High-octane capitalism meets climate change, with Chamath Palihapitiya

business called Berkshire Hathaway. He used that company as a stable source of income to place other bets, eventually turning it into a holding company for all kinds of investments. Buffett's investments are not climate oriented. Berkshire holds shares of any carbon intensive businesses and only some clean energy companies. My guest today, Chamat Polyhapithia, is a venture capitalist and

self proclaimed disciple of Buffet. He wanted to create a Berkshire for climate and not because it is a morally right thing to do. People ask me like, are you motivated to solve the climate problem because of your love of the environment. I could give you the virtue signaling answer which is yes, but that's not really where my

motivation comes. My motivation is economic. Chamat made his fortune as an early Facebook employee and later with well timed investments in the tech industry, including through a venture capital firm called Social Capital that he has been running for a decade. In twenty twenty, Chamat put out a call on Twitter, are you interested in decarbonization, sustainability and climate

change and want to do something about it? I need help allocating a few billion dollars into these areas over the next two to three years, so I'm turning to you for help. In return, you can work with me to implement it. Chamat outlined how anyone could write in with a way to create a holding company that bankrolls the growth of climate tech companies. I missed this until I got a call from a material science professor at

Carnegie Mellon University, Venkott. With Vanathan Venkott and I often talk about startups and investments, and we thought, what the hell, let's write in. Our group went pretty far in this competition. But since that tweet, Chamat has not created a climate holding company, but through his firm Social Capital, he has invested in climate tech companies, a residential solar startup, a

battery manufacturer, a marketplace for farmers. So during a trip to Silicon Valley, I arranged for him Venkitt and I to talk about why he never created the Berkshire for Climate, what companies he invest in and why and how much can you teach yourself about batteries. Chamat, Welcome to zero. Thank you, thanks for including me. Now let's talk about what you wanted to build, which was a barksher Hathaway

for climate, and you started that out. And one reason why Professor Venkats, Nathan and I are here today is because you put out a tweet saying, hey, guys, if you had a billion or three billion dollars and you wanted to put it all to climate in a climate holding company, how would you structure the climate holding company?

And Venkat and I used to talk frequently about batteries and startups, and we saw the tweet and we were like, hey, that's an interesting challenge should be you know a few ideas, and so the deadline comes and closes, you end up getting fifteen hundred applicants and end up employing a McKinsey consultant. I mean it cost us two million dollars. Truth is so expensive. I mean we have to probably the most

expensive tweet you've put out. I mean no, because I put on other twets where I've done deals and I've lost hundreds of millions. You know that you can rank them. But I wanted to make sure that we were being thoughtful and signaling to people that this was something that

we took very seriously. And I just needed intellect. Like, we have a very small organization, and so you know, when you have seven thousand pages of content or ten thousand pages of content from all very very diverse, smart people all around the world, you have a responsibility to be thoughtful about that. And so we hired McKinsey to help us sort through it all and read them all and score them. And yeah, I mean it cost me a few million dollars, but it was money while spent.

Why Because at the end of that funnel, there were six or seven groups. You guys were one that really helped me in clarifying how to think about this. So what did I learn from you guys as a class? The first thing I said, if you look back at the history of Burke, they have two seminal transactions that allowed them the oxygen, if you will, to become what they are today. The first transaction was Berkshire itself, and this was a business that had incredibly profound, free casual characteristics.

It was a dying business, you know, this was they sold suit linings, right, but it was an incredibly a creative casual business, which allowed Buffett to take that money and to reallocate it into things that generated higher returns. And then the second seminal transaction was that so much of his money of that money went into Geico that in nineteen ninety six he was able to buy the fifty percent he didn't don't. Geico is a large American car insurance company. It's a major source of stable income

for Berkshire. Hath to Weigh. Warren Buffett has called Geico a jewel and his favorite investment. So I said, I have to go back to the beginning and say, is there a Berkshire hath Towagh like asset in climate today? And I found some. The problem was I did not have the courage to buy them. What were they? I found,

specifically a coal company in the United States. I was in love with this company, in love with it I was like, I should buy this company, but when push came to shove where I did not have the courage to act. And by the way, this was back then, which would have been a sickening trade today. Okay, first sickening trade that stunning behind the health issues of the people, the ability to keep them employed gainfully over a long

periods of time, the environmental impact. But that coal asset, in my mind, was my version of a Berkshire in that it was in climate. I mean, let's be honest, it creates energy, maybe not in the best way, but it does well. You're using the cash flow from the coal. It generates enormous cash flow, and I thought I could reallocate this cash flow into now building this portfolio of assets that I think are quite interesting, batteries, solar, all

of this stuff. But you didn't that investment because of ESG constraints. You don't have any es G constraints. I have no ESG constraints, but I have moral constraints. And so you know, I sat down and I was thinking, like what happens when a person, a parent says, my partner has black lung because of the work he or she did. In your mind, what do I do well? The old line answer was tough health insurance and then you're on your own. I can't do that, not based

on my background. I would feel too much guilt. So I went through those practical issues, and I could not tell myself that I would make the decisions that I would need to to optimize for free cash flow. Do you see what I'm saying? Not in that asset. If I own a software asset, it's easy. There's nobody's coming to you with black lung. And I just didn't have the internal stamina to do it. It's not me. So then what I came to the conclusion of is there

is no anchor asset for me today. So no, the reason we haven't started a brokeshire for climate is we haven't found our gico. Now, let's just start by talking about your climate tech investments, perhaps the biggest one. First, I think we've put on the order of about a billion dollars to work over the last two and a half years, and I would say that most of them have been really about learning where we think the future

opportunities are. And then one has really consumed a lot of the capital, which is this company called Palmetto, and the simplest way to think about it is that Palmetto is driving the bottoms up deregulation of energy. And the way that it does that is that it helps consumers really simply and cheaply get solar onto their roof in

a predictable way for a predictable price. And then it allows them to manage that energy so that they can be self sufficient and resilient, and all the access energy can be back into the grid and all of that, you know, becomes cheaper and cheaper over time. You've made not just solar bets, but other bets. Yeah, if I can take a step back, like if I can give you the framework in which you know, people ask me, like, you know, are you motivated to solve the climate problem

because of your love of the environment. I could give you the virtue signaling answer, which is yes, But that's not really where my motivation comes. My motivation is economic. The economic motivation that I have is that there is going to be trillions of dollars of value that will be redistributed over the next decade or two. And the simplest lens with which to view that change is through

the lens of energy. So at the highest level, I was really fascinated by the geopolitical capital that it gives the United States to make better decisions if we're energy independent. Underneath that, I focused on two areas that to me seem the most practical ways for us to get to energy independence. So Number one is this deregulation of energy.

If you put one hundred million virtual power plants inside of every single home in America, you will completely change the nature of our need for hydrocarbons to such a degree that every time we look at a problem abroad and we take that issue off the table, I think will be in a much better position to coordinate and do the things that we believe in without having to

make these very complicated trade offs. I wanted to ask you about the climate motivations as we talked about you want to make money, but maybe there's the peace and prosperity lens, which to me was an interesting way to think about it as well, which is, if we don't solve this problem, there will be less peace in the world. If you solve this problem, there will be more prosperity in the world, and there will be more peace. The correlation is kind of tip to me, is it not.

I'm pausing. Okay, I'm not sure that that's true. I don't know whether. I just think that the United States has more freedom. So actually, let's talk about like if you look at the Iran nuclear deal and our position and our posture with Iran, one could theorize that if we were completely energy independent, we would take a much harsher stance, not necessarily because of our need for Iranian oil. I don't think we have that, but our friends and our friends friends who do need Iranian oil is what

causes that posture to be more watered down. As an example, And I'm not saying that that's the right posture to take, but you can go through all of these issues and actually come to a very different conclusion if you take energy off the table because it's a weight off of our shoulders, or it's a weight off of our allies shoulders. And I think that that that is an important place to be. And so this is why I think the energy transition really should be understood in this geopolitical context.

It is a national security and peace and prosperity objective. There's a lot of science that has to go into it, and a lot of carbon. Maybe that gets eliminated, and who knows how much, because those are all guesses. But what is practically true is that our foreign policy changes dramatically. It changed dramatically when we were energy independent for the few years under Bush, and you know, at the beginning of Trump or I think it was, Yeah, maybe at

at the beginning of Trumpet ended. But well, energy independence as a concept is a weird one because even when there was enough energy that America was producing on its own territory, it was still importing oil because the sum of the oil that was making it had to explode because the type of oil that was being produced here was only being refined in other net energy independence, yeah, you're absolutely right, but it has implications for our allies as well, Like you know, think of how the degrees

of freedom it gives. I don't know Europe right now when it's going through a gas crisis and is dependent on USLNG. Yeah, but beyond the solar bed what are the beds that we've made that would so at the highest level, I was really fascinated by the geopolitical capital that it gives the United States to make better decisions if we're energy independent. Underneath that, I focused on two areas that to me seemed the most practical ways for

us to get to energy independence. So number one is this deregulation of energy, and then the second is that if you unbundle that concept of the virtual power plant, there are two practical opportunities today. The first is how do you actually deploy the physical systems on top of one hundred million homes so that they can generate energy. That's what Palmetto does. But then the second is, while you're always generating energy every day, if you get solar on top of your roof, you need to store it.

So then the next area that I got really fascinated by was batteries. And within batteries it's really a matrix. There are different chemistries and different use cases. So if you talk to a utility, the battery solution that they would deploy are these football field size storage solutions that

you use a very specific iron based chemistry. Perhaps it's cheap, it has very different characteristics than the NMC or NCA batteries that Tesla would put in a Model X right, and that's nickel cobalt manganese or nickel cobalt aluminium exactly exactly now, if you did not catch that, I just listed out the elements in the batteries that Chama describes as being in one of Tesla's more expensive cars. All

of these batteries are lithim ion batteries. Lithium is the element that has enabled the explosion of handheld electronic devices we used today and the electric car revolution. But within lithi amine batteries there are different formulations, and these formulations have meanings beyond just how the battery works. There's cost. There's also supply chain and ethical implications related to buying

the raw materials. Chamat mentioned iron based chemistry. He's still talking about a lithiumine battery, one with a formulation of lithium ion and phosphorus, the LFB battery. The F stands for fee, which is the chemical symbol of iron. This chemistry is behind one of the cheapest lithium ion batteries you can buy in the market. That's because the components of an LFP battery are widely available elements. The other type he mentioned NMC or NCA batteries. NMC or NCAA

batteries are made with nickel, manganese, cobalt and aluminum. These metals are more expensive and they have other problems. The cobalt supply chain, for example, suffers from abusive labor practices. What chemistry a company chooses is a major decision, very complicated issues. So I've started to focus on batteries, and in batteries there are a handful things that I think

are practical solutions today. The first is that if you look at the choices that Americans make in terms of the kinds of cars that they drive, one of the biggest takeaways that you can make practically speaking is you probably do not need a Cadillac Escalate to go from your house to the Safe Way and back. And so there are very different power torque, energy profiles of cars that you could give a consumer to meet ninety nine

percent of their everyday use cases. But then that also gives them the added value of knowing that they're not emitting carbon into the environment. So you want to build a car company that is not a Tesla, because a Model three will give you all that power and target that is the useless. I think Tesla's actually making the right decisions. So if you think think about what Tesla did, they started at the upper end of the cost but also the upper end of the chemistry curve where they

picked NMC and NCA because they had to. And Elon wrote this in his master plan, I have to sell a premium car to get these early adopters. The features of a premium car are underpinned by performance, always has and always will be. But as he moved down the cost curve, what did he do? He went to LFP, He went to iron phosphate. Ye going to cause power and talk to go down. It's just well the energy no, all of it changes. The energy density of these batteries

are different. You you design a different car from here. And I got into a debate about the merits of different battery chemistries and how they affect the design of electric vehicles. It was charged two point three seconds using them? Is that true? But you want to elaborate and then maybe we can unpack if you if you think about like you cannot do it and just guys, just help. Can't do it. All you need to do is put enough of LP in there. You can't do that. That's

not true. You don't have a power tool that moves a five ton piece of Yeah, So the reason for that is because let's okay, how about I give you the answer that satisfy you. In the end, we all agreed that the supply chain for A left B batteries is preferable to the NMC batteries for reasons that have more to do with politics than chemistry. Okay, So my point is that I've gotten very interested in that idea, which is there are practical solutions that require an energy

profile that's very different than what we source today. You know, if you move away from these ternary chemistries and you go from instead of three critical you know, inputs like nickel, manganese, and cobalt which are difficult to source, complicated, terrible supply chains, to LFP, which is basically everywhere. That's something that I really am interested in, and and I think that that's worth exploring.

Both again from the perspective of cheaper, faster, better solutions will only have happen on LFP in my opinion, right, And that's what your bet on Metricham is doing. In part. Metri Kem is a startup that Chamat's Social Capital invested at least twenty million dollars into. The startup has plans to manufacture LFP the material needed to make the cheaper lithiumine batteries in North America. The batteries will be for electric vehicles are energy storage. I think metri Cham is

two pronged. One is we have to first prove that we can make the same LFP that China makes. We've proven that now at small scale. We have to prove that we can make it at large scale. So we're you know, at the kilogram scale, we can do it.

We're as good as anybody else in China. Now we need to prove that we can make it at ton scale, so that Samsung or sk or Tesla or anybody else who needs LFP can call us and say I need it from you guys, And as they do that, what we will also prove that with the existing infrastructure that makes LFP, we will give you our version of LFP which actually moves up the energy density curve at the

same price point. And we have some tricks. We have some things that we've been experimenting with our own trade secret which, if they bear fruit, will essentially allow us to have a recipe that for the same machines, the same infrastructure can just give you a better version of the product that you were buying before. So that's one thing. But the second thing, which I think is on the margins slightly more important, is it domesticates this know how

an ip in the United States. After the break, I talked to Chamat about risk SPACs and ESG, which is using environmental, social and governance measures, these non financial metrics to make financial decisions. The story of Linthiaman batteries is stunning in that you know, almost all the components that went into making the first commercial one were invented here in America, but then it was commercialized by Sony in Asia, and then obviously in the twenty first century it was

China that scale of the industry. And so now we are at least here in the US having to by the way, they've be sure they've they've done two things. They consolidated the industry with respect to the actual specially chemical processing. So all of those pipelines are effectively Chinese zode. And we need to do a lot of very hard work over the next ten to fifteen years to both pull in people to train them if they don't exist, and then to figure out how to do it ourselves.

There's enormous amounts of know how and trade secret ad into this stuff, which is what allows these duopolies and oligopolies to exist. And then the second thing that China did brilliantly is they used their capital to go all around the world and essentially by the critical inputs. So in the United States, because we fell under the spell of ESG, you know, we allowed all these random companies to get banner of ESG, which that didn't deserve it.

You know, all of Big Tech is an EESG company, which is so stupid because what did it really do. It got all these asset managers to divest and move away from these hard capital areas of our world that we needed investment mining, specialty chemicals. Nobody wanted to touch it. It is putting capital allocators in the position to be moral judges and arbiters. And I don't think that's the job capitalists should be doing. I think capitalists should focus

on return uninvested capital only. And when they do that, and if they do that, well, they would finance some of the things that have been ignored. They would have financed the lithium exploration around the world, the lithium extraction in the United States, which not only, as it turned out, would have made us, and it still can, by the way, an enormous amount of money for that capital allocator, but it would have given a level of national security that

we desperately need today. But you've also made the point that capitalists are chasing, and have been for some time, short term returns, and that's because the people who run these investment firms, who run asset managers, are trained to do that. They go to the same schools, they meet the same people, they hang out with the same people, they have all the same thesis, and what they want is a set amount of return, stable return, all the time. Right.

So if that's the kind of capitalism that we have right now, how do you think that would have funded lithium exploration. It's just high. It's not the only it's not the only. Look, here's the thing. I think it's unfair to cherry pick a set of decisions by a plurality of people in a moment as the total set of decisions. It has always been the case that the riskier the bet, the higher the returns, and it has always been the case that there have been people who

are willing to take those bets. But I think what you're talking about is something else, which is after an industry starts to become professionalized, then a plurality of people do come in, and they neither have the capability to make those decisions nor the risk appetite to make those decison. The capability, meaning you know, if you're if you're going to be a good biotech investor, I think at some level you need to have either built a biotech company

or at least understand biology. If you're going to be a really skilled technology investor, I think you need to have built a technology company. I think everybody else can be good, and some of them have turned out to be excellent, But mostly those folks are doing a job, and I think that's okay. So I think my retort to you would be there are all kinds of people today, it's just that there's not enough of them doing some

of the riskiest work. And I think right now we're at a moment where there may be enough wins so that people get very excited to follow. So, for example, I am pretty sure that when people see the returns or that we will generate in some of our companies, it will open their mind to consider those kinds of companies when they never would have before. I'll give you a different example of one. So we made an investment in a business that, again this is in the theme

of climate, but it's helped landhold farmers in India. And you guys know this, but there's it's India's a highly, highly fragmented farming infrastructure. These folks are in a very difficult position. You know, if you look at the suicide rates among farmers, it's off the charts. It's crazy. It's crazy. And what are the problems underneath that? Yield management, the ability to source crops at a reasonable I mean, like, these are very simple problems. That it's a coordination problem.

I mean exactly because of funding farmers on audit right. So my point is it's very easy to identify, like, it's not a mental health crisis amongst farmers. These are capital and coordination problems that can be solved by a company with software, et cetera. We've made that bet we're seeing some really interesting early progress. What was the company called Harvesting Farmers Network. Anyways, I think if I walked around Silicon Valley, people would say two things. Moth's a

great investor. He's made billions and billions of dollars. What the hell is farming in India? Who the hell cares? They would say both of those two things. If this farming and India thing works, I guarantee you, guys, okay, that more organizations and local value will say maybe there's agriculture based opportunities that we should really be focused on that can be improved by software. Because look, Jimals just made a billion dollars off this thing. If he can

do a week into it, I agree with that. You know, I don't think we're particularly that special. We're just willing to take risk a few years earlier than the plurality. If you're talking high risk, let's talk about failures. What are the failures that you've had personally and how have you learned from them? Tons? Okay, so in general or in climate, Well, in climate, let's focus on climate. But like if it gives you a bigger lesson, look to

get to Palmetto. I probably burned a couple hundred million dollars. How did I burn it? I made some bad investments. I made some investments that were okay investments. I made some investments that actually made a little bit of money. But All of those things had a capital cost to me, the some total of the money I had to spend, meaning money in versus money out. I lost a bunch of money. So, for example, I invested in the solar financing space. I didn't know what I was doing. I

wanted to learn about it. I thought I could understand it. I did understand it. But what I didn't understand was how horribly the market valued such companies. They couldn't care less, you know they. I thought, wow, here's a great cost of capital trade and you know, this makes sense, and I talked myself into it, and the market was like, this sucks. I invested in a renewable energy business in India,

and I thought, this is a no brainer. Ninety percent ebit to Margins, who's seen a company like this, Everybody's gonna love it. It's like great entrepreneur, but you know it doesn't have the market characteristics to be rewarded. I did electric buses, you know, market didn't reward it. So all these signals I take on the way in. I'm willing to use my money as risk capital to learn, and so I go in thinking, if I have one

hundred percent impairment on this would I be okay? And my answer typically is as long as I am fundamentally further along in my understanding of the space, that's the cost of doing business for me, you know, because like, I am not in the business of hitting a ninety seven percent average batting average. That's not my business. It's not been my career. It's not what I'm good at. Lose, lose, lose, lose one massive giant outcome, a couple of good outcomes,

and you replenish the pot. And the way that that happens iteratively over years can build great fortunes, but it can also build great progress. And the way that I do it is I just start, you know, honestly, Like I started in Wikipedia. I was like what is a battery? And then I went to YouTube, like show me how a battery is made? What is an anode? What is a cathe? And like, look, I mean, I'm being kind of phycegious. I have a background in electrical engineering. My

undergrad was in Doube. You know, I spent a lot of time in semiconductors, so I know that world. So I was able to short circuit some of the learning steps. But to be very honest, with you. It is. If you look at my calendar in a week, call it fifty hours in the office. I have maybe eight hours of schedule time. So what am I doing the other forty two hours? You'll see me for all you know.

I could be sleeping at my desk, but I'm reading constantly, reading, reading YouTube, reading YouTube, back and forth, over and over and over again. And then at some point I say, okay, I jump in with my two feet. I make a

bet I learned. Sometimes I jump in with ten millions, sometimes a jump with fifty, sometimes M one hundred, trying to learn, trying to make sure that that you know that that was a good investment, trying to reinforce my body of knowledge, and over time, for me, that has proven to be a successful way to approach the job. One of the things that Chamat is most known for is popularizing a kind of investment called a spack. He's often called a spack king. But what is a spack?

I'll tell you about it through one of Chat's most famous ones. Today, Virgin Galactic, makes its debut here at the New York Stock Exchange as a spack, joining me in a first on CNBC interview, Virgin Galactic bunder Sir Richard Branson, Social Capital CEO Chat Palata. It's twenty nineteen and Chamata is on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange along with Branson, who is dressed in a

blue space suit. It's the day that Virgin Galactic, the spaceflight company, went public bya as the reporter notes, a spack. SPACK stands for special purpose Acquisition company. Two years earlier, Chamata and other investors created a special company with no operations or employees, just a shell company that was publicly traded. It existed solely to find another company that was not public to merge with in the process making it public,

which shares on a stock exchange. They had six hundred and ninety million dollars to do it, and they decided to acquire Virgin Galactic. What they're celebrating at the Stock Exchange is the completion of that merger. Fireworks, literally, it's probably the first time I've ever seen fire technics on the floor of the New York Stact Exchange splash with a conventional IPO or initial public offering, the majority of the stock sold on the first day goes straight to

large banks, investment firms, or rich individuals. With a SPAC, many more people can buy shares. They are heavily marketed to retail investors, people like you and me. That's largely Chamats doing now. It's wonderful tri enable the public recomment and invest alongside us. Taking a company public through a regular IPO can take over a year because of the amount of oversight required by financial regulators. SPACs can be

rolled out faster, which has its own benefits. SPACs were popular with climate tech companies because they're not seen as great investments through the lengths of the traditional IPO loot. These companies are developing technology that are riskier, and they need lots and lots of money to develop those technologies before they can turn a profit. Chamatha as an investor in this company. Now, I know one of the things you've come on CNBC and talked about the past is

how impressive the girls march. Chamat is a promoter of the SPAC. It's a role with compensation. Chamath could go on CNBC and promote Virgin Galactic. I generally don't put my own principal capital on the table unless I think there's a really compelling risk reward and I'm doing that, he said Virgin Galactic would have revenues of close to four hundred million dollars. By twenty twenty two, SPACs became bigger than Chamat. Celebrities like Tiger Woods, Shaquille O'Neal, and

Serena Williams launched them. Chamat claimed he would create one for every letter of the alphabet. Virgin Galactic was spack a Chamat ended up stopping at f in twenty twenty one. Chamath sold his shares of Virgin Galactic while they were still high and made two hundred million dollars. He stated his money would go to word flighting climate change. Virgin Collected did not make four hundred million dollars in revenue

as projected. By twenty twenty two, it brought in less than two million dollars in revenue and was operating at a loss of three hundred and forty six million overall. Given the macro environment, etc. But also your specific investments climate and non climate, it's a rough time for you with SPACs all down. The plan that you had to have a spack for every letter of the alphabet. Where is that now? I think that that could still be something that we do, but it'll happen over a much

longer period of time. I think like spacks are really they're really interesting because I think there are a lot of companies that are working in industries that don't fit the neat model of how folks have wanted to historically invest in technology. In the past, people have wanted to invest in software ninety plus percent gross margins, you know,

ideally recurring revenue. These things are not possible in many areas that really matter, and in those the capital markets will need different tools in order to bring investors together for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars, and I think Auspact can still do that. I will do them from time to time, but it was always

a tool in my toolbox. You know. You have to remember, like in the last couple of years, I think we've done like fifty investments you know, eight verspects or sorry, six verspects, right, So there's still a lot of our body of work is much bigger than that. I think people know us for that, or know me for that in part, but I would encourage them to, you know, read the annual letter to really understand, like we are

doing a lot of stuff. We've been on the ground floor in Silicon Valley for eleven and a half years building tech companies. That's what we do. If you look at the amount of money that was put into climate tech through SPACs, yeah, it's astronomical, astronomical. It would have never happened otherwise. A right. That is probably the singular moment that has happened for climate right that in twenty twenty one there was capital that was ingested at a

level that was that has never happened happened before. I agree, and I'm very proud of that. I think that that's that's a very good start. And then I think this, you know, the IRA is going to be profoundly impactful, profoundly impactful. I think that was an incredible, incredible piece of legislation on the whole, and I think Chuck Schumer

deserves an enormous amount of credit for that. How he negotiated that with Mansion, I don't know the TikTok of that deal, but that is a transformational piece of legislation. This is American government at its best, which is mostly getting out of the way, creating very bright line incentives and then letting the free market operate. You have a billboard outside your house with a message to the world. What would it say, Oh, I know the answer to this.

It's the same billboard that when I first moved tier in two thousand, blew me away. It was right as you entered Menlo Park and it was on the freeway, the one on one south you're going on, and it said high octane capitalism ahead. I loved it. I loved it. I was like, Wow, I'm home. That's what I thought. I was like, I'm home. I've found my people. So that's the billboard. It would say, high octane capitalism ahead. Be passionate, but don't be emotional. Come to me with

your best ideas. And did I say, this was a lovely conversation. Thanks for having this. Thank you. Chamata is one of many venture capitalists trying to make it big with climate investments. Given the decline in the stock market globally, investors are being more careful about where to put their money, but relative to other industries, climate tech continues to get

a healthy dose of investments. And while we talk about Buffet's disciples, if you'd like to learn why Buffett thinks an oil company can be a climate bet check out our episode in the archive that features Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollob. Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, Send it to a friend, or send it to someone who wants to get rich quick. Get in touch at zeropod at Bloomberg

dot net. Zero's producer is Oscarboid and senior producer is Christine riskoll Our team music is composed by Wonderley. Special thanks to Benkuet, viscern Athan Brian Eckhous, Bailey Lipschulz, and Kira Bendon. I'm Axtrati back next week.