The single biggest thing that America has right now going against it is that we have four or five companies—Facebook, Apple Amazon, Microsoft, Google—that suck up the enormity and the overwhelming majority of all talented, technical human capital ... If you are a smart young kid... how do you turn around to your family and say 'I'm going to go and work at the startup for 80 grand a year, or this nonprofit, or something else versus going and getting paid a million dollars a year at one of these big companies'? It's really impossible.

It [COVID-19 vaccine distribution] is a wartime scenario. When war is happening, you don't go home at 5 PM, and wake up at 9 AM, and clock out for an hour for lunch ... We've created incredible disincentives in the system. In fact, [Andrew] Cuomo put out a million-dollar fine if you get your vaccine out of line. Think about the disincentive that creates. Now, people are more scared about giving the vaccine to the wrong person than they are incentivized to give the vaccine to the right person.

A whole bunch of services have also cropped up that allow you to find the best grade 5 math teacher, the best grade 6 algebra teacher, the best grade 7 history teacher ... I think, in the 21st century, especially in America, it stands to reason that we should be able to give these incredible teachers— We should pay them like athletes ... These guys should be making 30, 40, 50 million bucks a year, and they should be teaching all American grade 5, grade 6, grade 7 materials. And when you're in school, you should be consuming this video content with incredible local teachers that help supplement and reinforce what these best-in-class folks teach us.

There's a series of court challenges we can talk about. I think that they're unlikely to prevail—very, very unlikely. I think Joe Biden will be the next president. We can kind of compare this to Bush v. Gore from 2000, and if you want to compare Trump's case to Gore's case, it's weaker in every respect.

This guy [Moncef] Slaoui, who's the head of the Trump administration's effort to produce the vaccine, he actually slowed down the Moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren't including enough minorities in the trial, and that cost them three weeks. If it weren't for those three weeks, Moderna's vaccine would have happened before Pfizer's, and it would have come out about a week before the election.

There are a lot of very, very reasonable Republicans and a lot of very reasonable Democrats. The fringes of both parties are functionally mentally retarded.

As a man, I was taught that talking is weak. I also found that, as an immigrant man, I was taught that talking about emotions was doubly weak ... I was taught that, in this industry, talking is awkward. You put all these things together and the biggest thing that I found that's helped me is just talking and being open.

I think COVID-19 is going to be a distant memory by next summer. I think we'll have one to two quarters of transition, but I think that once the vaccine's widely available, plus the treatment and testing for the people who slip through the cracks... I tend to think things are going to snap back very fast and COVID-19 will just be this bad memory.

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.

I think that we all are trying our best ... When we forget that, we just act like raging dipshits, but we are all honestly trying our best, everyday. If you keep it in mind, it's amazing how much empathy you can have for other people.

I read a study ... It said that the absolute maximal link between money and happiness is around $50M.

Being happy, personally, is the pathway to help everything else make sense.

If I was an investor in your company, and you said, 'Chamath, I generate 30% free cash flow, and I'm going to give you a dividend,' I would say, 'Shane, fuck you! I don't want that money. What am I supposed to do with it? Reinvest it! Grow faster!'

The pandemic has really shown to me that our education infrastructure is totally broken.

I don't know if it was [Anthony] Fauci or someone that's closer to the operation [who] shared that they do think they can get 70% of Americans immunized [from COVID-19] by May [2021].

If you look at the Asian countries that have controlled the virus [SARS-CoV-2], every single person wears a mask when they go out in public.

I actually feel very bad for the people that stormed the Capitol. I feel like these are folks that are on the fringes who just need a vessel, and Trump is a vessel ... He instigated them, and runs away.

I think it's ironic that an administration that was constantly accused of white supremacy probably lost the election because they slowed down this [COVID-19] vaccine trial group [Moderna's] to include more minorities.

The healthier I am mentally, the more I'm able to overcome these natural inclinations to revert to comfortable patterns that have been very well-established and well-worn. They're not healthy, but they're just habits.

I think that it's very likely that the Donald Trump that runs for president in 2024 is Donald Trump Jr.

I think that if more people believed that they could be economically self-sufficient... it would solve a lot of the societal implications of inequity.

I think that children, in many ways, are the best and worst reflections of you as a parent.

[Warren] Buffett has a saying which is that the way you make money is not timing the market; it's time in the market.