#9 - Joe Lonsdale on Everything

[00:00:00] Here in sunny Singapore with my friend, Joe Lonsdale, his first company Palantir was in the hexagon on page mill road. 1500. You remember that? Yeah. The whole place we’re doing like a dollar 50 a foot. I remember on page mill, it costs nothing. It costs nothing. Right. It was totally affordable. You can’t easily do the garage startup in Silicon Valley anymore in the same way.

[00:00:19] Now I was talking about this, my friend in biotech. Everything just got fat too, because there was too much money, but 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 to 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.

[00:00:35] Like there’s a ways of doing things cheaper and scrappier, probably useful. That’s right. It’s like, you know, the, uh. With biotech kits, kits can get really expensive. It’s like difference roughly between making your own coffee and pre made coffee. I run a VC. We build lots of companies, but there’s all sorts of opportunities and fixing healthcare, fixing things in defense.

[00:00:55] Like I like to go, I like to run towards the broken things in society. I think that’s what a leader’s job is to [00:01:00] 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 meth.

[00:01:08] It’s right. No, it’s right. Drugs to right. And, and, 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. It’s 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.

[00:01:20] Right? So there’s. There’s, that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be leaders in the U. S. And, and I love it. And, you know, I, I think, you know, there’s, there has to be criticism, but there has to be constructive criticism, where your alternative has to be better than the existing, and, and you have to learn how to build.

[00:01:35] 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 energy that comes from the innovation world that you and I are part of.

[00:01:49] I’m an entrepreneur, uh, founded Palantir, founded Adapar of 2009, which is also a large global company, leader in wealth management technology. Started at open gov, which you were an early investor in. I [00:02:00] get ported also great unicorn sporting thousands of governments. And, you know, I built a bunch of companies and a lot of people who worked for me started building companies.

[00:02:06] So I started helping them have eight VCs, one of the larger, more successful venture funds. We’ve done kind of seven big funds now. And. Uh, 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 the ABC now? It’s like, Oh, I think we’ve raised a total about 7 billion between all the funds.

[00:02:25] Give or take. We have like seven core funds, a couple of follow on funds, some SPVs. Um, so that’s, that’s, that’s committed capital. AUM is much higher because you get to count the markups. Right. We’ve raised about 7 billion and we’ve done well. Because ABC is a big fund. We build a lot of things and then it turns out you can’t solve every problem with entrepreneurship.

[00:02:40] So I got my policy institute out of the university and to try to be a leader in U. S. society. Yes. And actually that’s a really deep point, which is, um, 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.

[00:02:56] You need some policy. You need some politics as well. Right. Talk about your, your [00:03:00] thing. Well, I love the, I love the Javier Mille quote in Argentina. This is like crazy guy. I love it. To go to Argentina is very exciting. And he’s basically saying like the way Milton Friedman said, just your social role is to make profit as entrepreneur.

[00:03:12] That’s correct. But you also. You need to try to make sure socialists don’t take over your country. You need both of 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.

[00:03:28] 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, like keep them out. Thomas Jefferson. He actually believed in the, in public education.

[00:03:44] And a lot, it was actually controversial. You know why you want public education to teach them about Liberty, teach them to stand demagogues and despots, right? So that the whole point of public education. Is it teach people not to allow what we call today, socialists, jealous, jealous of liberty, right?

[00:03:59] Exactly. That is the [00:04:00] one thing like he said, you know, public university is different. University is the elite in the university. You have to train the elite to understand our history or great debates. Uh, like really be ready to. To, to run, run a free society. They’re not in charge of society, but they’re still in charge of government, of free society.

[00:04:14] 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 then we’ve totally lost that in our education. You know, the, the thing about this is, uh, you know, we’ll put up a graph which shows the speaking level of like US presence.

[00:04:29] Have you seen that graph? They’ve gotten a lot dumber. A lot dumber since the age of Jefferson and Hamilton and so forth. I wish I could talk like these guys. I read them all the time. I love them. I 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, I, I haven’t fully squared the circle, right?

[00:04:47] You know, when the U. S. became independent, it was like about like 1. 6 million people, something like that. It was A few million, because people like Patrick Henry’s speech, Three millions of people are the holy cause of liberty. Yes. And such a nation as we possess. Okay, there you go, you remember. So, so it’s [00:05:00] like, it’s like in the single digit millions, right?

[00:05:02] 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. Right. The entrepreneurs, they’re in their 20s and 30s. Exactly. They’re all startup guys. Younger than we are now. Younger than we are now. I know. We got to get on it.

[00:05:13] Rushed up. Well, well, some of them, Ben Frank was a little bit older. There’s, there’s some He used to be a 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 in a relatively small group of things, you could start the greatest startup in, in world history, right?

[00:05:28] Which is the United States of America. So, the thing that I don’t get is, uh, and this will sound stupid, but, but sometimes asking the stupid questions. No intradays, right? No ability to look up references. You had to read everything on pen and paper, 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.

[00:05:49] Yeah. Like everyone, basically like the men who were running society, like there’s this thing called the London Magazine. Have you ever seen London Magazine? No. I love this. It’s, it’s a, it’s like the combination of like 10 of our [00:06:00] top magazines all in one, like the Atlantic and then all these things. And then people would read it in London, they’d read it all over the Americas and like you’d have like Lord North arguing with uh, Benjamin Franklin and the pages and then 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 math and physics problems here and like this is what the gentleman at the time all read, like I collected, as a kid I read all of these.

[00:06:22] 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 on, you know, looking up a reference for example, It’s actually relatively easy to do on the internet. You can use Sci Hub or LibGen or something like that. And I do that a lot.

[00:06:39] 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.

[00:06:58] Like every great man in Rome. [00:07:00] would read like Livy and read like Virgil or read Horace. So maybe there are five or six. There’s a cultural foundation that was shared. Right. And they had a, it was a different one now when you come to Americas, but it was the same set of like cultural foundations where you’d have like There’s a standard library.

[00:07:16] There’s a standard library that everyone would have. Everyone would read. An educated man. What it would have this history of the West and that was in it 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 and they’d all know.

[00:07:39] 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’s interesting, it’s a nice play on words, right? Yeah. Um, and, and I wonder if it’s actually somewhat, not just a play on words, but something deeper than that in the following sense.

[00:07:54] If, uh, in, you know, Python or any language, you type in something which you haven’t defined yet, you get an error. [00:08:00] So the words actually need to be defined in order for you to use them in, in, in a program or, or with, you know, another program. So in the same way, if people aren’t familiar with certain concepts like, oh, you know, uh, Plato wasn’t a fan of democracy and democracy has altered other meanings, or, you know, the concept of despotism.

[00:08:19] 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, um, as we’re thinking about education, you know, and you’re doing K through 12, I’m, I’m finding, you know, stuff like synthesis, and Um, you know, I did this Network State Conference with Parallel Education Track, so we’re both interested in this kind of stuff.

[00:08:40] You also got the University of Austin, right, which, uh, 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? I mean, we need to make sure they have the standard library, have the concepts even go there, which is, yeah, which the Enlightenment kind of like gave that to the, to [00:09:00] the, to the men of America at that time, which created the revolution.

[00:09:03] So what, what are the, what’s the modern version of the MIT? I mean, what are the types of things we need to be doing? Yeah, make sure everyone reads Bology, right? Well, okay. Or, or Teal or, you know, PJ, you know, right? I think, uh, I think we’ve, we are, you know, one of the things that’s funny is on Twitter, they’ll, they’ll kind of make fun or something.

[00:09:18] They’ll be like, Oh, why do all these tech guys become philosophers? And I actually thought about why, and I’ve got a couple answers. I wanted to hear your thoughts. So one is, um, every founder starts as lead engineer and ends up as chief psychologist. 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.

[00:09:47] It’s true. I mean, I think the law, the truly greatest founders, they’re chiefs like psychology, but they actually are like, I have a, one of my friends who’s built the biggest private company in the U S. He calls himself chief philosophy officer. So he’s, he was CEO for a long time, but he replaced [00:10:00] himself and became like the chief philosophy officer.

[00:10:01] And he writes books on philosophies, well, not tech guy, but, but, you know, 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, uh, philosophy of self actualization. They’ll have the hierarchy of needs.

[00:10:18] The very highest one is a self actualized, right? So 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, uh, and again, to engage some of the, they’ll say, why didn’t tech guys always want to make tech analogies for everything?

[00:10:36] And actually one of the things I talked about in the never see it book is we can see the birth and life and death of companies in like a five 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.

[00:10:52] Right. And so you, you start to see patterns in the life cycles of organizations. Well, the only thing that’s larger [00:11:00] 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 larger than countries, which is civilization.

[00:11:10] Civilizations, right, like India, China. A lot of my, a lot of my favorite thinking is like these books on the history of civilizations. Sonny, 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 a new kind of set of primitives that come together and cultures are mixed.

[00:11:31] And then it grows and there’s, and then there’s these like things that help it grow, but the things that help her grow become a special interest over time. And then, and then things start existing for the sake of the special interest themselves. And that’s when it starts to decay and then it gets invaded again.

[00:11:43] But it’s, it’s fascinating to watch how like almost all of these civilizations as well as see them happening as fast forward with the companies. It gets, it gets captured, the things get captured over time and it becomes decadent. Right. And then, 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 [00:12:00] capturing it.

[00:12:00] We’re going to go against these interests, and we’re going to make it for the interest for all again. It’s what Javier Mele is trying to do in Argentina. That’s right. I believe some people, you know, they’re trying to do in the U. S. as well by going against the European 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.

[00:12:18] 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. Just like you have it for a company. Do we have it for a country?

[00:12:37] 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, uh, this guy? So there’s folks who are doing more in the way of quantitative history.

[00:12:57] Dalio is doing a little bit of it. Uh, Peter [00:13:00] Turchin, um, the guys who were doing the fourth turning have done kind of a verbal version of it. Yep. And I feel like, uh Trying to quantify these things is always a really good thing to do with social sciences. Right. Usually the smartest guys try to do that.

[00:13:09] They’re smart. 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 Ngram? You can do stuff like that. You can see when they were saying certain words and others, for example, you go to Google Ngram, here’s a fun experiment, if you type in republic and democracy, you see that early American founders talked about the U.

[00:13:29] S. in terms of a republic, and the term democracy is ramped up in the 20th century. I know, I like republic much better, by the way. Mass democracy doesn’t work. All our founders knew mass democracy was 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 percent of the world is non American.

[00:13:50] Is that vote going to go the way that the U. S. government wants it to go? No, it’s not going to go the way We see this with the U. N. all the time, which is a bunch of dictators get together and do terrible things. Right. [00:14:00] And so the thing is, can you be the, quote, champion of democracy if most of the world is not on your side?

[00:14:04] Right? Or at least you have to reinterpret what democracy means in that. I think it’s a, 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 they’re, first of all, we don’t want democracy, we want republics, and second of all, those places weren’t even set up for it.

[00:14:20] With that said, I think, and 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, um, by E. Owen Grillo on, uh, narco terrorism in South America, right? And, and it’s in, in Mexico in particular. It’s called like El Narco, and he makes a point, you know what actually evidently led to the drug war there?

[00:14:39] 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.

[00:14:59] Uh, [00:15:00] Barbara Walter has a book called How Civil Wars Start, and she actually comes to a very similar conclusion, totally different person. And, 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.

[00:15:17] 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 U. S. Department. This was like the old McDonald’s thing, you know, like how two countries with a McDonald’s in them will go together.

[00:15:31] 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, right? That was why they weren’t funding, is they were under Pax Americana. Exactly. So it wasn’t the local voting, it was the global non voting, you know, right?

[00:15:47] 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, uh, whether it’s, um, MBS or whether it’s, uh, you know, China. They had [00:16:00] built a non local, you know, pyramid or whatever.

[00:16:03] And at least, at least stable for some, you know, These are deceptively stable and then not. That is correct. Because they will hide the internal conflict and then it bursts 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 so on and so forth.

[00:16:22] So anyway, it turns out anarch, anarchism is not a good, especially when you have Iran on your border throwing in a mess there. Totally. Exactly. Right. So lots of words actually get sort of rebranded to be both X and its opposite. For example, Christianity meant both the revolutionary Christianity that tore down the Roman Empire.

[00:16:41] and the hierarchical Christianity that buttressed 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.

[00:16:58] And then, you know, communism [00:17:00] 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, princelings, right? So it went from revolutionary to ruling class ideology. And actually, I have a bunch of examples of this.

[00:17:15] 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, uh, 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.

[00:17:31] It should be enlightened bureaucrats that do that. And then, you know, there’s, there’s one wrinkle I talk about is, uh, to go from 51 percent debauchery to 100 percent debauchery. So 51 percent is where we currently have where 49 percent are really mad that they didn’t get to vote for the guy. They didn’t consent.

[00:17:46] They didn’t get consent to the government. 100 percent debauchery is everybody goes and moves to, let’s say, Starbase, Texas, right? 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, cul de sac in Arizona. And everybody has consented to be there.[00:18:00]

[00:18:00] 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.

[00:18:16] 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 percent democracy is actually also 0. 01 percent 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, that’s never going to go mainstream.

[00:18:31] I say it doesn’t need to go mainstream, and the reason is there’s 8 billion people in the world. And you only need a very few of us to do it. Exactly. 01 percent is 800, 000 people. 800, 000 people is like, actually would be like the 30th largest UN country or something, like 40th largest. Okay. 800, 000 people.

[00:18:45] So 01 percent of actually every minority group that can organize enough to can get their own city or their own state potentially. So this is some of the stuff I love. I love that you’re bringing this back out for the world to follow this stuff. Because you, you know, I. I [00:19:00] introduced Peter to Patrick Friedman originally, and you know, I was the original chairman of the Seasteading Institute.

[00:19:04] My very first video, which is the only thing you would find when you search for me, like, for five years on YouTube, was like me, I’m like Glenn Beck, talking about seasteading, which was actually quite embarrassing for a while because it was like sharks. But, you know, I was, I’m proud of how I’ve been involved with that.

[00:19:19] No, I like, actually, I love what you and Patrick and Peter did on that. Because, and Patrick has talked about this, like, the path of seasteading, 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.

[00:19:35] I, when I started Palantir, I could have gone and 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. And yes. And like, you know, I’ll admit, um, I am, I am trying to fix government in the U S I have to stay in fight.

[00:19:49] Well, as 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, but, but I, you [00:20:00] actually can go into states. You can like partner with governors, you can pass laws, you can show the things work and you can inspire people.

[00:20:07] I’ve done this now, you know, sister was 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, so I am trying to do is now at the same time, I would love there to be like a Singapore for the U S to learn from exact closer, closer to America.

[00:20:25] 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, it’s a hundred billion dollars. That’s true. This is true. So of course, Steve Ballmer, if you’re watching this, I don’t, I, I still, we’ll still take your money.

[00:20:43] No, no, no. Hey, I mean like, you know, I have nothing against his heart. The thing about it is. You know, just in defense of Steve Armour 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. There may have been things that they put in place that ended up working later, but Satoshi was really needed to make a lot of these things work.

[00:20:59] Yeah, exactly. Right. [00:21:00] 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 was pretty hard to be an NBA player. 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.

[00:21:14] Satya 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 Brovian bureaucracy. Sure. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like, you got to be the internal warrior. So not T Long. You know, like, yeah.

[00:21:30] Well, Satya is far, and you might know him better than me, Fairholme. I think he’s a better diplomat than Elon. I don’t know if he’s necessarily more patient with broken things. You guys, it’s, 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.

[00:21:47] This is what’s actually really interesting. Like basically his book hit refresh. And so I think, especially with this recent open ad, right. Where within 48 hours they had announced a deal. To catch and [00:22:00] field a ball like that over the week is obviously super intense. He’s super intense, right? Like, that’s really hard.

[00:22:05] He is at war. He’s clearly at war. Elon is at war. He is at war too. They, they, I think, 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. Exactly. But it’s, it’s unusual for somebody to, something is like Deng Xiaoping in my, in my view, because somebody who is diplomatic enough to work their way up.

[00:22:27] But then, courageous enough to do those kinds of things at the senior levels. Usually what happens is the guy who’s diplomatic enough, I won’t name names, but folks who are diplomatic enough to work their way up. No, but they’re all person neurotic, they’re never bold when they get to the top. Yeah, yeah, exactly, they’re too bureaucratic.

[00:22:38] 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. Yes, and this is something that I’m, I’m always determined, I always wanted to be a revolutionary as a kid. Right, yeah, yeah. And I started like, as many companies as anyone else that are big.

[00:22:54] Sure. I love that, but. But I am trying to work within the system because it’s so important, but you always got to [00:23:00] 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. Uh, it’s one of these things where I think we’re going to need both approaches and it’s very important.

[00:23:13] Go ahead. Having a few of us on the inside is useful. It’s exactly. And, 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, um, the, uh, the prime minister retweeted it. But he’s, he’s totally following you.

[00:23:28] Yeah, that’s right. It’s good. And, 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. We are bullish on India. India is in an amazing position. You know, I’ve always hired people there. Of course, 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.

[00:23:51] They should be there. They’re like five years ago. Yeah. It was like, it was like you’d pass the easy, well defined problems to them. Yes. Now for some of my teams for at a par for [00:24:00] open gov, for other companies, we give them the hard problems. Yes. Right. And in all of that, like I’ve taken, there’s like, you know, companies like people who were at Freshworks left and started rocket lane and we’re very proud of big investors very early there.

[00:24:11] And, and there’s, there’s, there’s, I mean, right. Series HX. I’d love to do more series HX. And 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.

[00:24:29] 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 now. It is, it is, but it’s improving. But if you kind of see where it’s going, it’s like clearly going to be a very wealthy, very powerful country.

[00:24:42] Yeah, and I think, you know, here’s my, I’d love to hear your take on this. And so my, my view is Um, there’s about like 7 million Indians in the Diaspora. It’s actually not that. Where are there? No. Yeah. Well, there must be more than that. So, so rather in, I should be more clear, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia.

[00:24:58] Okay. Right. So, so it’s in the [00:25:00] Anglosphere. Yeah. Exactly. And there’s more in like Saudi Arabia and in, uh, Dubai. There’s a lot of important Indians in the Middle East for sure that I’ve met who run things there too. That’s right. In the Anglosphere, it’s only 7 million though. So listen, it seems like there’s more because you guys are running like all the big tech companies.

[00:25:13] We’re doing all right. Basically. Basically. So here’s my, my view is that. So, if there’s 7 million abroad who are doing this well, there’s 1. 4 billion Indians. If you even say, now, obviously the group abroad are a select subset and so forth. They probably have some advantages on average from who they are.

[00:25:30] 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 percent of India can play at that same level. Sure. I think that’s probably reasonable. I think that’s very, very reasonable. Yeah. So if it’s 5%, that’s 70 million people.

[00:25:46] So whatever the Indian diaspora is doing now, 10x that. It’s amazing. And that’s a real, that’s a really big thing, right? We gotta 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.

[00:25:59] [00:26:00] I, 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 on, that’s why it does share a certain set of, you know, what I call it now is I call it intranet values. Did I talk to you about this? So, here’s, here’s, here’s the theory. It’s like, many, many years ago, people used to talk about Europe in terms of, like, Christendom.

[00:26:23] Right? And that was used to delineate, it was like an explicitly religious conception. Yeah, religious, but a set of values. A 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, quasi geograph, right? Like the West.

[00:26:39] And by the way, even as a Jew, I do appreciate Christendom. There was the savage world out there back then. Right. There was like, it was good stuff overall. Yeah, and Judaism is adjacent to Christianity, you know what it is. And they were, 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.

[00:26:53] Sure, right? And so, so that concept of the West now, one of the reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about this is, If, you know, [00:27:00] you or I, we speak at tech conferences, we’re all over the place around the world. And you know, I was, I was just at like a, some event, whether it’s in Dubai or Singapore or South Korea or something like that.

[00:27:09] 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, uh, 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.

[00:27:29] 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 intranet values as like sort of the V3, you know, you go from Christendom to Western values to intranet That’s the phrase I’m using now. Maybe I can come up with an even better one.

[00:27:46] Right? Intuitive 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 [00:28:00] is, but it’s also, you know, opportunity for anybody, right? It is a taking a bet on somebody who has no name and seeing them level up.

[00:28:08] It’s fundamentally a classically liberal. It’s classically liberal, but it’s like the sort of muscular 21st century version of that. Right. So that’s it. And when I say intuitive values. Everybody nods. And they’re like, I get, they instantly kind of get what I’m saying. They know what that is. It’s deceleration and growth versus deceleration and degrowth.

[00:28:24] That’s right. And so you can only say what something is by what it’s not, you know, who’s against internet values, Washington DC and Beijing, right? Many of them. Many of them. 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 stuff.

[00:28:38] They want to ban compute. They want to regulate this. They want to throttle that. They want to go after Jack Ma and Elon Musk. They want to make us safe. They want to be 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.

[00:28:53] Like sort of term that groups a lot of people together. Cause you kind of want that right phrase sometimes as like an umbrella [00:29:00] term. And, uh, an internet values is that’s something that can build startup cities that can, that can all the reforms that you’re talking about, even for example, university of Austin.

[00:29:11] You probably thought about the digital version of that as being a core component of it from the very beginning. You need to get the digital right. We did believe that in person was very important. Sure, yes. But, but, but you’re going to be able to compete with Yale and Harvard directly, but you’re right.

[00:29:23] 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 applica The digital now hits so many different areas that if you don’t have the intranet first, intranet values perspective on things, that’s something actually where you can bring in a broad coalition.

[00:29:46] Intranet values doesn’t exclude India, it doesn’t exclude like, uh, tech guys in, in Japan. But you know what it does exclude? It ex 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 [00:30:00] Western values. They hate Western values.

[00:30:01] 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 the self-driving car with a hammer. Yeah. So crazy, so stupid. Okay. I can’t believe they won and turned it off in San Francisco. They won.

[00:30:15] Exactly. That’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. Now this, this is why this is, this is, this is why I do, I have to fight these guys. We need to bring in back. Right. Actually, one way I was, I was actually Ill to say this is like, so in San Francisco, you know there’s a big mural of somebody.

[00:30:33] And they’re not actually a San Franciscan, do you know what I’m talking about? I think I saw you posted this as Greta Thunberg, right? 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?

[00:30:48] 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. [00:31:00] Global movement. It really is like the forces of evil versus the forces of gun.

[00:31:03] And we have to be like clear, there’s light and there’s darkness in the world. Yeah. 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. That world. That’s right. Because basically you, you bring down, when you shrink the pie, people start fighting.

[00:31:18] Black 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, 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.

[00:31:34] 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.

[00:31:50] 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 it’s just like the cells of our body. They don’t, they don’t know [00:32:00] what’s going on or whatever, but it kind of works together in a certain way, right?

[00:32:03] And in the same way that like communism and capitalism were like swarm intelligence is 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.

[00:32:22] Right. And that’s what like woke versus tech is to me, 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 in the last few years. I, I’ve always kind of, even, even like myself, who’s very strong, I’ve kind of hedged a little bit.

[00:32:41] Sure. And now, I think it’s just become very clear, it’s very healthy. You know, you know, you know, you have those Pictures where it’s like the really dumb caveman and then 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.

[00:32:56] And then like the wizard, like it’s good and evil. And then you actually need this [00:33:00] framework to understand modern society and to be on this side of good. I agree with that. And I think that in particular, like the, um, the Greta thing, here’s, here’s the thing that’s a synthesis, maybe our two views, right.

[00:33:10] Which is, um, Greta shows that the woke. Mind virus or the meta organism or whatever we want to call it, right? Um, that that is pulling resources from abroad, right? It’s fighting a global conflict and it’s doing things, 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, like really bad stuff.

[00:33:32] That’s right. And, and, you know, the worst is if they can manage to link up with the Chinese, like the Newsome 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.

[00:33:46] 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, um, it could be, you know, like, uh, but with the Newsome Z thing [00:34:00] that to me is concerning because that would link up to censorship regimes and make them cooperate rather than compete in a bad way.

[00:34:06] 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 well. We need global allies. You’re, you’re helping, you’re helping build some allies out, out here for us, for, for, for America. Exactly. For India, from India and from everywhere.

[00:34:20] And to work together with the Indians, a hundred percent. Exactly. And India is also fighting that same virus locally in India. And so then once we all kind of realize, it’s like, it’s like, how is that, how is that going in India? Like, like, it’s like, do they have all sorts of like, I mean, they can’t tell as much DEI nonsense as we do in the U S for example.

[00:34:36] 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, we see two business plans and they’re using the same words.

[00:34:52] I’m going to build a social network, but one turns out to be Friendster. One turns out to be Facebook. And this is actually really important because a lot of people [00:35:00] 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 U S 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 blue America.

[00:35:18] Like a small example is you saw the California high speed rail, hundred disaster, a hundred billion dollars to nothing, but they’re still arguing for more money online. Okay. That is, they’re still arguing for it. Because they just think that the words, I think it’s, they think it’s like clicking some on amazon.

[00:35:31] com, right? It’s so crazy. It’s funny. They really don’t. They think if you have enough money, everything else is just straightforward, no problem. This must be a combination of like corrupt people with really stupid people. It was like useful idiots helping the corrupt people. It’s it’s, I think it’s both this, but it’s also something where.

[00:35:47] 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, 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 [00:36:00] math, the chemistry, the computer science, and so on. And then it’s thought that the business part of that is just, eh, meh, trivial, right?

[00:36:06] 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 the academics don’t understand that the actual idea that matters is how systems work, and how incentives work, and how accountability works.

[00:36:22] 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?

[00:36:36] They found a startup. Like, cause 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 common DNA between the socialist professor and capitalist CEO. You know, what it is is they both deeply feel they should be in charge.

[00:36:52] Isn’t that good? That’s fair. That’s true. So what I’ve seen folks go from being, you know, Marxist ish, [00:37:00] 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.

[00:37:12] 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 the system’s not designed correctly. 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 our government does not do and cannot do without the ownership side of it.

[00:37:28] There’s just all these things you need. That’s right. And that’s why I actually, so here’s an education idea for you. Maybe, you know, you might think of it, um, 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 of this, but maybe this is a piece of it.

[00:37:47] Take the budget that you would have wasted on the last year of high school or whatever and instead just give it to the kids as cash and say, um, you’ve got a year to do a business. And the reason is, you know, parents already spend a huge [00:38:00] chunk of savings on their college education. That’s like, that’s like their like starter money or whatever to do something.

[00:38:05] If instead that was their seed fund to go and start a business, here’s what would happen, right? 99 percent of them would fail or whatever number, maybe 95, you know, some of them might be 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, just take our argument, 99 percent of them fail.

[00:38:21] That failure is actually good. And the reason it’s good is all these kids by doing, uh, 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.

[00:38:42] 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 understand what’s actually going on. So just by allowing them, just like you have phys ed, they pick up a ball and they can see how good or bad they are, right? There should be something where they get the actual real experience in entrepreneurship.

[00:38:56] Get their CEO degree as their, you know, whatever you call it, CEO, boss, [00:39:00] president, or something like that. You give them the money and the ability to actually run a company. And for them to feel is the greatest education ever. My friend, uh, Joe Lamont’s one of the top guys in Austin in tech. I don’t think I’ve got to know him at all when you were there.

[00:39:12] He did Trilogy and so he Oh, the Trilogy guy. Okay. I didn’t know what he was called. He’s called Alpha. Okay. And, uh, and they do something similar. 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 and build businesses.

[00:39:25] 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 ninth, 10th, 11th grade. And he gives 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?

[00:39:39] 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 relatively small amount of money, but they actually were actually starting businesses rather than just going for four A’s.

[00:39:57] Most of USAID is just such a waste. It’s [00:40:00] so corrupt. It’s so dumb. And you know what 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 more budget. It’s so racist, right? It’s like you think these people And it’s so funny because now they’re on the left doing it.

[00:40:13] It’s like it’s a neocolonialism. They’re bringing in their woke values and trying to oppose. The same way we opposed our values in the past, they’re opposing today’s values. And it’s a worse version, and basically they did this in India for many reasons, 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 at least, at least to the India, which was the very bad as they were trying to make money off of India too, which was later with late most later though.

[00:40:41] Yeah. So that’s the thing is once you move from aid to trade, that’s the key, right? Look, it’s actually better to try and make money off them because then everyone somehow leaves. Yeah. Exactly. Like, like this is the thing is, you know, what one of my, some of my. Pokes are provocative on that capitalism is the ultimate socialism.

[00:40:55] Okay. Why here’s why the, um, if we take, take the famous example of [00:41:00] teal investing in Zuck in 2004, but in fire cages, Teal was much richer than Zuck at that time, but Zuck success meant that Zuck became much richer than Teal, but both became absolutely richer. And that is something which charity could never do, but investment can write with charity.

[00:41:17] 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 a hundred X or 10 X 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.

[00:41:33] Go ahead. No, I totally agree. And you know, you know, back, back, back to really what we were talking about earlier. I do think most of the things in the world, we, we do this and we invest and we build and that, that’s the way to create value together. There are some frameworks in the world where once you’re already successful.

[00:41:47] I do think it’s your duty to get back to, yeah, and you’re not even just get back, but like fix the systems that other people can’t fix. So there’s things that you and I can fix that like other people, like they can’t begin to do it. Yeah. And so, so once you get to this level, and so the, and the [00:42:00] question is.

[00:42:00] How do you take the frameworks we’ve learned from what works on 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, and I, I love it. I want to help with that. I’m also taking these entrepreneurial frameworks and saying, how can I reform?

[00:42:14] How can I reform? How can I build, how can I take an idea that I know is going to help a hundred thousand people and how do we like use the same kind of tactics and smart people 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, the way, one thing to your point is actually.

[00:42:27] A lot of young guys look to us for advice or what have you. Now that we’re a little gray now, exactly. 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 there is definitely value to that. Uh, but it’s also true that you should have.

[00:42:44] 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, Bology, the way I see it is like, [00:43:00] and this is, this is my point of view is that you shouldn’t build a startup unless you’re just like absolutely obsessed.

[00:43:06] And 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. 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 it a few years as an intern, that sort of thing.

[00:43:21] And then like, but then like, I’m 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 the tech, you know, I was watching, so, you know, you put, you know, the background, I need to give the whole story where PayPal, the bad Chinese mafia, Russian mafia were stealing money, right?

[00:43:36] 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 an impossible problem. I have to fix it. And like, and you thought that’s okay sometimes.

[00:43:49] Yeah, no, of course. And I guess, uh, 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. It’s where you kind of, [00:44:00] yeah. And, and, and, and then, but in general, like. You definitely do want to like, just only do one of these things.

[00:44:05] If you’re just obsessed with 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 we’ll always say it’s not an asset class. I totally agree. It’s like, right. Yeah. 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.

[00:44:24] Right. And, um, because you have, 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 with that. I’ll, I’ll add something else to what you’re saying, which is one thing I’ve seen, especially for a lot of Indians, cause 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.

[00:44:49] Is like, it’s already like an exit, which is why it’s a lot harder for, I guess, some of those people I’d imagine to, to do startup right away. You probably should make sure your family’s taken care of a little bit of money to raise them up. That’s, [00:45:00] that’s probably responsible. There’s totally responsible years.

[00:45:02] That’s right. So exactly. So this way I see, 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, or maybe you fired 10 years.

[00:45:21] Exactly. That’s right. That’s right. So it could be either your kids or it can be you fire change leader. Then you swing for the fence. So like one of my big mistakes at a company I was invested in is, is that, and I, I would not gonna say who, cause it’s probably private, but I, I, the guy, I didn’t realize his mom was on welfare and, and, and like he was trying to take money off the table.

[00:45:38] And normally I think you shouldn’t let someone take a lot of money off the table. And then, and then the 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, and I’d known that, and if I just wanted a secondary, secondary, right.

[00:45:53] And, and like, is it, I think it is really important that both as an investor and as a partner to like know what their circumstances are. There’s nothing [00:46:00] wrong with like doing something to help your family when they’re in a tough situation. Yeah, absolutely. It’s actually our duty as investors to help people do that.

[00:46:05] That’s part of our job as partners. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s one of these things where. The right amount of secondary takes the pressure off the founder and allows them to just work harder and don’t know that they have, they, they, they don’t have the, they don’t feel like, Oh, I need to sell kind of thing.

[00:46:21] And it’s like, and sometimes it might not be them. It might be the spouse too. So yes. Was it for the things I’ve learned is you got to get to know that. Yes. So it’s often encouraged. Yes. Especially for the older ones. You know, they’ve got it, especially for technical guys. Yes. That’s funny. Um, so let’s see other things.

[00:46:36] Um, Covered a lot. Uh, gosh. Um, 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, I’m looking at a lot of applications of AI to transform the productivity of the economy. That’s, that’s, that’s my job. Let’s talk about the red state and purple state strategy for AI.

[00:46:54] We were just talking about that earlier, right? So a lot of these, you know, these Washington DC regulations, I call it the [00:47:00] 640 K of compute should be off. Should be enough for anyone. Bill, you know, the executive order that just came down, go ahead. Yeah, no, it’s unbelievable stuff, which like Sohail and some of our people, they tweeted were like, we’re going to regret that we did this to ourselves.

[00:47:12] 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 56 K 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 see this, but it’s like a famous illusion.

[00:47:28] So the hard cap on compute is like the stupidest part. 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, it’s like the definition of de growth.

[00:47:42] 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 unenforceable without Congress actually like passing a law. 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?

[00:47:58] But the [00:48:00] states have their own interests. We need free states. Free states, exactly. There’s fed states, there’s free states, in a sense to speak, right? Pretty good, right? And so the free states, which can be red states, can be purple states, can be independent blue states, they would essentially do the calculation that, wait a second, uh, this is really good for reducing medical costs, for reducing legal costs, uh, AI is really good for automating all this medical billing and paperwork and other kind of stuff.

[00:48:24] Uh, this could be really, really valuable for us. Um, 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.

[00:48:44] Right? Yeah. And so then I’ve got a big one of those was in my house, the come and take it flagged from the, you know, from the history of Texas. That’s right. A big canon. And there’s a one with it, with the, but there’s a version of, with the GPU in the, in the form of a cannon. It’s really good. Right. That’s great.

[00:48:57] So I, I mean you do have to be a little bit [00:49:00] careful. I do think that, that the Supreme Court. Well, probably and I’m having to rule on this because it was in a Supreme Court. I think we’ll actually rule in our favor on the freedom side, but, but there is like a very powerful army that that’s tied to federal government that you, that you don’t want to actually have to like.

[00:49:14] You don’t want to. 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 U. S. there’s been such a fragmentation or fracturing that states are kind of doing their own thing and saying, sue me to the feds.

[00:49:29] Which is what you mean. This is how the world’s supposed to work. Right. The federal government’s not supposed to be signing 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.

[00:49:44] Places 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 [00:50:00] early technology for motion pictures.

[00:50:01] They must have broke it 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. Okay. And they did their own thing, right? And, um, this guy Neil Gabler has a good book on this, like, uh, like an industry of their own or something like that. It’s about how Hollywood was created, right?

[00:50:17] An, an empire of their own, I believe is 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.

[00:50:33] 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 thing. It’s just a corrupt thing where the copyright, where the owners of the content have done that. They just want to milk it forever, right?

[00:50:44] Exactly. And I think now we’ve got Um, the, uh, we’ve got enough examples of where the overly aggressive enforcement of copyright. I mean, we know what open source gives us, it gives you security, it gives you all these kinds of good benefits. Um, [00:51:00] the other thing that’s interesting that’s kind of related to that is the, uh, some of the data stuff.

[00:51:04] 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 IndyCar. So 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 ten years, which is actually really amazing.

[00:51:28] So the same guys who are working on IndiaStack and OTHER are working on something called DIPA, 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, uh, A, you have EU style bureaucracy and cookie laws. Or B, you just access all the data or whatever, right?

[00:51:47] And you just have some, some click through that gives you all the permissions. So India is trying a model where it’s an API approach where if you, um, you know, like, like you can just programmatically get access and train on [00:52:00] 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.

[00:52:10] 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. Yeah. Available for training on AI with the consent of the people and potentially with compensation for the people.

[00:52:29] Interesting. Okay. So just something to track because India is big enough that it can be an influential kind of thing if it works. Compensation is going to be hard to figure out for these things because there’s so much stuff that comes from it. Well, so this is where it gets, because they’ve got UPI, they’ve already got the payment information for a billion people.

[00:52:44] So you can, it’s kind of, it’s a little bit like what X is doing with like the direct deposits into your account. They just track a bunch of stuff and aggregate it and just drop it into your account. And it’s, and it’s interesting cause like you’d think. And 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 [00:53:00] lot of things.

[00:53:00] 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.

[00:53:15] There is a, it is a digital factory. I mean, I, I have factories in India that I use for lots of companies 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. And you can make like a dollar, if you can make a dollar a day on that.

[00:53:30] 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, there’s 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, we’ll have to see.

[00:53:45] I wish you could throw out some things and just get your reaction to them or whatever. Okay. 3D printing. 3D printing. I think it is actually finally getting to be useful for different areas of, uh, just in time inventory. It’s not quite there yet, but it seems like the next five years it’s going to be a big deal for a lot of [00:54:00] things.

[00:54:00] Yeah, it was hyped and went to the Gardner Trust 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 with the time they do it, but for very specific kind of small parts for inventory and manufacturing, I think basically the U S is going to become a major manufacturing hub.

[00:54:15] Again, it’s already started to grow a lot the last few years. If you look at the numbers 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 that they’re driving.

[00:54:29] It’s not lame, but they’re driving around and not, 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 five years, this should be a really big thing. Uh, I’d, I’d love to meet the, the people who are figuring it out.

[00:54:45] Cause it’s hard. Yeah, it’s hard. I mean, uh, 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. Even just like getting the hand.[00:55:00]

[00:55:00] Yeah. And like getting the hardware right to then allow us to train it in software and open it up to others. 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 Plung. Third is El Salvador and Bukele, named Bukele.

[00:55:15] 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 human antibology 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 something.

[00:55:35] 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.

[00:55:52] But he probably did need to do what he did in order to stop the murders in this society, because it was, it was a lawless society on the edge. And should we be more in his [00:56:00] direction of putting bad guys in jail who are causing murders? Yes. Yeah, and I think, the way I think about it is, Um, that society was at war.

[00:56:07] The, it wasn’t like a peacetime society. These guys with face tattoos were terrorizing the world. I bet if you’re at war, you do what you can to win the war and to save lives. And he did. Exactly. He did. 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.

[00:56:22] And America needs to remain a 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. Uh, related Javier Millet. I am very excited about Javier Millet.

[00:56:36] Yeah. He is a, I mean, listen, no one knows what 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, the, I love the affair of video, right? Yeah. Oh, getting rid of all the departments love.

[00:56:54] We need to do a lot of that in the U S like literally we need to fire, like everyone in the private education in the U S they should [00:57:00] just, you should not exist. It’s not, I’m not saying I’m not for education. I’m just not for what these bureaucrats are doing. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a waste. And there’s like, and the department of labor.

[00:57:08] 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 at 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.

[00:57:20] There’s just a bunch, 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 some embassies in the U.

[00:57:34] S. They’re doing some good things around the world. So the vast majority of it is like government on government stuff between our different departments. And it’s just, it’s like such a waste. It’s all meta work. It’s not even any meta work. It’s meta. It’s meta waste. And so I think we desperately need to move things in the direction of poverty, but like Argentina is like, was the wealthiest countries in the world a hundred years ago as now has 140 percent inflation.

[00:57:53] Like, thank goodness. So when like him got in charge, does he have enough power to do what he needs to do? But yes, that’s the question. I don’t know if he controls legislature, [00:58:00] but. Amazing, amazing guy. That’s right. I think it’s, it’s sort of similar to, you know, Asia went through so much communism, so much socialism, they developed antibodies to it.

[00:58:09] They finally learned it’s about to do here. Exactly. And so South America, Latin America is maybe starting to develop as well. This is why Florida is a great state because a lot of these people are from Cuba. Yes. All experienced how terrible communism is. Exactly. That’s right. Suarez, you know, he actually did a whole thing with the, you know, victims of communism there.

[00:58:23] Few more, uh, 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.

[00:58:37] Yep. Um, you know, I think, 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.

[00:58:51] I would love, I would love to, to build colonies on Mars, build colonies on the moon and do more out there. So overall, overall, very positive. Awesome. Um, last one, [00:59:00] 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 when the largest bio manufacturing companies in the U S I shouldn’t know that one.

[00:59:10] What’s that? Yeah. Resilience bio. We called it astral resilience originally, but the scientists said the nationals to nativists, but we’ve raised, okay, it’s ours. We’ve raised a few billion dollars. We partnered with, uh, with all sorts of countries because they needed us or help for MRNA. We do gene therapy, cell therapy.

[00:59:24] We’re doing GLP ones out of it. Um, so I’m, I’m very, very bullish on like this real revolution in biology. All the tools will begin 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.

[00:59:41] And I think we’re in a strong position overall there. And I’m very bullish on it. Awesome, dude. This is great. Let’s see about it. Thank you very much.