half my paycheck every year until that and every year was going back to my family so he it's not like I even was able to celebrate any of the trappings of him because take my salary divided by two for taxes then divided by two again and that was my effective salary so in an event I remember thinking to myself okay well you know here's what my expected value is at Mayfield over the next five years and I said what is the distribution of outcomes at Facebook and I basically like most of the scenarios were less than it but there were a few scenarios where I could make a case that it could be equivalent to what I would make it Mayfield or before your period and in a very very small number of cases where we would be in excess and I said okay the the mathematical answer is that it's probably easier to just stay where I am and then I said to myself but if I can go there and if this thing does fail so meaning the outcome is in one of those kind of like equivalent or worse situations what will I still have and what I said to myself was I will have met some of the smartest people in the world and I'll be in the game and I will have learned something about myself of whether I can do something at a really early stage scale and whether can I do this on my own am I sort of like you know have I been trained now and ready to execute and so I took the shot for most of those reasons that what was funny at the time was I actually had an offer or somebody was recruiting me to be CEO of the business what kind of business it's like something internet business I can't even quite as he remembers I remember like getting called thinking to myself wow maybe I could be like you know the chief versus the Indian and but when I spent time with the team at Facebook I was like wow this is like this kind of like fun and nobody knows what they're doing and I thought that's probably a place where like I can learn something and so even if it fails even though it may be had a lesson from the whole when I'm when I'm a a well experience sometimes what you learn from the failure is just as important as winning and you calculate that what you would learn at Facebook yeah and also John quite honestly I was like look I've never really been around something that has succeeded so I mean I know what failure feels like and it feels okay you know it's not life threatening like life goes on like you know you try some stuff some work some doesn't you know you're subject to market conditions you're subject to internal politics and I've kind of become relatively resilient and I first thought how much worse could it be than that and so I was like yeah I'll probably learn a lot it seemed like I mean it seemed like it was the next arc after a man died seek you to me right because I have been so deep in that business where I could tell like there is something that Facebook was scratching the surface on especially in a world post myspace and post Friendster that was really unique it had just started to figure out how to experiment with algorithmic feeds and so there was enough surface material there where I was like I'm gonna learn a ton and just you know I just saw this former cow card-counting teenager former derivatives trader always been comfortable with numbers and calculating risks and up in this position with Facebook which is the biggest data problem you had a post google of absent of a generation absolutely and you end up in the position of chief growth hacker yeah you're tackling the kinds of problems having to do with people and outcomes that the technology world has never really never wrestled with no work no and in fact I think what we're learning now is how complicated and nuanced these issues really are you know when I created the growth team I said okay basically what I wanted to do was tell a bunch of smartypants Ivy League graduates who I worked with that they didn't know what they were talking about and I took great pride in that and I just used data and just basically just told them to pounce and and shut up but one of those smarty pants Ivy League people was Mark Zuckerberg himself yeah although to his credit he really wasn't because he dropped out after nine runs bred and he was actually open to the truth more so in a way of anybody that I've ever seen he loves the truth but again like you know in success you get a lot of people that conflate luck and skill and in the early days of Facebook there were many of those people so part of it was just decapitating their political and social capital which happens by just telling the truth but in that what we figured out was you know to your point how much of a system it was and what I mean by that is that as much as we all believe we're individuals we are we all act within a range of outcomes that frankly can be modeled mathematically and be highly predicted and it's no different than you know you must think to yourself sometimes when you go to Google and you start typing in a few letters and it instantly knows and you think to yourself well is that the same search result that everybody else gets and the answer's no and then you must think to yourself well how creepy is it that Google knew what I was thinking and the answer is well you probably in a whole bunch of many other subtle ways told them you just didn't realize it I like how you're counting the cards in my search behavior right now right and so I think we reduced a lot of theoretical complexity to that simple insight which is that humans are telling you in passive and active ways every day what's in their heart and mind and when you collect those signals and you learn you can become really good at giving them what they want but then you also become really good at understanding their behavior and now unfortunately in some you know rare edge cases in manipulating while one would hope they're rare in manipulating their behavior as well but you know this whole fake new stuff yeah I was just gonna ask you about that is that the sort of thing that granted it's been a long time since you were at Facebook but outfits like yours were set up to anticipate no you know the fundamental thing that I want to make sure is clear to everybody is you know technology by design is deterministic in the following way which is that whatever can be done and whatever is possible will be done and what we need to do is have the moral and ethical discussions around how we prevent the broad implications of how technology can be used not just in positive ways but in ways that are poorly understood are you saying it's impossible to anticipate everything absolutely like you know I'll give you a simple example you know I helped start a cancer genomics business seven years ago which is doing incredibly well helping people manage the fundamental problems of cancer care with precision around their specific genetic makeup it stands to reason that within the next 10 years we'll be able to take that profile and makeup of who we are genetically and precisely start to target things that can make us sick and then eventually someone will say well what about the things that could make us sick in the future well what's the difference between something that could make you sick in the future versus something that could frankly just be optimized for you in the future it's a very slippery slope and so the type of gene editing technology that people are experimenting with today for the you know foreseen future will be used at eradicating disease that's a fantastically positive thing it's C but within you know it seems almost dangerous to be able to say on the one hand it's possible to crack the code for growth so that this technology can spread global around the world and touch everybody but it's impossible to anticipate some of the worst uses of it that then can use this network to manipulate it's almost like a Frankenstein's monster situation yeah and look again the thing is I want to be clear like we are making a lot of this stuff up as we go along and anybody that pretends that they know or pretends that they know the future is fundamentally either lying or stupid so you're absolutely right like we are going to uncover all kinds of unintended consequences for the things that we've built so again you know to use this genetic example it will start with curing diseases that you have and it will quickly migrate to diseases that you may get and then two things about you that you just want to change and then eventually some government whether it's us or not will take the decision well you know what I just want to create a superhuman cyborg that our citizens of my country what do you do then so you know there are all of these issues that I think we have to grapple with around technology that that we are only starting to scratch the surface of now and they all come back to this idea of we are building things we never thought were possible but we just have to be honest that we're also probably not well equipped to realize the full breadth of implications so should we regulate that in some way yeah has to be now the question is how and you know this is where I think like you get this intersection of governance and politics and technology that we've never had to contend with before you know the last 30 years have been about unbounded gains where technology has largely allowed things to be cheaper faster better where the aggregate value creation was undeniable with very very few consequences but now I think that has changed and so we're gonna have to really grapple with that and that's going to require a level of conversation between governments between companies populations and it is a global discussion it cannot happen at a national level because it's irrelevant what happens in any one country that's why frankly the current political climate has to be really thought of with skepticism but also with some greatness because you know sticking your head in the sand and just saying oh we as a country can figure this out is not going to solve it because whatever we do is like playing whack-a-mole some other country can decide to go the other way and so it's about creating a moral framework that everybody agrees with I hope one day and your 50 year plan you can crack the code for social disruption and hopefully I mean by the way that that is chapter 5 ok so I'm glad it's in the plan jimana thank you so much for hey there thanks for checking out CNBC on YouTube be sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date on all of the day's biggest stories you can also click on any of the videos around me to watch the latest from CNBC thanks for watching

Channel: CNBC

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Id: vvIR13eS8FE

Length: 42min 47sec (2567 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018