ology. Did we say this about Japan when I was young? Didn't we say, oh, the Japanese, there's something about their culture. They'll never want to take a chance, so therefore they'll never build any technology because they don't want to. There's something about their culture.

Well, Japan is doing okay. Seems like they fixed that. Now we're doing the same thing about China, that there's something about their system or something about, I don't know, the culture that makes them not be able to make microchips. On the surface, doesn't that just sound like a racist sort of thing that we're looking for support for? Like we're looking for confirmation bias. But it feels like it starts with racism, doesn't it? Am I wrong about that? Am I too woke? Is that too woke? Because that might be me. Or maybe I'm just so primed for it that — well, I'll give you the argument, right?

So I'm going to give you the argument. I suspect I just feel like it may have started in the wrong place and then they work backwards to the argument. But we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay, and here's the argument. Now this first part is a pretty good argument. In the U.S. system, funding for big companies usually starts with small companies and it's private. You know, venture capitalists and angels and stuff. And so there are tons of people in the market and they're watching their money pretty closely. If a venture capitalist gives you a million dollars, they're going to attend your meetings, right? They're going to make sure you spent their million dollars right.

So we have a system in which the funding for tech is monitored and managed by the people who gave them the funding. So the funders are very close to the process, literally in the room, same room. In China it's a state-managed process. So the state decides which industries they're going to be promoting. They decided they would do chips. It's a good idea. So then at the top of the government they release a gazillion dollars — I think it was going to be like a trillion dollars or something eventually, just huge amounts of money. And then who does it go to? Who does it go to? Well, it doesn't go to anybody who's not part of the Communist Party.

Did you know that if you're not in the Communist Party you don't get any of the money? So right there they basically taken out part of what works in the United States. Because in the United States you just have to be good at what you're doing. Over there you have to also be in the Communist Party. It's one inefficiency, right? They're missing anybody who's not. But I don't know what percentage are not, frankly. So maybe it's not as big a deal as I think.

Secondly, the higher your rank as a technology person, the higher you rank in the Communist Party, the more funding you're going to get. So that it's based not on the quality of the project but on the status of the person who asked for the money. Again, there's no way in the world that doesn't hurt their system. Now, but you could argue it's the same here. It just looks different, right? You could argue that if Elon Musk starts another company and if he were to ask for investments, which he typically doesn't, people would say, oh, okay, we'll definitely give you money. So it could be that the important people always get the most money anyway, you know, however you slice it. But I think our system works better there.

But here's the big part. So if the Chinese government at the top releases a billion dollars for something, it first goes to the biggest communist who wants the money. And then after that it just go