Here in sunny Singapore with my friend Joe Lonsdale on his first
company, Palantir was in the Hexagon on Page Mill Road 1500.
You remember that the whole place for doing like $1.50 a
foot? I remember on Page Mill it cost
nothing. It cost nothing, right?
It was totally affordable. You you can't easily do the
garage start up in Silicon Valley anymore in the same way.
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.
Like there's a ways of doing things cheaper and scrap your
probably useful. That's right.
It's like, you know, the the biotech kits, kits can get
really expensive. It's like different roughly
between making your own coffee and pre made coffee.
I run AVC. We build lots of companies, but
there's all sorts of opportunities in fixing
healthcare, fixing things in defense.
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 do, is that the things everyone else is running towards
are usually the popular things. They're usually not that broken.
There's all these things that are broken about the US, meth
and meth. No, it's drugs too, 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.
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 and I love it and you know, I I think you know there's there
has to be criticism but there's to be constructive criticism
where your alternative has to be better than the existing.
And 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. 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 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 at a par of 2009, which is also a large
global company leader in wealth management technology started
opening Gov, which you were an early investor in.
I supported 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.
We have APC 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 7 core funds,
couple follow on funds, some SP VS, So that's that's that's
committed capital AUM as much higher as you get to count the
market, right. We've raised about $7,000,000
and we've done well. So the APC is a big fund.
We build a lot of things and it turns out you can't solve every
problem with entrepreneurship. So I have my Policy Institute at
the university and you know, to try to be a leader in US
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 our, the broader tech community.
But folks have realized you can't do everything but
technology. You need some policy, you need
some politics as well, right? Talk about you're you're
thinking. But I love the, I love the
Javier Milek quote in Argentina. This like crazy guy.
I love it over Argentina is very exciting.
And he's basically saying, like the way Milton Friedman said,
just to your social roles to make profit as an entrepreneur.
That's correct. But you also need to try to make
sure socialists don't take over your country.
You need both of those, 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 socialist to say you have a
social responsibility as an entrepreneur and so on.
And I agree, the social realizability is keep out the
socialists. 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 public education?
To teach them about liberty. Teach them to stay on demagogues
and despots, right. So that the whole point of
public education is to teach people, not to allow what we
call today. Socialist Jealous of Liberty,
right? Exactly.
That is the one thing like he, like he said, you know public
universities, different universities, the elite.
In the university you have to train the elite to understand
our history or 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.
It's 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 our education.
You know the 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 they've gotten a lot
Dumber. A lot Dumber since the age of
Jefferson and Hamilton and. Someone said I wish I could talk
like these guys. I read them all the time.
I love them. I read their primary yeah, 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.
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's speech 3. Millions of people are in the
holy cause of liberty, yes, and such a nation as we possess.
OK. There you go.
You 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 forest? They were the entrepreneurs.
They're in their 20s and 30s. Exactly.
They're all startup guys younger than we are now.
I know we got to get on it. Well, well, some of them.
Ben Frank, who was a little bit older.
There's there's somebody that. Ben Frank.
Yes, exactly. 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?
Which is the United States of America.
So the thing though that I don't get is, and this will sound
stupid, but but me sometimes asking the stupid questions.
No intradas, right? No ability to look up
references. You have 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?
Yeah, like everyone. Basically like the men who were
running society. Like, there's this thing called
the London magazine. Have you ever seen a London
magazine? No.
I love this. It's it's a it's like the
combination of like, ten of our top magazines all in one, like
The Atlantic and then all these things and like.
And then people would read it in London.
They'd read it all over the Americas.
And like, you'd have like, Lord N arguing with Benjamin Franklin
and the pages and it would show you, here's what happened in
parliament. Here's like this war going on.
You have a fold out of the war. There'd be like hard math
problems, like how 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 on, you know, looking up a
reference, for example, is actually relatively easy to do
on the Internet. You can use sci hub or Lib Gen.
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 1000 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.
This is the very. It's just so the Roman analog I
think is very important. Like every great man in Rome
would read like Libby and read like Virgil or read Horse.
There's there's a, there's a cultural foundation that was
shared, right. And that.
And they had a, it was a different one.
Now when you come to America's, but it was the same set of like
cultural foundations where you have like your library, there's
a standard library that everyone have everyone read.
That educated man would would have this history of the West.
And that was and and 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's interesting.
It's a nice play on words, right?
And and, and I wonder if it's actually somewhat not just a
play on words something deeper than that in the following
sense. If in you know 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 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,
Plato wasn't a fan of democracy and democracy has other meanings
or you know, the cause 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 networks, a conference with
parallel education track. So we're both interested in this
kind of stuff. You're 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, I mean, we need to make
sure they have the standard library have the concepts to
even go there. Which is.
Yeah. Which.
Right. We've seen 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, OK. Or Teal or you know PJ, you
know, right. I think, I think we've, we are,
you know, one of the things that's funny is on Twitter
they'll they'll kinda make fun or somebody they'll be like, why
do all these tech guys become philosophers?
And I actually thought about Wyatt.
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, their chiefs like psychology 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 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 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. They'll have the hockey of
needs. The very highest one is a self
actualized right. 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
tech analogies for everything? And actually one of the things I
talked about in the never Saved 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 10s of years or 20s of years
or decades. There's one thing largely in
countries, which is civilizations.
Civilizations, right? Like India.
China. A lot of my one of my favorite
thinking is like these books on the history of civilizations.
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 that mix. And then it grows and there's
and then there's these like things that help it grow, but
the things that help it grow become special interests over
time and then this. 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 happening as
Fast forward with the company. 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, OK, we're going to go against
this thing that's capturing it. Got to go against these
interests and we're going to make it for the interest for
all. Again is what Javier Mile is
trying to do in Argentina. It's right.
I usually, 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, could 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 the the sky.
So there's folks who are doing more in the way of quantitative
history. Dalio was doing a little bit of
it. Peter Church in the guys who
were doing the 4th turning of them kind of verbal version and
I feel like. Trying to quantify these things
is always a really good thing to do with social sciences.
You the smartest guys, try to do that.
Be 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 N Gram, you can do stuff like that.
You can see when they were saying certain words and others,
for example, you go to Google N Gram.
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 only is
ramped up in the 20th. Century.
I know. I like Republic much better.
By the way, Master Democracy doesn't work with all our
founders. New Master Democracy is a bad
idea. Well, it's funny, it's.
It's different. The the, the, the quickest way I
can establish that to somebody is I say OK if there was a
global vote, OK 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 see this with the UN all the time, but exactly which is a
bunch of dictators get together and 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 I think it's AI 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, you We don't want democracy of our republics, The signal all
those places weren't even set up for.
US 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 by Yon Grillo
on narco terrorism in South America, right.
And and so 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, 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 faction
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 can get in power. Barbara Walter has a book called
How Civil War 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 the, what
she calls the intermediate range between the quote, full
democracy and an autocracy, that you have the maximum amount of
chaos. OK.
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 the McDonald's in them will go.
That means if they both have McDonald's, they basically have
enough American influence that they're under PAX America, so
they've got a dispute resolver. That that was why they weren't
finding if they were under Pax America.
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 Congress either 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 you know these are
deceptively stable and then not. Correct.
Because they they will hide the internal conflict, then it burst
forwards, 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 20 tens like ISIS and and so on and so forth
and so. Anyway, turns out anarch
anarchism is not a good when you ran on your border throwing in a
mess. Totally, exactly right.
So lots of words actually get sort of rebranded to be mote 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 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.
The reason I just say that is when something can mean both X
and it's 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 and it's bad. The people shouldn't have a say.
It should be enlightened bureaucrats to do that.
And then, you know, there's this one wrinkle I talked about.
It is to go from 51% democracy to 100% democracy.
The 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,
didn't get consent to the governed, hundreds into boxes.
Everybody goes and moves to, let's say Starbase, Texas,
right, which is Elon's new city or they're 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 and they've consented to enter essentially the
jurisdiction of, you know, ACEO. That's running that territory,
which is done totally legally by the way.
And now because they've consent to be there, they they literally
sign a social smart contract on 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
Hunterson democracy is actually also point O 1% and what do you
mean by that? So, you know, a lot of people
say, oh, these crazy ideas on governance and so on networks,
that's how we're going to go mainstream.
I say it doesn't need to go mainstream.
The reason is there's 8 billion people in the world.
You only have very few of us to do it.
Exactly. Point O 1% is 800,000 people,
800,000 people is like actually would be like the 30th largest
UN country or something like 40th largest.
OK, 800,000 people. So point O 1% of actually every
minority group that can organize enough to can get their own city
or their own state. Potentially anyway so this some
of the stuff I love. I love that you're bringing this
back up for the world to follow. This stuff is, you know I I
introduced Peter to Patrick Freeman Peters LA and you know I
was the original chairman of the sea setting 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.
I'm like Glenn Beck talking about sea studying which was
actually quite embarrassing for a while because it was like
sharks. But you know, I was, I was from
proud of that. I've been involved.
No, I like actually, I love what you and Patry and Peter did on
that because and Patrick has talked about this like the path
of sea setting. 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.
I, 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. And like you know I'll admit I
am I am trying to fix the army in the USI have to stay in fight
ball as you so so so I. Respect that and.
And 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 work and
you can inspire people. I've done this.
Now, you know, Cicero's 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 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 it's what I'm trying to
do is now at the same time I would love there to be.
Like a Singapore for the US to learn from exact closer, 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. OK.
Well, I mean. The the $100 billion.
That's true. That's true.
Is true. So of course, Steve Ballmer, if
you're watching this, I don't I I still respect.
People still take your money. I mean, like, you know, I have
nothing against his heart. The thing about it is, you know,
just in defense of Steve Ballmer before a 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, you know,
things that they put in place that ended up working later, but
Satya 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, OK, maybe, maybe he wasn't
scoring at all. It's 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.
Satya is patiently wait and work your way through the bureaucracy
to execute the turn around. Because I wouldn't say patiently
wait. I'd say I 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 the internal. Warrior.
So that's Elon, you know. Yeah.
Well, Katya, as far and you, 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 is it like I think
especially with this recent open ad right where within 48 hours
they had announced a deal like to catch and field a ball.
Like that over the week. He's obviously super intense.
He's super intense, right? Like that's.
Really hard. He is at war.
He's Claude at war. Elon is at war.
He is at War 2. They they, I think, I think to
be the CEO of Microsoft that 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 something is like
Deng 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.
I won't need memes, but the folks, they diplomatic enough to
work their way up? No, with the lost.
Person to rotting, they're never bulable.
They exactly. They're two bureaucrats.
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 want to be a
revolutionary. As a kid, yeah.
Yeah. So I started.
Like as many companies as anyone else that are big because 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 and The thing is, I'm glad that you were, in a sense, it's
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 and I think like So what I'm doing is I am
obviously I'm, 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 When?
He's when he's slowly. Following you.
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. It's something like they're
saying we are bullish on III is in an amazing position.
You know I've I've, I've, I've always hired people there.
I, I, I 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. They're they're like.
Five years ago, yeah. It was like it was like you
passed the easy well the five problems to them.
Yes. Now for some of my teams for out
of par for open Gov for other companies we we give them the
hard problems. Yes, right.
And and and all of that like I've taken, there's like you
know companies like people who were at Fresh Works 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 right
Series HX. I 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 it's a 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 1015 year horizon.
It's 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.
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.
Yeah. And I think, you know, here's
my, I love to hear your take on this.
And so 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. OK, right.
So so it's in the. Yeah exactly that's right.
And there's more in like Saudi Arabia and in Dubai, a lot of
the foreign. Indians in the Middle East, for
sure. Yeah, I have men who run things
there too. That's right.
But Angles fear it's only 7 million though.
Even so. Listen, it seems like it's more
because you guys are running like all the big tech.
We're doing all right, basically.
So here's my my view is that if there's 7 million abroad who are
doing this? Well, there's one point for a
billion Indians total if you even say.
Now obviously the group abroad are a select subsets and they.
Probably have some advantages on average, yes, from people who
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 that's very, very
reasonable to say. 5%, yeah. So it's 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.
We 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 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 intranet values.
Did I talk to you about this? So here's here's the theories.
It was 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. 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 and by the way, even as a Jew, I do appreciate
Christendom. There was the savage world out
there back then, right? There was 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, so that cost of the West.
Now one 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 this
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 and they're play.
Go ahead. It's just funny.
You don't know it's a buy or South Korea.
You're all over the. Place 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, OK, 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.
So what are you, my Internet values?
That's the phrase I'm using now. Maybe I can come up 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, right? It is taking a bet on somebody
who has no name. It can't seem to level.
Up It's fundamentally A classically liberal floss.
It's classically liberal, but it's like the sort of muscular
21st century version of that, right?
And when I say intraday values, everybody nods and they're like,
I get, they instantly kind of get what I'm saying.
They know that. It's as the desaleration and
growth versus deceleration and and D growth.
That's right. And so you can only see what
something is by what it's not. You know who's against intraday
values? Washington, DC and Beijing,
right? 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 stuff. 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 get safe.
They want to give up. They want to give up liberty for
safety. Exactly what our founders said
not to. 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? Free sometimes as like an
umbrella term and an Internet at the very beginning.
You need to get the digital right.
We did believe that in person was very important, but yes, so
but, but you can compete with Yellen, Harvard directly.
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. It was a zillion AI applicant.
The digital now hit so many different areas that if you
don't have the Internet first, Internet values perspective on
things, that's something actually you can bring in a
broad coalition. Internet values doesn't exclude
India, It doesn't exclude like tech guys and 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.
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 attacks self
driving car with a hammer. So crazy.
So stupid. OK, 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. Now This is why this is, this
is, this is what I do. I have to fight these guys.
We need to bring him back, right?
Actually, one way I was actually, I'll to say this is
like, so in San Francisco, we knew there's a big mural of
somebody 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 Deceler 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 gun.
And we have to be like 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 we will be at war of that. World.
That's right. Because basically you you bring
down when you shrink the pie, people start fighting.
The black people all fight over the pie, that you're basically
condemning us to a dark, Dark World.
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. Yes, I don't think.
I don't think she's evil. I mean, 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 just 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 it just like the cells of our body.
They don't, they don't know what's going on or, 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 Wolf versus tech is to me.
Like book 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've always kind of even like
myself who's very strong. I've kind of hedged a little bit
and now I think it's just become very clarity.
It's very healthy, you know. You know, You know, you have
those pictures where it's like the really dumb caveman.
And then. Yeah, 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 this 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 maybe our term views, right, which is
Greta shows that the woke the mind virus or the meta Organism
or whatever we want to call it, right?
That that is pulling resources from abroad, right.
It's by the way, global conflict and it's doing, for example, it
tries to get all the governments to work together to ban AI.
Yeah. Did the European government like
this source of a lot of this? I think it's like really bad
stuff. That's right.
And and you know the 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 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 new SIM 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.
We need, we need to have global allies.
We need global allies. You're helping.
You're helping build some allies out out here for us for.
Americans exactly from India and from everywhere.
And to work together with the 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? How's that going in India?
Like, like is like, do they have all sorts of like, I mean, they
can't tell me 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, OK? But like, we, 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 the 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 in blue America.
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. OK, that they're still arguing
for it because they're they just think that the words I think
it's they think it's like clicking some on Amazon.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'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 it.
I mean, I guess me more academia than you in the sense I spent
more time in academia, right. But in academia, there is so
much emhasis 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,
eh, meh, trivial, right? Yeah.
And then when you actually go and do it, you're like, whoa,
this is. More engineering 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 economics don't understand that the actual
idea that matters is how systems working out, incentives working
out 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 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.
Because you have to apply what works and you have to take the
ideas of a free society and apply.
Otherwise you're not going to succeed pretty much.
Yeah, and you know it was seriously against there is
actually common DNA between the social professor and capitalist
CEO. You know it is what it is, is
they both deeply feel they should be in charge.
Isn't that good? It's fair, right.
So what I've seen in folks go from being you know, Marxist ish
leaning CS guys to founding a company, they're like ultra
libertarians, like 3. 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 I would say this is.
Well, they realize these these bureaucrats are not that bright.
And then they realize the system's not designed correctly.
And and then they and then they realize the incentives is what
really matters and accountability is what really
matters of measuring things and iterating, which our government
does not do and cannot do without the ownership side of
it. There's just 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
of it. K through 12, I think is just
basically 1213 years of jail for the most part, right.
It's done terribly. It's done terribly.
OK, So one thought I've had for a long time is what if you and
and that you can do much more radical reforms of 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, OK.
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 they're
like starter money or whatever to do something.
If instead that was their seed fund to go and start a business,
here's what happened, right 99% of them would fail or whatever
number, maybe 95. You know some of them might do
plumbing or other something else that's got lower risk, which is
fine. We don't know the exact number,
but let's even say the cigar, even 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 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. Yep.
But they think that being a CEO is just putting your feet up on
a desk. I love them.
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 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 what you call it, CEO, boss,
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 there.
My friend Joe Lamont's one of the top guys in Austin in tech
and I didn't even got to know him at all when you were there.
He had trilogy, and so he. Oh, the trilogy guy?
OK, I didn't know what he. Was called Alpha.
He and 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.
I've been on the phone with a few of these kids in Austin and
met a couple of them who built amazing things and like 9th,
10th, 11th grade and he gets to raise them a lot of freedom to
do, which I think is very healthy to try and.
Learn. It's very healthy.
The thing about it is it's win, win.
Because if they succeed, of course they're growing the
economy. You know, actually, 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, OK.
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
days. Most of USA 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 more budget. It's like, how 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 neo
colonialism, yeah. So they.
They're bringing in their woke values and trying to oppose the
same way we opposed our values in the past.
They're proposing today's value. And it's and it's the worst
version. And basically they did, they did
this in India for many reasons, for many, for many years.
And they 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.
At least at least of the India which was the very bad is they
were trying to make money off of India too, which was later was
later though. Yeah.
So that's The thing is once you move from aid to trade, that's
the key, right, Look as I think better.
Try making money off them, because then everyone somehow at
least, yeah. Exactly.
Like, like this is. The thing is you know what one
of my some of my Polks are provocative on the Capitalism is
the ultimate socialism. OK, why?
Here's why the If we take take the famous example of Teal
investing in Zuck in 2004, right, putting 500K in Zuck Teal
was much richer than Zuck at that time.
But Zuck's success meant that Zuck became much richer than
Teal. 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 100 extra. 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 back back to relay 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 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 to like fix the systems
that other people can't fix. There's things that you and I
can fix to like other people. Like they can't begin to do it.
Yeah. And so.
So once you get this all and so the and the question is 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 aspiral frameworks and saying I can
reform. How can I reform?
How can I build? How do 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 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 that 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 they look right 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 start up swing for the fences and and there is
definitely value to that. But it's also true that you you
should. If you're if you're young and
just starting out and you're on startup #1, 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, Balaji, 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 to go work for a high growth startup because
that's like the best Chris 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 a few years as an intern and that sort
of thing 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 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 play another background.
You think of the whole story where PayPal the bad in Chinese
mafia. Russian mafia.
We're stealing money. Great.
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 nice guys but way behind that text what they were
doing. So I'm like this is impossible
problem but I have to fix it and like and you thought that's OK
sometimes. Yeah, and of course and and 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? Where you kind of you got yeah
and and and 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
start up is so hard. I mean one thing is even the
concept of do you know what people say oh venture capital
and they'll always say it's not an asset class.
There's I totally agree it's like right so like a start up
it's not it's not an asset class really of start-ups in the sense
of you know what was TL 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 with 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 to do start up right away.
You probably should make sure your family's taken care of a
little bit. Some money to to raise them up.
That's that's probably responsible.
It's totally responsible for years.
That's right. So.
Exactly. So that's why I say I'm like,
look, you know, it depends on your financial circumstances And
the first Gen. like out of poverty, There's absolutely no
shame in that middle class. Get to stability, 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 fire 10
years exactly. 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.
Like one of my big mistakes on a company I was invested in is is
that and I I would not going to say who because it's it's
probably private. But I I the guy I didn't realize
his mom was on welfare. Oh no.
And and 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 then the people try.
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 know that And if
I just. Want to do a secondary?
Yeah, secondary. And and like is it, I think it
is really important that both as an investor is and 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.
It's actually our duty as investors to help people do
that. 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 they have the the 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 was the very other things I've learned is you got to get
to know that yes is often in charge.
Yes, especially for the older ones, you know, they've got,
especially for technical guys, yes.
Yeah, 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 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 my job in it. Let's talk about the red state
and purple state strategy for AI.
We were talking about that earlier, right.
So a lot of these, you know, these Washington DC regulations,
I call it the 640K of compute should be should be enough for
anyone. Bill, you know the exact order
that just came down. Go ahead.
Yeah, No, it's unbelievable stuff.
Which, like Suhail and some of our people, they tweeted were
like, we're going to regret that we did this to ourselves, right?
With the hard cap on Compute, OK?
It's just 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 and she really believed it.
And this is, this is, of course, you know, like Bill Gates didn't
actually see this, but it's like a 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. Like the definition of D growth.
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 you. Can imagine enforceable without
Congress actually like passing a lot, 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 law, OK, but the the the
states have their own interests. We need free states.
Free states, Exactly. There's fed states.
There's free states, you know, so 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, 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 could 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. And so then I've got.
A big one that was in my house that come and take it flagged
from the, you know from the history of Texas.
That's right, the big cannon. 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. So.
I I mean you do have to be a little bit careful.
I do think that that the Supreme Court will probably, I'm having
to rule on this because it is 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 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 Supreme Court like, but
within the US there's been such a fragmentation or fracturing
that states are kind of doing their own thing and saying sue
me to the feds, which is. What, You mean this is how the
world's supposed to work, that 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 wasn't broke yet 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, OK? 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. And an empire of their own, I
believe, is the new. 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 3000 miles is a
pain for Edison to send his guys all the way across the country.
India's probably a good analogue 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. It's.
Like it's just a corrupt thing where they've copied 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 and 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? OK, 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 Indian
government. So that's what, like others, 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 5
or 10 years, which is actually really amazing.
It's the same guys who are working on India Stack and other
are working on something called DEPA, which is like a data
access thing. And you know, 'cause 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 all the permissions. So India is trying to 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 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 a 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. OK, there's 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 because because they've got UPI, they've
already got the payment information for a billion
people. So you could it's kind of 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 aggregated
and this drop it into your. 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 IT area and that 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?
But a billion Indians could do a lot of training data.
There is a 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 dollar, 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 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
blow up a seat. We should throw out some things
and just get your reaction to them.
Or OK, 3D printing 3. D 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
it's going to be a big deal for a lot of things.
Yeah, it was hyped and went to the gardener Trost and then kind
of coming back. You're starting to see some
cases where it can be pretty useful.
People are using it for too much with how they 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 this is going to be one part of the
solution. OK.
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. It's not lame, but they're
driving around or 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 it'll be a lot of us think in
five years this should be a really big thing.
I'd I'd love to meet the the people who are figuring it out,
'cause 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
you 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 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 Clone Third is El
Salvador and Bukelli. Name Bukelli.
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 you
know, 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 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 US? No, it's not.
Not in that form that 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 didn't need to do what he did in order to stop
the murders in the society because he was.
He was a lawless society on the edge and should we be warrant
his direction of putting bad guys in jail or 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 peace and society, these guys
with face tattoos were terrorizing the.
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.
And America needs to remain a shining light with a functional,
principled system. So he said, 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. Are related Javier Miley.
I am very excited about Javier Miley.
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 the I Love the Afuera video, right?
Yeah, Yeah. Getting rid of all the pure fire
departments love. We need to do a lot of that in
the US, Like literally we need to fire like everyone in the
private education in the US. They should just not exist.
I'm not saying I'm not for education, I'm just not for what
these bureaucrats are doing because it's it's a waste.
And there's like a Department of Labor probably should get rid of
the whole thing too. It's very politicized.
It's sued pounds here for total bullshit reason.
After Peter spoke, you have literally Peter Thiel spoke with
Trump's convention and this frigging thing sued us and then
like Elon became an enemy and this thing went after.
He Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
This is a bunch. I mean, are there some good
people there? We're sure there's some good
people there. Is it politicized?
Yes. And.
And do we need them to be doing anything?
No, Right. I mean, it's funny, I I meet
people all the time who are like in the bowels of embassies.
There are some good people on some embassies in the US that
are doing some good things around the world.
The vast majority of it is like government and government stuff
between our different departments.
And it's. It's like such a waste.
It's all meta work. It's not even meta work, it's
meta. It's meta waste.
And so I think we desperately need to move things the
direction of hobby. 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 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 develop.
This is why Florida is a great state, because a lot of people
from Cuba all experienced terrible communism.
Exactly. That's right.
Suarez. You know, he actually did the
whole thing with the, you know, victims of communism there.
Few more space. You know, I think that space is
really critical for defense. I'm a big fan of the space for
us. Unfortunately I'm working a lot
in defense. We need to think about that.
Very bullish OnStar Lincoln. I'm waiting for it to be
installed on my plane. It's obnoxious thing to say, but
I'm sure very excited for that. Yep.
You know I think it's I think I think space is over hiked in the
venture capital world where too much money has gone to things
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
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. Obviously, I invested in a ton
of bio infrastructure companies, built one of the largest bio
manufacturing 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 of the
nationalist too nativist, but we've raised OK, it's ours.
We've raised a few billion dollars.
We've partnered with with all sorts of countries because they
needed us, our help for mRNA. We do gene therapy, cell
therapy. We're doing GLP ones out of it.
So I'm I'm very, very bullish on like this real revolution of
biology of all the tools we're beginning to tell.
I think longevity is very scary like just what we're learning
and and like how aging is going to change in the next 1020
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, ball.
Thank you very much. All right.
See you soon.