Joe Lonsdale

So there's a bunch of that stuff that's really working well right now. For example, I'll just give you an example. One example is this company, Orca Bio. These amazing founders we backed relatively early on, and they were able to sort cells one by one using semiconductor technology. It came out of a Stanford lab. And it turns out this is really useful for cell therapies.

And so cell therapies, there's been like a trillion dollars invested in cell therapies. They're amazing. So what they are is they used to be that all the pharma guys were chemists and they would do things with molecules and all the drugs were molecules. And then with Genentech and others in the 1980s, you had what's called biologics.

And so instead of using a molecule to treat you, you'd use like a peptide or an antibody, something that came from a body, right, to treat you. And that was a really powerful way to cure a lot more things. Now, instead of just using that, you're using a whole cell to treat someone. If this is a peptide, the whole building is a cell. It's a much more complicated thing.

Just in the last 10 years, we've learned how to program them and use them. All this is going on. But the simplest form of cell therapy has been around forever. For example, it's called a bone marrow transplant. So if someone has late-stage blood cancer, they're going to die pretty much for sure in six months. What you do is you can give them a bone marrow transplant, reboot the immune system.

Good chance it cures the cancer now. Unfortunately, it's like playing Russian roulette. You'll die 15%, 20% of the time with a bone marrow transplant, right? Because it could be rejected. It could just kill you. So you only do it if someone's about to die anyway of cancer, and then maybe it saves them.

Now it turns out with this new cell therapy sorting thing these guys are doing, they're able to make it so the rejection rate's almost nothing. And so as opposed to 15% to 20%, there's very, very few rejections, even those were not fatal. And so here's what's really cool about this.

Not only is that going to save thousands more lives per year of people who have these blood cancers, it turns out that when you reboot someone's immune system, it seems to cure autoimmune diseases. So autoimmune diseases are like Crohn's or multiple sclerosis, you may have heard of. We lost my aunt, unfortunately, to multiple sclerosis.

We're starting a phase one now with the FDA where we think we may potentially have a cure for multiple sclerosis. So there's stuff like this happening right now with bio that's really exciting. Man, that's incredible. It's fun stuff, right? There's like the breakthroughs coming out of our top universities with the latest technology. It's just really inspiring.

I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can keep things functional, you know? Wow, man.

He's the king of the moment. Probably my two most important mentors, Claire or Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, I'd say. Those are the guys I learned the most from in my youth. And they're both extraordinary individuals. Alex is my co-founder of Palantir, as was Peter.

And Peter obviously was co-founder of PayPal and was kind of one of the intellectual leaders that I think, even though Peter was not involved in this election, a lot of the things he created kind of led to this stuff happening. And he's someone I really admire. Well, maybe you can put a word in for us.

And J. Cal. I am also winning too much, but I'm happy to be here last minute as a sub for David J. Cal.

And J. Cal. I am also winning too much, but I'm happy to be here last minute as a sub for David J. Cal.

Adapar just crossed $7 trillion. I was reported on it this month. It's a good real company, too. Yeah, the OpenGov sold this year. We saw it start with a bunch of people. Congrats. They're good.

Adapar just crossed $7 trillion. I was reported on it this month. It's a good real company, too. Yeah, the OpenGov sold this year. We saw it start with a bunch of people. Congrats. They're good.

I don't know, maybe six or so.

I don't know, maybe six or so.

Well, listen, Jake, I think I do agree. I think almost all reasonable Americans can see that our growth is ridiculously constrained. And I think Jeff Bezos was saying yesterday, like we need a growth oriented mindset if we're going to get out of our debt problems, our deficit problems. So it's nice to see everyone kind of coming on the team and saying, yeah, we need to fix these things.

Well, listen, Jake, I think I do agree. I think almost all reasonable Americans can see that our growth is ridiculously constrained. And I think Jeff Bezos was saying yesterday, like we need a growth oriented mindset if we're going to get out of our debt problems, our deficit problems. So it's nice to see everyone kind of coming on the team and saying, yeah, we need to fix these things.

I think what people don't understand is like just how broken the government bureaucracy and regulations are. Right. It's not like they're kind of sort of bad. Like, it's almost like they're companies that went bankrupt. Like, think of the worst company you know in Silicon Valley that went bankrupt, like, 30 years ago.