Joe Lonsdale

And I thought it couldn't be that hard if we're running data globally for all these intelligence agencies and defense stuff to do this little finance thing. And so we started it off and it turned out it was a really hard problem as well. It took about, again, about three years to get it to work. It was called Adapar.

But today Adapar is doing really, it took us a long time, but Adapar is now by far number one.

in the country we just crossed seven trillion dollars reported over at a par so so it's a leader in that space you just crossed what seven trillion dollars reported over out of par so if you think of like a big investment advisor a big bank with wealth managers or family offices even some of them here in nashville you know with friends you mentioned like those guys are probably running their family office and their wealth off of that apart to do all their data and reporting and decisions and

How does their accountant see it? How does their lawyer see it? How does they bring together all the information, figure out what to do next? It's really good for finance to be more data-driven, because if things are not data-driven, it becomes an old boys club. It becomes just like insiders, just doing things like insiders do.

Whereas once you have all the data, it's able to bring in and help new solutions work and help people actually break into it. So I think it's been a good thing.

Yeah, because a lot of those companies initially were just in the cloud, and that was a pretty expensive thing. Amazon and others and Google and Oracle set up these big giant things that made a ton of money, like the infrastructure powering the cloud, powering things like Atapart. was become a big business.

And now all of a sudden, there's a whole new infrastructure, of course, with NVIDIA chips and everything else to build for AI. And this is like a trillion dollar investment. And it's one of the biggest investments we've ever made in infrastructure in our civilization to power all this new AI stuff we're doing. And I'm sure you guys on your team are using it for different things.

We're each using it for things. We're going to need more power. A lot of us are big fans of nuclear, but right now we don't have a lot of nuclear in our civilization. We do have some, by the way. It's 20% of what we do is about that. But a lot of us want to ramp up nuclear. I think this administration is going to do that. But a lot of people want to ramp up solar in different ways.

There's a lot of good options for how we do this, but it is a big problem to make sure we do that if we're going to keep growing this stuff. Is solar actually a realistic option for AI? Yeah. You know, so the problem is, it's actually funny, there's this term I like.

So a lot of people, the old term is clean energy, of course, because they call it cleaner, which I don't know if solar panels are that clean. It takes a mess to make them, but it's clean in the sense that when you're using them, they're just very clean. There's another term called intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is stuff that's not always on, which is wind and solar.

So if you're going to use intermittent energy, first of all, we've probably oversubsidized that, because if you have too much intermittent energy, it just screws you, right? Because it makes energy cheaper when the sun's shining, and then everyone's screwed and you have to pay people even more who are running all the time when the sun's not shining. Batteries are getting better.

There are certain things, for example, with air conditioning, that works really well because you need more energy anyway when it's sunny outside. I think solar is a big part of the solution. But I think for the base load, I think natural gas and nuclear are the obvious things to scale off for now.

There's a lot of stuff. There's a few different companies. There's one called Commonwealth in Massachusetts that a bunch of my friends are invested in. It's interesting because Fusion is one of those things where for a while, when I was younger, I was just really skeptical because it's always supposed to be coming and you're like, this is never going to come. It's crazy.

But it turns out you can actually map out the ratio of the energy you put in to get out and you graph that. If you graph that, it's called the I think it's called the Q ratio or something. If you graph that, it was like 0.2 like 10 years ago. So you only got back a fifth as much energy out and it kept going up and up and up. And now it's over one.

So fusion is now over one in terms of energy coming out. I don't know exactly. It's like 1.2, 1.3. It starts to get really economic around 1.5, 1.6 and really economic at two. And it looks like if you graph it, it's going to cross. I think it crosses two in the early 2030s. I think some of these new designs make that very likely. This is not something that just happens magically.

There's a ton of billions of dollars of work. But one thing I will say about America that's awesome is even people I disagree with politically I have a lot of friends in the tech world, for example, that might be on the other side.

But there's people on both sides, including Bill Gates, including all sorts of other guys, who are putting just a ton of money into this fusion research, these fusion companies. And I think we're going to get there, and I think it's really, really good for our civilization if we do. If we have cheap energy, man, that helps everyone, but it helps the working class more than anyone else.

Because it just makes everything cheaper. And I think it's a really good chance we get there.

Cost of food, the cost of driving your car, the cost of building stuff, the cost of building a manufacturing plant for things you buy, the cost of running the manufacturing plant. Everything comes back. to energy. If you make energy cheaper, you make everything cheaper, and it means all of us can afford more stuff.

And by the way, it's not just like, if you make energy cheaper, it's also then cheaper to clean the environment. It's cheaper to make things more green, right? So there's all this stuff that just, in our society, there's just tied to that.