Joe Lonsdale on Everything

Here in sunny Singapore with my friend Joe Lonsdale. His first company, Palantir, was in the Hexagon on Page Mill Road. 1500.

Remember that? Yeah, the whole place we're doing like a dollar fifty a foot. I remember on Page Mill it cost nothing.

It cost nothing. Right. It was totally affordable. You can't easily do the garage startup in Silicon Valley anymore. In the same way I was talking.

About this, my friend in biotech, everything just got fat too because there was too much money. You don't actually need to spend nearly as much money as we do on some of these things. That's one of the things I'm working on right now, teach people is like you don't need to have like 200 people at your biotech company using like all the really high end prepackaged stuff. Like there's ways of doing things cheaper and scrappier, probably useful.

That's right. It's like, you know the, with biotech kits, kits can get really expensive. It's like difference roughly between making your own coffee and pre made coffee.

I run abc, we build lots of companies. But there's all sorts of opportunities in fixing health care, fixing things in defense. Like I said, like to go, I like to run towards the broken things in society. I think that's what a leader's job is to do, is that the things everyone else is running towards are usually the popular things. Those usually aren't that broken. There's all these things that are broken.

About the U.S. meth and.

No, it's drugs too.

Right.

And you talk about this a lot. So, so the question is let's actually acknowledge these things. Let's run towards them and let's fix them. Yeah, that, that's one of my passions right now. The university system is broken. Let's build a new one and teach how to do it better. Right. So there's, there's, that's, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be leaders in the.

US And I love it. And you know, I think, you know, there's, there has to be criticism, but there's a constructive criticism where your alternative has to be better than the existing.

Thing and you have to learn how to build. I mean this is why America is a great country is we get together and we create things and we build things and we try things.

Yes.

And rather than, rather than just like saying everything's broken. Well, what's your answer? Let's get together, let's fix it. So that's, that's the and that's the energy that comes from the innovation world that you and I are part of. I'm an entrepreneur, founded Palantir, founded add a par of 2009, which is also a large global company. Leader in wealth management technology, started Open Gov, which you were an early investor in. Support is also great unicorn, supporting thousands of governments. And you know, I've built a bunch of companies and a lot of people who work for me started building companies. So I started helping them. ABC is one of the larger, more successful venture funds. We've done kind of seven big funds now. And you know, there's a lot of things you can solve with entrepreneurship. I think entrepreneurship is the best way to fix society.

And what's still aum of ABC now.

It'S like, oh, I think we've raised a total about $7 billion between all the funds, give or take. We have like seven core funds, a couple follow on funds, some SPVs. So that's, that's, that's committed capital. A much higher. Because you get to count the markups.

Right.

We've raised about $7 million and we've done well. So the APC is a big fund. We build a lot of things and then it turns out you can't solve every problem with entrepreneurship. So I have my policy institute, I have the university and you know, to try to be a leader in U.S. society.

Yes. And actually that's a really deep point, which is I think you and I got to that realization maybe, maybe a little bit sooner than the broader tech community. But folks have realized you can't do everything with technology. You need some policy, you need some politics as well. Right. Talk about your, your thinking.

Well, I love that. I love the Javier Milei quote in Argentina. This like, yes, crazy guy who, I love it to go Argentina is very exciting. And he's basically saying, like the way Milton Friedman said you see your social roles to make profit as entrepreneur. That's correct. But you also need to try to make sure socialists don't take over your country. You go for those.

Right, Right.

You need both to make profit, but also to keep your government and your society functional.

And you know what I love about this is lots of folks who are socialists say you have a social responsibility as an entrepreneur and so on. And I agree. The social responsibility is keep out the socialists.

You know, social responsibility is make sure these people who don't do things based on merit, don't do things based on functionality, who are, who are breaking things when they get in power to keep them out. Thomas Jefferson, he actually believed in the, in public education a lot. It was actually controversial. You know why you want a public education? To teach them about liberty, teach them to stand demagogues and despots.

Right.

So that the whole point of public education is to teach people not to allow what we call today socialists jealous of liberty.

Right, Exactly.

That is the one thing like, like you said, you know, public university is different. University is the elite. In the university you have to train the elite to understand our history, our great debates, like really be ready to, to, to run, to run a free society. They're not in charge of society, but they're still in charge of government. In a free society, that's one thing, but it's another thing. Just the masses in general, the number one thing is make sure they don't get corrupted and make sure they support liberty. And we've totally lost that in our education.

You know, the thing about this is, you know, we'll put up a graph which shows the speaking level of like US presence. Have you seen that graph?

They've gotten a lot dumber, a lot.

Dumber since the age of Jefferson and Hamilton and so on.

And so I wish I could talk like these because I read them all the time. I love going back read their primary sources, but they're a lot more sophisticated than we are.

Yeah, it's actually the thing that's. Here's the thing that I haven't fully squared the circle. Right. The, you know, when the US became independent, it was like about like 1.6 million people, something like that.

It was a few million because people have Patrick Henry speech. 3 Millions of people are the holy cause of liberty.

Yes.

And such nations we possess.

Okay, there you go. Remember? So, so it's like, it's like in the single digit millions. Right. And a lot of these guys were in their 20s. They were, they were actually quite young. A lot of the. Do you know about that? Like the.

Of course, they're the entrepreneurs. They're in their 20s and 30s.

Exactly. They're all startup guys, younger than we are. I know, we got to get on it. Well, well, some of them. Ben Franklin was a little bit older. There's. There's some Ben Franklin. Yes, exactly. That's right. That's right. So that shows that when there was a frontier and there were young talented people and a relatively small group of things, you could start the greatest startup in world history.

Right.

Which is the United States of America. So the thing though that I don't get is, and this will sound stupid, but sometimes Asking the stupid questions. No Internet. Right. No ability to look up references. You had to read everything on pen and paper. Oh yeah, right. There weren't that many books printed, but.

They were all really well read and they were all constantly reading what's going on.

Yeah.

Like everyone basically like the men who were running society. Like there's this thing called the London Magazine. Have you seen London Magazine?

No.

I love this. It's a, it's like the combination of like 10 of our top magazines all in one. Like the Atlantic and then.

Yes.

All these things are like. And people would read it in London, they'd read it all over the Americas and like you'd have like Lord north arguing with Benjamin Franklin and the pages. And it would, it would show you, here's what happened in Parliament. Here's like this war going on. You have a fold out map of the war. There'd be like hard math problems. Like you have.

Yeah.

Physics problems here. And like this is what the gentleman at the time already I collected as a kid. I read all of these.

So, so this is the thing that I don't, I feel that there's a piece of the past that at least I don't fully understand, which is, you know, looking up a reference, for example, is actually relatively easy to do on the Internet. You can use Sci Hub or Libjan or something like that. And I do that a lot and that's how I learn things. If you had to go to the library and look up a card catalog, it's like it takes a thousand x or literally a million x as long to look that up. So how. And there are fewer books and so, so how are they so well read? I don't actually understand that part of it.

This is a very, it's just so. The Roman analog I think is very important. Like every great man in Rome would read like Livy and read like Virgil or read Horse. There was a, there's a cultural foundation that was shared.

Right.

And they had a, it was a different one now when you come to America, but it was the same set of like cultural foundations where you had your library. There's a standard library that everyone have. Everyone read. An educated man would, would have this history of the west and that was, and that was like their reference set. So when you go back to all the speeches of these guys, you go back to all the conversations, they're all referencing not just things from the Bible, but things from Rome, things from the Glorious Revolution and British history and you know, the Magna Carta, things from, you Know parts of French history. Like, there's all sorts of things they would study. They'd all know.

Yeah. You know, this is funny because, you know, I made that analogy to the standard library of, like, Python or something like that.

Right.

You know, it was interesting. It's a nice play on words. Right. And. And I wonder if it's actually somewhat. Not just a play on words, but something deeper than that in the following sense. If in Python or any language, you type in something which you haven't defined yet, you get an error. Right. So the words actually need to be defined in order for you to use them in a program or with another program. So in the same way, if people aren't familiar with certain concepts, like, oh, Plato wasn't a fan of democracy, and democracy has altered other meanings, or know the concept of despotism. And if. If they don't even have these vocabulary words, then the program crashes. They didn't install those words at the top of the program. You know, so that, in a sense, as we're thinking about education, you know, and you're doing K through 12, I'm. I'm funding, you know, stuff like synthesis and, you know, I did this network conference with Parallel education track, so we're both interested in this kind of stuff. You also got the University of Austin. Right. Which I think I'm going to be giving some talks or something there. Right. One way of thinking about it is these are almost like a standard library. And then what kinds of things do we want them to do downstream?

And we need to make sure they have the standard library, how the concepts even go there.

Which is.

Yeah, which. The Enlightenment kind of like gave that to the. To the. To the men of America at that time, which created the revolution. So what. What are the. What's the modern version of the Enlightenment? What are the types of things we need to be doing? Yeah, make sure everyone reads biology. Right.

Well, okay. Or teal. Or, you know, pg, you know. Right. I think. I think we've got.

We are.

You know, one of the things that's funny is on Twitter, they'll. They'll kind of make fun or something. They'll be like, oh, why do all these tech guys become philosophers? Or. And I actually thought about why, and I've got a couple of answers. I wanted to hear your thoughts. So one is, every founder starts as lead engineer and ends up as chief psychologist. Right. Because you're managing a team of people. And now what matters is, yeah, certainly the engineering matters and whatnot, but also their emotions. What's in their heads and how groups of humans interact with each other and all the crazy things that happen out of that, which is different than how groups of machines interact.

It's true. I mean, I think the law. The truly greatest founders, they're chief psychologist, but they actually are like I have a. One of my friends who's built the biggest private company in the US he calls himself chief Philosophy Officer. So he's. Yes, he was CEO for a long time, but he replaced himself and became like the chief Philosophy officer. And he writes books on philosophy as well. Not a tech guy, but. But you know, someone is. And it's, and it's basically like, like how do you take how people work, how society works and how do you imbue your company with that? And he's, he's all about like Maslow's, Maslow's philosophy of self actualization, the hierarchy of needs. The very highest one is to self actualize, right? Say, how do you help everyone in your company self actualize in a way that's aligned, you know, with creating value. And there's things like that which is really important.

And you know, the thing about it is, you know, even though people think, oh, and again, to engage some of the, they'll say, why do tech guys always want to make technologies for everything? And actually one of the things I talked about in the Never State book is we can see the birth and life and death of companies in like a 5 or 10 or 15 year window. And you and I have now run, you know, hundreds, probably thousands of experiments to take all of our investments and add all of them up, right? And so you, you start to see patterns in the life cycles of organizations that the only thing that's larger than that are countries, right? And countries start spanning over the life of hundreds of years, whereas companies are in the tens of years or twenties of years or decades.

There's one thing largely countries which is civilization.

Civilizations, right? Like India, China.

A lot of my, a lot of my favorite thinking is like these books on the history of civilization.

Funny, I've got, I've got a few back here.

I mean, Quigley's evolution of civilizations I always found very useful because he talks about how, you know, you have to have mixed things from different backgrounds, almost like the different types of enlightenment type things where you have new kind of set of primitives that come together and cultures of mix. And then it grows and there's, and then there's these like things that help it grow, but the things help it grow become special interests over time. And then, and then things start existing for the sake of the special interests themselves. And that's when it starts to decay and then it gets invaded again. But it's, it's fascinating to watch how like almost all of these civilizations, as.

Well as see them happen as fast forward with the company.

It gets, it gets captured, right? The things get captured over time and it becomes decadent.

Right.

And then the question is, can you renew it and can you teach enough people in society? Okay, we're going to go against this thing that's capturing it and to go against these interests and we're going to make it for the interest for all again, is what Javier Milli is trying to do in Argentina.

It's right.

I believe some people, you know, they're trying to do in the US as well by going against the broken bureaucracies.

You know, and the thing about it is that is possible because if we look at, you know, people talk about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but it wasn't just a strict, you know, rise and fall sign. It wasn't a parabola. The trajectory is much more complicated than that with many reversals and so on before the final collapse in 476. So I think a better metaphor is not a sine wave, but a stock price. Right. For not just like you have it for a company, do we have it for a country. It could be population, it could be gdp, it could be real estate footprint. So the Ottoman Empire collapses and loses a lot of real estate footprint. And that's like, you know, a stock price dropping 95%. Right. And so there's, there's, there's some folks like, you know, Turchin, do you know this guy? So there's folks who are doing more in the way of quantitative history. Dalio is doing a little bit of it. Peter Turchin, the guys who are doing the fourth turning have done kind of a verbal version of it. And I feel like trying to quantify.

These things is always a really good thing to do. The social sciences, usually the smartest guys try to do that.

Yeah. And so I think with some of the AI stuff now in particular, you can take all of the written materials on ancient Rome and, you know, Google Engram, you can do stuff like that. You can see when they were saying certain words and others, for example, you go to Google Engram. Here's a fun experiment. If you type in republic and democracy, you see that early American founders talked about the US in terms of a republic and the term democracy at least ramped up in the 20th century.

I know. I like Republic much better. By the way, Master mockery doesn't work. All of our founders knew Master Rocket is a bad idea.

Well, it's funny.

It's different.

The quickest way I can establish that to somebody is I say, okay, if there was a global vote, okay, 96% of the world is non American, is that vote going to go the way that the US government wants to go? No, it's not going to go the way.

You see this with the UN all the time.

Exactly.

Which is a bunch of dictators get together and do terrible things.

Right. And so the thing is, can you be the, quote, champion of democracy if most of the world is not on your side? Right. Or at least you have to reinterpret what democracy means in that.

I think it's a terrible word to use for this. And a lot of the dumbest foreign policy America has done has been trying to spread democracy to places that, first of all, we don't want democracy, we want republics. And second of all, those places weren't even set up for us with that.

Said at the end. So, like, you know, some examples, a lot of the stuff in terms of trying to democratize the Middle East, a lot of stuff, actually. Interesting thing. There's this book by Ian Grillo on narco terrorism in South America, right. And in Mexico in particular, it's called, like, El Narco. And he makes a point. You know, it actually evidently led to the drug war there. The old, like, I think the PRI was able to keep the lid on drugs and. And so on. The introduction of competitive elections is actually what spurred the drug war.

How's that?

So basically because factions started to realize, oh, I can bribe the guy on the other side.

Cardinals were so powerful, they were able to actually bribe people and get in power.

Barbara Walter has a book called How Civil Wars Start. And she actually comes to a very similar conclusion. Totally different person. And she's. She's actually not looking at South America. She's like, it's when you have something that's in what she calls the intermediate range between a, quote, full democracy and an autocracy, that you have the maximum amount of chaos. Okay. And now I interpret what she's saying in a somewhat different way, which is a, quote, full democracy by what she's saying is something where it's basically under the control of the US government. This was like the old McDonald's thing, you know, like how two countries with a McDonald's in them will go. Yeah, that means if they both have McDonald's. They basically have enough American influence that they're under Pax Americana. So they've got a dispute resolver.

That was why they weren't finding as they were under Pax Americana.

Exactly. So it wasn't the local voting, it was the global non voting, you know, Right. As that's a different interpretation. That's like what Curtis talks about. And conversely, the quote, autocracies were stable for a different reason because they had built some non local, you know, whether it's MBS or whether it's, you know, China. They had built a non local, you know, pyramid or whatever. Right. And at least, at least stable for some deceptively stable.

And then not.

That is correct because they, they will hide the internal conflict and it burst forward sometimes.

Right.

And then, then you've got the things in the middle like democracy, you know, like Saddam was actually more stable than the war zone that it became in the 2000s and early 2010s like ISIS and, and so on and so forth.

So anyway, turns out anarch anarchism is.

Not a good anarchy when you have.

Iran on your border throwing in a mess.

Totally. Exactly right. So lots of words actually get sort of rebranded to be both X in its opposite. For example, Christianity meant both the revolutionary Christianity that tore down the Roman Empire and the hierarchical Christianity that buttress the Holy Roman Empire. You know, now I recognize those aren't continuous things, that there's a gap in between and so on. But still there's something interesting where like you had the concept of a Christian king after, you know, like Christianity attacked the Roman Empire. Right. And then, you know, communism meant at one point tearing everything down. But now in China, communism is a hierarchical, top down, total control thing. And even the children of the top officials are called what prince links. Right. So went from revolutionary to ruling class ideology. And actually I have a bunch of the examples of this. The reason I just say that is when something can mean both X and its opposite, you know, so democracy is interesting where it can mean like, you know, oh, the, you know, people are voting and it's all good, but it can mean populism, politics. And then they're mad at it and it's bad. The people shouldn't have a say. It should be enlightened bureaucrats that do that. And then, you know, there's, there's one wrinkle I talk about is to go from 51% democracy to 100% democracy. So 51% is where we currently have, where 49% are really mad that they didn't get to vote for the guy. They didn't consent, they didn't get consent to the government. 100% democracy is everybody goes and moves to, let's say, Starbase Texas, which is Elon's new city, or they've moved to one of the new startup cities that we're looking at funding, you know, Culdesac in Arizona. And everybody has consented to be there and they've consented to enter essentially the jurisdiction of, you know, a CEO that's running that territory, which is done totally.

Legally, by the way.

And now because they've consented to be there, they, they literally sign a social smart contract upon entry. And so because you have a higher level of consent, then people can do things together and everyone's a lot happier.

And they get what they want on average, a lot more.

Exactly. Now the other thing about it is 100% democracy is actually also 0.01% democracy. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, a lot of people say, oh, these crazy ideas on governance and so on network states are. That's never going to go mainstream. I say it doesn't need to go mainstream. And the reason is there's 8 billion people in the world.

You only have very few of us to do it.

Exactly. 01% is 800,000 people. 800,000 people is like, actually would be like the 30th largest UN country or something like that, like 40th largest. Okay, 800,000 people. So 0.01% of actually every minority group that can organize enough to can get their own city or their own state potentially in the future anyway, so this is some of the stuff I love.

I love that you're bringing this back up for the world to follow this stuff as you, you know, I, I introduced Peter to Patrick Freeman originally and you know, I was the original chairman of the Seasteading Institute. My very first video, which is the only thing you would find when you search for me, like on YouTube, five years on YouTube was like me on like Glenn Beck talking about seasteading, which was actually quite embarrassing for a while because it was like short. But you know, I was proud of having been involved.

No, I like, actually I love what you and Patri and Peter did on that because. And Patrick has talked about this like the path of C sitting people got really fixated on oh, it's on the water and so on. But the point was competitive.

Yeah, the point was like, the point was like, let's have a new government. When I started Palantir I could have gone, tried to work for IBM and fix IBM or something like that.

Right.

That's probably would not have been a very good use of my time on a relative basis.

Yes. And like, you know, I'll admit I.

Am, I am trying to fix government in the U.S. i have to stay in fight laws.

You so, so, so I respect that.

And it turns out, it turns out America is like way less broken than almost everywhere else, is my view. This is where we may disagree a little bit.

Right. But, but I.

You actually can go into states, you can like partner with governors, you can pass laws, you can show the things that work and you can inspire people. I've done this now, you know, Ciceros, in 15 states, we're getting dozens of laws passed. You can put accountability incentives, cut the waste, like get rid of broken things. And then we're going to teach people that and go to the national level. Now. It's going to be a big battle. But so, so I am trying to do is now at the same time, I would love there to be like a Singapore for the US to learn from.

Exactly.

Closer to America. That'd be great.

That's right. So. So the way I think about it is I think you can be Satya or you can be Satoshi. Just don't be Steve Ballmer.

Okay, Well, I mean, $100 billion.

That's true. This is true. So of course, Steve Ballmer, if you're watching this, I don't, I, I still respect.

Will still take your money. No, no, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, I don't think it gets.

It's hard.

The thing about it is, you know, just in defense of Steve, Amber before I critique is it's hard to run something like Microsoft. Right. To even keep it stable for like 10 years. It's really hard.

I think there may have been things that they put in place that ended up working later, but saty was really needed to make a lot of these things work.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So. So it's one of those things. It's kind of like people saying, oh, that NBA player sucks. Well, okay, maybe, maybe he wasn't scoring at all. It was pretty hard to be an NBA player.

Right? It's, it's, it's pretty tough.

That's right. But basically the point is that Satoshi is totally exit build a new system. Sathya is patiently wait and work your way through the bureaucracy to execute the turnaround.

I wouldn't say patiently wait. I'd say I basically think it's like Go to war against the broken bureaucracy.

Sure.

It's like. It's like. It's like you got to be an internal warrior.

So that's Elon.

You know, we are. Well, Satya is far. And you might know him better than me. I think he's a better diplomat than Elon. I don't know if he's necessarily more patient with broken things. So it's.

It's different, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just because you don't see.

Him yelling at them and being the crazy guy doesn't mean he's not really fierce, just in a different way.

This is what's actually really interesting. Like, basically his book hit refresh. And so does it. Like, I think especially with this recent OpenAI thing. Right. Where within 48 hours they had announced a deal like to catch and field a ball like that over the weekend.

Obviously. Super intense.

He's super intense. Right. Like, that's really hard.

He is at war. He is clearly at war. Elon is at war. He is at war, too, I think to be the CEO of Microsoft and it gets that position, you have to be a diplomat in a way that Elon doesn't have to be. Because Elon. Elon's a different type of game.

He's. Exactly. But it's. It's unusual for somebody to. Sethi is like Ding Xiaoping in my. In my view, because somebody who is diplomatic enough to work their way up, but then courageous enough to do those kinds of things at the senior levels. Usually what happens is the guy who's diplomatic enough. Everyone need names. But folks are diplomatic enough to work their way up.

No, but the wrong person to run. They're never bullied.

Yeah, exactly. They're too bureaucracy.

The problem. Well, the problem is, is that. Is that we're all humans and our nature is that if you have to be a certain way for a long time, you like change, you become that way.

Yeah.

So this is something that I'm. I'm always determined. I always want to be a revolutionary as a kid.

Yeah. Yeah. So.

And I started like as many companies as anyone else that are big. So I love that.

But.

But I am trying to work within the system because it's so important. But you always got to make sure and program yourself not to get captured by it and start like going with what they want.

Right. And the thing is, I'm glad that you were in a sense is one of these things where I think we're going to need both approaches. And it's very important. Go ahead.

Having A few of us on the inside is useful.

It's exactly. And I think like so what I'm doing is I am obviously, you know, I'm in Singapore, but I'm also investing a lot in India. In fact I just had a tweet on this that the, the Prime Minister retweeted.

Mooney's, Moody's slowly following you.

Yeah, that's right. It's good. And what I want to do is, you know, I think a lot of Americans now recognize that India is sort of back on the world stage. It's like it's executing out.

I think it's something we are bullish on. India. India. India is in an amazing position. You know I've, I've always hired people there. I mean of course, but to like, but to put it differently, like 20 years ago or maybe 15 years ago when I was hiring people there, if I'm totally honest, feature they're, they're like.

Body Shop years ago. Yeah.

It was like, it was like you pass the easy. Well to find problems to them.

Yes.

Now for some of my teams for add a par for open gov for other companies, we give them the hard problems.

Yes. Right.

And not only that, like I've taken, there's like you know, companies like people who are at freshworks left and started Rocket Lane and we're very proud, big investors very early there. And, and there's, there's, there's, I mean Ryan, Series hx. I'd love to do more series HX and you. I'm very bullish on it.

The thing about that is I feel it's still, it's, it's funny. I don't mean this in purely a market sense but I do think India is underpriced on the world stage.

People don't, people don't realize how important it's going to be over a 10, 15 year horizon. This is like clearly going to be like the dominant part of the world. That it's going to be extremely wealthy and people still think of India as poor, which it kind of is.

It is, it is, but it's improving.

But if you kind of see where it's going, it's clearly going to be a very wealthy, very powerful country.

Yeah. And I think, you know, here's my, I'd love to hear your take on this. And so on my, my view is there's about like 7 million Indians in the diaspora. It's actually not that rather.

No.

Yeah. Well there must be more than that. So. So rather in. I should be more Clear in the us, uk, Canada, Australia.

Okay, right.

So. So it's. Yeah, exactly. That's right. And there's more in, like Saudi Arabia and in Dubai.

A lot of important Indians in the Middle east, for sure. Yeah. I have men who run things there, too.

That's right.

English Sphere. It's only 7 million, though, even. Listen, it seems like it was more. Because you guys are running, like, all the big tech companies.

We're doing all right, basically. So here's my. My view is that if there are 7 million abroad who are doing this. Well, there's 1.4 billion Indians total, if you even say. Now, obviously the group abroad are a select subset, and so they probably have.

Some advantages on average. Yes. From people.

They are totally right. Because it's hard to do all the immigration stuff. But let's say you say, and this is a guesstimate, anywhere between 1 to 5% of India can play at that same level. I think that's probably reasonable.

I think it's very, very reasonable to say.

Yeah, so it was 5%. That's 70 million people. So whatever the Indian diaspora is doing now 10x that, it's amazing. And that's a real. That's a really big thing.

Got to be like, India. And frankly, the world needs India because we need more innovation in the world. We need more. More wealth. We need more people solving problems. We need more good guys, I think.

You know, I mean, basically, even though India is a cousin of, rather than a sibling of like Europe and the west. And so that's why it does share a certain set of. You know, what I call it now is. I call it Internet values. Did I talk to you about this? So here's, here's, here's the theories. It's like many, many years ago, people used to talk about Europe in terms of, like, Christendom.

Right.

And that was used to delineate. It was like an explicitly religious conception.

Yeah, Religious, but a set of values.

The set of values. That's right. And then that became the more secular concept of the west, which included America, which was more geographical. More secular as quasi geographic. Right. Like the West.

And by the way, even as a Jew, I do appreciate Christendom. There was a savage world out there back then, Right. Yeah, there was like. It was good stuff overall.

Yeah. And Judaism is adjacent to Christianity.

You know what it is. And they were. And I mean, they were nasty to us in Europe a lot. But on a relative basis, Christendom was like a good part of the world.

Sure. Right. And so that. Cause of the West. Now, of the reasons I've been thinking a lot about this is if, you know, you or I, we speak at tech conferences. We're all these places around the world. And, you know, I. I was just at like a. There's some event, whether it's in Dubai or Singapore or South Korea or something like that, and they're playing. Go ahead.

This is funny. You don't know. It's Dubai or South Korea. You're all over the place.

I'm all over the place, Right. Because crypto in particular is global. Right. And you know, there's somebody on stage and they were talking about, you know, free speech and free markets, but they were of non Western descent and they had a non Western accent, and there's a group of non Westerners, but everybody's nodding, right?

I love it.

And so what I realized is I was like, okay, eventually I was able to put a phrase on it. What we actually believe in is Internet values. As like sort of the V3. You know, you go from Christendom to Western values to Internet values. And what do you mean by Internet values? That's a phrase I'm using now. Maybe I can come with an even better one. Right. Internet values, technology values. What does that mean? That's peer to peer. It's freedom of speech. It's free markets. It's open source. It is fair competition. It's meritocracy. It's capitalism. It's property rights. It is, but it's also, you know, opportunity for anybody. Yeah, right. It is taking a bet on somebody who has no name and seeing them level up.

It's fundamentally a classically liberal philosophy.

It's classically liberal, but it's like the sort of muscular 21st century version of that. Right. And when I say Internet values, everybody nods and they're like, I get. They instantly kind of get what I'm saying. They know that it's deceleration and growth.

Versus deceleration and degrowth.

That's right. And so you can only see what something is, but what it's not. You know. Who's against Internet values? Washington D.C. and Beijing. Right. Many of them.

Many of them. They're many of the bureaucrats.

Many of the bureaucrats. They're for Internet censorship. They're for, you know, filtering bans, you know, all this kind of. They want to ban compute. They want to regulate this, they want to throttle that. They want to go after Jack Ma, Elon Musk.

They want to make us safe.

They want to get safe.

They want to give Up. They want to give up liberty for safety. Exactly what our founders said not to do.

Exactly. That's right. So Internet values I feel is the right like sort of term that groups a lot of people together. You kind of want that right phrase sometimes as like an umbrella term. And in the digital.

Right. We did believe that in person was very important. Sure, but. Yes, but, but could be all. I compete with Yale and Harvard directly. But. But you're right, the Internet framework is key.

That's right. And even every area for education, for example AI tutoring is going to be a big deal. For law it's smart contracts, it's automation of legal work. With AI for medicine it is. There's a zillion AI applications. The digital now hits so many different areas that if you don't have the Internet first, Internet values, perspective on things, that's something actually where you can bring in a broad coalition. Internet values doesn't exclude India. It doesn't exclude like tech guys in, in Japan. But you know, it does exclude it. This is the other flip side of it. Unfortunately a lot of people who are geographically or physically in the west don't believe in western values. They hate Western.

There's a lot of them.

There's a lot of them. Right. So the guy like a small example is the guy who's smashing. You see the self driving car. Like the guy who attacked self driving car with a hammer. That's so crazy, so stupid. Okay.

I can't believe they won and turned it off in San Francisco.

They won. Exactly.

It's terrible.

So this is the thing is my view is that coalition is at least strong enough to push things back in the garage.

This is, this is, this is what I do. I have to fight these guys.

We need to bring in backup. Right. Actually one way I was actually able to say this is like so in San Francisco, you know, there's a big mural of somebody and they're not actually a San Francisco. Do you know what I'm talking about?

I think I saw you post this as Greta Thunberg.

Yes.

She's like that motto of like global, decelerate, deceleration, degrowth.

Exactly. And that gives the game away because she's not San Franciscan, she's not even American. Right. She's on the other side of the world. But then it gives the game away. That like woke and deceleration and whatever you want to call it.

Global coalition of deceleration.

Yeah, exactly. It's not about a country, it's about this global movement.

It really is like the Forces of evil versus the forces of good. And we have to be really clear. There's light and there's darkness in the world. And like, I don't think people realize how much, like, degrowth means darkness. Like, if we have no growth world, that is a world full of war, like. Yes, we will be at war in that world.

That's right. Because basically you. You bring down. When you shrink the pie, people start fighting the pie, people all fight over the pie.

That you're basically condemning us to a dark, dark world.

Yes.

And I mean, I don't think she knows that. She's just a naive girl who wants to go along with whatever is going on.

Yeah. Yes.

I don't think. I don't think she's evil. Maybe she is. I don't know. But, but, but she's a symbol of something that is very evil and very dark.

That's right. Even if you take. Even if we take it abstract out from any person, the meta organism, you know, that is like the way I think about this is. Think about like an ant colony. Is there. Does any ant know what they're doing? No, but there's sort of like a swarm intelligence. There's a system. Yes, there's a system. Right. So swarm intelligence that exists when, like, you know, flocks of birds and things like that. There's like a swarm intelligence where just like the cells of our body, they don't. They don't know what's going on or whatever, but it kind of works together in a certain way.

Right.

And in the same way that, like, communism and capitalism were like swarm intelligences in the 20th century, that both, you know, they clashed in Korea, and that wasn't like local politics, that was like global politics, you know, where North Korea and South Korea were like, you know, these. These forces of good and evil on both sides clash. Right. And that's what, like, woke versus tech is to me. Like, woke is like the communist side and tech is like the capitalist side. It really is.

Yeah.

Right. And so San Francisco is not about, like, local politics. It's a clash of clouds.

This moral clarity has been very helpful for me the last few years. I. I've always kind of even. Even like myself, who's really strong usually. I've kind of hedged a little bit. And now I think it's just become very clear. It's very healthy, you know? You know. You know, you know, you have those pictures where it's like the really dumb caveman and then. Yeah. Person. And then there's like the wizard. Yeah. It's like the caveman believes in good and evil. And then, like, it's complicated. It's complicated. And then, like the wizard, like, it's good and evil.

Yes.

And then you actually need this framework to understand modern society and to be on the side of good.

I agree with that. And I think that in particular, like the. The Greta thing. Here's. Here's the thing that's a synthesis of maybe our term views, Right. Which is Greta shows that the WOKE mind virus, or the meta organism or whatever we want to call it, Right. That. That is pulling resources from abroad. Right. It's fighting a global conflict. And it's doing. For example, it tries to get all the governments to work together to ban AI.

Yeah. The European governments are like, the source of a lot of this. I think it's like, really bad stuff.

That's right. And. And you know, the worst is if they can manage to link up with the Chinese, like the Newsom Z kind of thing that, you know, they're flirting. You saw that thing, right?

This is like. This is like, the European governments have always been friends with Putin and with China, and they're. I think a lot of them are bribed by both Russia and China.

But it's like, you know, there's just so much money to be made that basically people will, you know, sacrifice today for tomorrow.

Right.

And it could be, you know, like. But with the Newsom Z thing, that to me is concerning because that would link up two censorship regimes and make them cooperate rather than compete in a bad way. So my view is if WOKE has global allies, tech can't think of itself as solely American.

No, we need. We need to have global allies as.

We need global allies. You're.

You're helping. You're helping build some allies out here for us. For. For global Americans.

Exactly. For India. From India and from everywhere.

And to work together with Indians. 100%.

Exactly. And India is also fighting that same mind virus locally in India. And so then once we all kind of realize it's like, it's like, how's.

That going in India? Like, like is like, do they have all sorts of, like. I mean, they can't have as much DEI nonsense as we do in the US for example.

No, no, no. You'd be surprised. They have their own version of it. And it's worse in some ways, and it's better in other ways. Sometimes, you know, we see two business plans, and one guy turns out to be. I actually know the friendster guy. So no offense to the friendster guy. Okay, but like we see two business plans and they're using the same words. I'm going to build a social network, but one turns out to be Friendster, one turns out to be Facebook. You know, and this is actually really important because a lot of people think that the words and the execution are the same thing or the execution is easy given the words. And it's not. Right. And one of the things I've observed is the same words that people will say in the US or especially in blue America. They'll often say similar sounding words in India, but it'll work in India and it won't work in Bloomberg. Like a small example is, you saw the California high speed rail 100 disaster, $100 billion to nothing. But they're still arguing for more money online. Okay, that was. They're still arguing for it because they just think that the words think it's. They think it's like clicking somebody on Amazon.com. right.

So crazy.

It's funny. They really don't. They think if you have enough money, everything else is just straightforward, no problem or something.

This must be a combination of like corrupt people with really stupid people. It's like useful idiots helping the corrupt people.

It's, it's. I think it's both. This. But it's also something where I, you know, we both came out of. I mean, I guess me more academia than you in the sense I spend more time in academia. Right. But in academia there is so much emphasis on getting the, the ideas correct. And some of the ideas are genuinely hard. Some of the math, the chemistry, the computer science and so on. And then it's thought that the business part of that is just me trivial. Right? Yeah. And then when you actually go and do it, you're like, whoa, this is far.

Engineering and operations are actually more of it.

And not to say the core idea isn't important sometimes, like if it's a cryptography breakthrough, it's a math breakthrough. Sometimes it's like. But, but the academics don't understand that.

The actual idea that matters is how systems work and how incentives work and how accountability works. So those ideas are not even right when it comes to the government.

Yes. And the only way they actually learn it is. You know, it's funny, I think you and I have both observed this hundreds of times. The guaranteed way to turn somebody from a socialist into like, like how do you turn a socialist professor into a capitalist CEO? They found a startup.

Well, because you have to apply what works and you have to take the ideas of a free society and apply it, otherwise you're not going to succeed.

Pretty much, yeah. And you know what's interesting is there is actually a common DNA between the social suppressor and capitalist CEO. You know, it. What it is is they both deeply feel they should be in charge.

Isn't that good?

That's fair, right?

That's true.

So what I've seen folks go from being, you know, Marxist ish, leaning CS guys to founding a company. They're like ultra libertarians. Like three months the moment they have to do some of the crazy paperwork and they go off the W2 and they go to, you know, all the crazy regulation stuff. They're like, I can't believe how insane this is.

Well, they realize these, these bureaucrats are not that bright. And then they realize systems not designed correctly and, and then they, and then they realize the incentives is what really matters and accountability is what really matters and measuring things and iterating, which a government does not do and cannot do without the ownership side of it. There's all these things you need.

That's right. And that's why actually. So here's an education idea for you. Maybe, you know, you might think K through 12, I think is just basically 12, 13 years of jail for the most part, right?

It's done terribly.

It's done terribly. Okay. So one thought I've had for a long time is what if you, and you can do much more radical reforms than this, but maybe this is a piece of it. Take the budget that you would have wasted on the last year of high school or whatever, okay? And instead just give it to the kids as cash and say you've got a year to do a business. And the reason is, you know, parents already spend a huge chunk of savings on their college education. That's like, that's like their like starter money or whatever to do something. If instead that was their seed fund to go and start a business, here's what would happen, right? 99% of them would fail or whatever number, maybe 95, you know, some of them might do plumbing or others something else that's got lower risk, which is fine. We don't know the exact number, but let's even say for the sake of argument, 99% of them fail. That failure is actually good. And the reason it's good is all these kids, by doing, by playing basketball or by using, you know, like a musical instrument or looking in the mirror, they could see whether they could be an NBA star or a great musician or a model or something like that. Right? And so Then they believe that those people in those careers have meritorious earnings. Yeah. But they think that being a CEO is just putting your feet up on a desk.

A lot of them don't understand what's actually going on.

They don't see what's actually going on. So just by allowing them just like you have phys ed and they pick up a ball and they could see how good or bad they are. Right.

There should be something where they get actual real experience at entrepreneurs.

Get their CEO degree as their, you know, what do you call it? CEO, boss, president or something like. Like that you give them the money and the ability to actually run a company. And for them to fail is the greatest education.

My friend Joe Lamont's one of the top guys in Austin in tech. I don't know if you got to know him at all when you were there. He did trilogy and so he.

Oh, the trilogy guy. Okay.

I didn't know. Called Alpha. Okay. And. And they do something similar al Alpha. The kids learn twice as fast. They're. They're in charge of their own learning and they learn how to learn. But he also gives them projects when they're young and they love them build businesses. I've been on the phone with a few of these kids in Austin. I met a couple of them who built amazing things in like 9th times, 11th grade. And get them a lot of freedom to do, which I think is very healthy to try and learn.

It's very healthy. And the thing about it is it's win, win. Because if they succeed, of course they're growing the economy, you know. Yep. Actually, you know, you know, Nigeria had this business plan competition and there's this guy who wrote, he's like, is this the most effective form of foreign aid ever?

I love it.

Yeah. Okay. Because it's literally teach a man to fish. And it was like, it was like a relatively small amount of money, but they actually were actually starting businesses rather than just going for four days.

Most of us is just such a waste. It's corrupt. It's so dumb.

And you know, it is. It's actually. It's basically the same as San Francisco. What they want are dependents. They want pets. And it's like they want to have budget.

It's so racist. Right. It's like you think these people. And it's so funny because they're now they're on the left doing it is a neoconialism. So they're bringing in their woke values and trying to oppose the same way we oppose our values in the Past. They're imposing today's value and it's.

And it's a worse version. And basically they did. They did this in India for many reasons or for many. For many years. And they basically want like brown pets, you know, and it's. It's like the same mentality as, like having dogs, you know, or whatever. Like, that's your.

At least. At least to the India, which was very bad, is they were trying to make money off of India too, which was later.

Later, though. Yeah. So that's the thing is once you move from aid to trade, that's the key. Right. Look, it's actually better trying to make.

Money off them because then everyone somehow.

Yeah, exactly.

Like.

Like, this is the thing is, you know, one of my. Some of my pokes are provocative on the Capitalism is the ultimate socialism. Okay. Why. Here's why. If we take. Take the famous example of Thiel investing in Zuck in 2004. Right. Put him 500k into Zuck. Thiel was much richer than Zuck at that time. But Zuck's success meant that Zuck became much richer than Thiel, but both became absolutely richer. Right. And that is something which charity could never do, but investment can. Right. With charity, the guy who's rich will give like a few drops of money to the poor guy and feel good about it, but he's definitely not going to make them equally as wealthy, let alone like 100x or 10x is richer.

Right.

But investment can do that. And so. So that's like one way in which what we're doing is actually building capacity. Go ahead.

No, totally agree. And you know, you know, back to really what we were talking about earlier, I do think most of the things in the world, we do this and we invest and we build, and that's how we create value together. There are some frameworks in the world where once you're already successful, I do think it's your duty to get back.

Yeah.

And not even just get back, but like, fix the systems that other people can't fix. There's things that you and I can fix that like other people, like, they can't begin to do it.

Yeah.

And so once you get this level and so. And the question is, how do you take the frameworks we've learned from what works in entrepreneurship world and apply it to these other things? And you're doing that with trying to think about new network states.

Yeah.

And I love it. I want to help with that. I'm also taking these entrepreneurial frameworks and.

Saying, how can you perform.

How can I reform, how can I build? How can I take an idea that I know is going to help 100,000 people? And how do we like, use the same kind of tactics and smart people in operations and go and do that? And I think, I think it's important a lot of us do these things.

I love that. And you know, the way, one thing to your point is actually a lot of young guys look to us for advice or what have you now that we're a little gray now. Exactly right. So, you know, one thing that's funny about that is, you know, people will say, oh, go and do a hard startup, swing for the fences and so on. And there is definitely value to that. But it's also true that you, you should have, if you're, if you're young and just starting out and you're on startup number one, you want to have a realistic sense of what you can do as opposed to when you're a little bit older and you've got more capital, more distribution, more connections, you can do riskier or bigger things to some extent.

For me, biology, the way I see it is like, and this is, this is my point of view, is that you shouldn't build a startup unless you're.

Just like, absolutely, I hear that.

I think the vast majority of smart people should go work for a high growth startup because that's like the best risk reward by far.

Yeah.

And you learn. Like, I was at PayPal as a kid, like as a teenager pretty much. And I got to learn so much from just being exposed to a few years as an intern, that sort of thing. And then like, but then like, I am a little bit of a crazy guy who, I'm like, you know what I'm going to, I really want to fix, I really want to fix how our government works with defense and intel and, and the tech. You know, I was watching so, you know, you know the background I need to give the whole story. Where PayPal, the bad Chinese mafia, Russian mafia were stealing money. Right. We're learning how to stop them. And I got to know a bunch of these guys in government and the DHS and the FBI and it was clear they were just, they're nice guys but way behind on tech, what they were doing. So I'm like, this is impossible problem, I have to fix it. And like, and he thought, that's okay sometimes.

Yeah, of course. I guess the way I put it is if people are ultra ambitious, you want to tell them to be more pragmatic and if they're too practical. You want to have them become more ambitious. That's fair, right?

For you. Kind of you. Yeah. And then. But in general, like you definitely do want to like just only do one of these things if you're just obsessed with it.

This I agree with. Because the startup is so hard. I mean one thing is even the concept of do you know, people will say, oh, venture capital. And they'll always say it's not an asset class.

I totally agree.

It's like. Right. So like a startup.

It's not.

It's not an asset class really of startups in the sense of, you know, what was Teal saying is you're not a lottery ticket. Right. And because you. It's so hard to do it because everything comes down to you that you basically, you have to want to build something that you can't buy. I totally agree that. I'll add something else to what you're saying, which is one thing I've seen especially for a lot of Indians because I'm mentoring more Indian kids and so on these days, is for many of them coming from like a background like total dirt poverty, like that job at Google or something like that is like it.

It's already like an exit.

Yeah.

Which is why it's a lot harder for I guess some of those people, I'd imagine to do a startup right away. You probably should make sure your family's taken care of a little bit.

Exactly.

Money to raise them up.

That's.

That's probably responsible.

Just totally response few years. That's right. So exactly. So that's why I say I'm like, look, you know, depends on your financial circumstances. And the first gen, like out of poverty, there's absolutely no shame in that. Middle class get disability, you know, buy mom, you know, a house or whatever it is, you know. Right. And then you know, the second gen or maybe you fire 10 years. Exactly. That's right. That's right. So it could be either your kids or it could be you fire change leader, then you swing for the fence.

So my. One of my big mistakes on a company I was invested in is that. And I'm not gonna say who because it's probably private, but I. The guy, I didn't realize his mom was on welfare.

Oh no.

And like he was trying to take money off the table. And normally I think you shouldn't let someone take a lot of money off the table. And then people are trying. And ultimately, you know, ultimately, like he ended up selling the company too soon because he needed to get the Money to help his mom. And if I am. I'd known that.

And if I secondary, I could have secondary.

And, like, is it. I think it is really important, both as an investor as an. As a partner to, like, know what their circumstances are. There's nothing wrong with, like, doing something to help your family when they're in a tough situation.

Yeah.

It's actually our duty as investors to help people do that. That's part of our job as partners.

Yeah. It's interesting. It's one of these things where the right amount of secondary takes the pressure off the founder and. And allows them to just work harder. And they have. They. They don't have the. They don't feel like, oh, I need to sell, kind of.

And it's like. And sometimes it might not be them. Might be the spouse, too. So.

Yes.

Which is one of the things I've learned is you got to get to know them. And, yes, spouse is often in charge.

Yes. Especially for the older ones, you know, they've got.

Especially for technical guys. Yes.

Yeah.

That's funny.

So let's see other things covered a lot.

Gosh.

All right, so what else in the world are you looking at? Right, like, so I'm looking at a lot of small countries.

I'm looking at a lot of applications of AI to transform the productivity of the economy. That's my job.

Let's talk about the red steed and purple state strategy for AI. We're just talking about that earlier.

Right.

So a lot of these, you know, these Washington D.C. regulations, I call it the 640k of compute. Should be a. Should be enough for anyone. Bill, you know the executive order that just came down? Go ahead. Yeah.

No, it's insane.

Unbelievable stuff, which, like Suhail and some other people, they tweeted like, we're going to regret that we did this to ourselves. Right. With the hard cap on compute. Okay.

This is so crazy. Imagine doing that with, like, you know, I had a teacher in high school. It was like, 56k is more than enough for anyone for connecting to the Internet.

Right.

And she really believed it.

And this was. This is. Of course, you know, like, Bill Gates didn't actually say this, but it's like the famous illusion. So the hard cap on COMPUTE is like the stupidest. Like, the only thing that's good about it is it's actually really explicit. You know, lots of the regulations, you can deny that they're going to stop progress or whatever. Oh, it's just paperwork.

Oh, it's just like the definition of degrowth.

Yeah. This is exactly. It is literally a brick wall which says, you know, you cannot. It's like a speed limit, but on compute. Right.

Imagine this is enforceable without Congress actually like passing a law. I'm sure it's insane.

I'm sure there's going to be suits. I'm sure there's going to be all kinds of things. That's at the federal level. Okay. But the states have their own interests. We need free states. Free states, Exactly. There's fed states and there's free states, so to speak. Right. Pretty good. Right. And so the free states, which can be red states, can be purple seat, can be independent blue states. They would essentially do the calculation that, wait a second, this is really good for reducing medical costs, for reducing legal costs, AI is really good for automating all this medical billing and paperwork and other kind of stuff. This can be really, really valuable for us. And so therefore we need to have sanctuary cities for technology where we just say we're going to defy federal law on this. Compute as much as you want in Texas. It's a free state. Compute as much as you want in Florida.

Right.

You know, the come and take it flags or the accelerator die. Right?

Yeah.

And so then I've got.

I have a big one of those in my house. The come and take it flag from the, you know, from the history of Texas.

That's right.

The big cannon.

And there's a one with it, with the. There's a version of it with the GPU in the, in the form of a cannon. It's really good.

Right? That's great. So, I mean, you do have to be a little bit careful. I do think that, that the Supreme Court will probably end up having to rule on this because in a Supreme Court, I think, will actually rule in our favor on the freedom side. But, but there is like a very powerful army that, that's tied to a federal government that you. That you don't want to actually have to like.

You don't. Yeah, that's right. But on the other hand, if you, if we look at sanctuary cities, drug laws, gun laws, abortion, like some of those things did go to the Supreme Court, but within the US there's been such a fragmentation and fracturing that states are kind of doing their own thing and saying, sue me to the feds. Right.

Which is what you mean. This is how the world's supposed to work. The federal government's not supposed to be deciding most of these things. You're supposed to be signing in the states.

Exactly. Make America states again, you know, or like the 10th amendment restoration and then abroad. The thing that's interesting about this is we talked about like generic AI for, you know, India and so on place like India. They didn't enforce copyright patents and so on as much. And so that's why the generic drugs industry built this huge drug industry. We could have generic AI where you can train on Hollywood movies, you train on copyright material. Actually, you know, that's how Hollywood started. Edison held all the patents for early technology for motion picture.

It was broke early on.

Yeah, because he was in New Jersey and he was on the east coast. So they went all the way to the West Coast.

Huh?

Okay. And they did their own thing. Right. And this guy Neil Gabler has a good book on this. Like, like an industry of their own or something like that. It's about how Hollywood was created. Right. An empire of their own I believe is the name of the book. And so now we just do that again, right? We basically say, look, you know, that's how Hollywood was built. It basically broke these in a sense because 3,000 miles is a pain for Edison to send his guys all the way across the country.

India is probably a good analog to this these days.

That's right.

There probably are things India should be doing where they don't. I mean some of the copyright law is just ridiculous.

90 years, Disney kind of things like.

It'S just a corrupt thing where they've copy where the owners of the content have done that.

Just want to milk it forever, Right? Exactly. And I think now we've got the. We've got enough examples of where the overly aggressive enforcement of copyright. We know what open source gives us, it gives you security, it gives you all these kinds of good benefits. The other thing that's interesting that's kind of related to that is the, some of the data stuff. So do you know what India Stack is?

No.

Okay, so imagine if Stripe was done by the Indian government. That's kind of what like UPI is like a piece of it. Or if Google Login was done by the Indigo. That's what like other is. Now these things have their flaws and so on and so forth, but they do work. And they work for a billion people and they work every day and they've kind of come up from nothing in like five or 10 years, which is actually really amazing. So the same guys who are working on India Stack and other are working on something called Deepa, which is like a data access thing. And you know, because there's all this stuff about Data privacy and whatnot. And in the west it's really either A, you have EU style bureaucracy and cookie laws or B, you just access all the data or.

Right.

And you just have some, some click through that gives you permissions. So India is trying a model where it's an API approach where if you, you know, like, like you can just programmatically get access and train on all the data that you want there. It's as opposed to saying no laws on privacy or stupid bureaucratic laws are saying we recognize this is a problem. We want to have the lightest touch possible solution that balances all interests. Yeah. And in particular what they want to do is they want, this is the crucial thing. They're coming in with the mindset of we want to make this work. We want to make these huge swaths of data available for training on AI with the consent of the people and potentially with compensation for the people. Interesting. Okay, so just something to track because India is big enough that it can be an influential kind of thing if it works.

Conversation is going to be hard to figure out for these things because there's so much stuff that comes.

Well, so this is where it gets. Because, because they've got upi, they've already got the payment information for a billion people. So you could, it's a little bit like what X is doing with like the direct deposits into your account. This track a bunch of stuff and aggregate it and just drop it into your account.

And it's. And it's interesting because like you think, you think that like training on all the data of everyone just in the open area and then everyone who was alive previously might be enough to do a lot of things.

Exactly, that's right. So you know, one of the things also interesting I think of India, you know, people think of India as a market and I think it is a market, but I actually think it's also potentially a digital factory. You know, like lots of physical stuff is made in China. Right?

Yeah.

But a billion Indians could do a lot of training data there is, it.

Is a digital factory. I mean I, I have factories in India that I use for lots of companies.

That's right.

Digitally.

Yeah. So all the labeling and stuff like that, that's what I think of as digital blue collar. Right. All the tapping and labeling and so on and so forth can be done anywhere interesting. And you can make like a, if you can make a dollar a day on that, that's massive for India and for places like that. Right. That will level you out of poverty training data. Is, you know, there's this infinite hunger for training data.

Right.

Of course. Then the question is, can somebody without education do the training examples and maybe, maybe they can, maybe they can't let the seat. We should throw out some things and just get your reaction to them. Or okay, 3D printing.

3D printing. I think it is actually finally getting to be useful for different areas of just in time inventory. It's not quite there yet, but it seems like the next five years is going to be a big deal for a lot of things.

Yeah, it was hyped and went to the Gardiner Trough and then kind of.

Coming back you're starting to see some cases where it could be pretty useful. People are using it for too much to do it, but for very specific kind of small parts of inventory and manufacturing. I think basically the US is going to become a major manufacturing hub again. It's already started to grow a lot the last few years. If you look at the numbers and, and this is going to be one part of the solution.

Okay. Related to that, robotics.

This is something that we're talking a lot about. You're seeing like working AI kind of boring, lame robots that doing all sorts of things with their driving. They're not lame, but they're driving around. I mean we don't have the hands that are easy to move maneuver. We don't have the stuff that's there yet. A lot of people are trying. AI should be able to do this. So I mean a lot of us think in 5 years this should be a really big thing. I'd love to meet the people who are figuring it out because it's hard.

Yeah, it's hard. I mean like Boston Dynamics and Tesla are putting in some effort here and Amazon has some humanoid robots, but it's not yet there. I wonder if this is one of.

Those where like a startup could actually beat the big guys by really kind of rethinking with a genius. Like even just like getting the hand right and like getting the hardware right to then allow us to train in software and open it up to. Because there's hardware that's missing.

So it's funny, me and Gary Tan actually just funded an Indian guy who did, who's built this amazing robot hand. I'll show it to you. It's called Clone. Third is El Salvador and Bukele. Naive Bikh.

You know, obviously I care a lot about the principles of how to put people in jail when they're bad. I think it's very important now, you know the, you know, but I'LL say, like the. There's this thing about humanity, biology, where at the darkest times, when, when. When many people have lost all hope, that's where you see, like, the real.

True character of him.

That's where you see, like, who's on the side of the darkness and who's on the side of the light. And this guy is clearly on the side of the light.

Yep.

Now, is what he did appropriate for the U.S. no, it's not. Not in that form. Like, we need to keep our principles, we need to keep our state. We need to not go into a totalitarian type of authoritarian approach. But he probably did need to do what he did in order to stop the murders in his society, because it was. He was a lawless society on the edge. And should we be more in his direction of putting bad guys in jail who are causing murders? Yes.

Yeah. And I think the way I think about it is that society was at war.

Like the.

It wasn't like a PCM society. These guys with face tattoos were terrorizing the whole.

At war. You do what you can to win the war and to save lives. And he did.

Exactly.

America has many problems. In some ways, I'm morally at war with things that are broken. But we need to approach them in a more principled way. And America needs to remain in shining light with a functional, principled system. So. So, yes, we should be putting bad guys in jail. No, we should not be, like, breaking all the rules to do so in America. And his society probably was necessary.

Related Javier Millet.

I am very excited about Javier Millay. Yeah, he is. I mean, listen, no one knows what's he's got to do, exactly how it's going to work out. But just the way he describes things, the way he explains the corruption, the way he explains, like, just how we basically need to, like, I mean, the. I love the Afuera video, Right? Yeah, exactly. Getting rid of all the departments. Love. We need to do a lot of that in the U.S. like, literally. We need to fire, like, everyone in the prime of education in the US they should not exist. I'm not saying I'm not for education. I'm just not for what these bureaucrats are doing. Yeah, it's a waste.

And there's like.

And the Department of Labor probably should get rid of the whole thing, too. It's very politicized. It sued Palantir for total bullshit reason. After Peter spoke. You have literally, Peter Thiel spoke to Trump's convention and this frigging thing sued us. And then like, Elon became an enemy and this thing went after Elon.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, are there some good people there? I'm sure there's some good people there. Is it politicized? Yes, yes. And do we need them to be doing anything? No.

Right.

I mean, it's funny, I meet people all the time who are like in the bowels of embassies. There are some good people on sub embassies in the US that are doing some of the things around the world. The vast majority of it is like government and government stuff between our different departments. And it's.

Right.

It's like such a waste.

It's all meta work. It's not even work. It's meta. It's meta waste. So I think we desperately need to.

Move things the direction of Harvey. We're like, Argentina is like was the wealthiest countries in the world 100 years ago as now has 140 inflation. Like, thank goodness someone like him got in charge. Does he have enough power to do what he needs to do?

See, but yes, that's the question.

I don't know if he controls the legislature, but. Amazing, amazing guy.

That's right. I think it's sort of similar to, you know, Asia went through so much communism, so much socialism, they developed antibodies to it.

They finally learned it's about to do here.

Exactly. And so South America, Latin America is maybe starting to build disease.

Why Florida is a great state because a lot of people from Cuba.

Yes.

All experience.

How terrible.

Communism.

Exactly. That's right. Suarez, you know, he actually did a whole thing with the, you know, victims of communism there and so few more. Space.

You know, I think that space is really critical for defense. I'm a big fan of the space force. Unfortunately, I'm working a lot in defense and we need to think about that. Very bullish on Starlink. I'm waiting for it to be installed on my plane. That's obnoxious thing to say, but I'm very excited for that.

Yep.

You know, I think it's. I think, I think space is overhyped in the venture capital world where too much money has gone into things that are not yet economic. Now I kind of like that they're doing that because they're accelerating the future and it's really exciting. So I'm on the side of it, but I think it's tough as an investor. I, I would love, I. I would love to. To build colonies on Mars, build colonies on the moon and do more out there. So over overall, very positive.

Awesome. Last one.

Longevity there is a ton of stuff happening. We haven't talked about bio very much.

Right.

Obviously. I invested in a ton of bio infrastructure companies, built one of the largest biomanufacturing companies in the US Actually, I.

Didn'T know that one. What's that?

Yeah, Resilience Bio. We called it national resilience originally, but the scientists said the national is too nativist. But we okay. Source raised a few billion dollars. We partnered with with all sorts of countries because they needed us our help for MRNA. We do gene therapy, cell therapy. We're doing GLP1s out of it. So I'm very, very bullish on like this real revolution in biology with all the tools. What we get to tell. I think longevity is very scary. Like just what we're learning and like how aging is going to change in the next 10, 20 years. It's very positive. Overall, I think we're going to live a lot longer. I think we're in a strong position overall there and I'm very bullish on it.

Awesome. Dude, this is great.

Good to see you all.

Thank you very much. All right, see you soon.