Joe Lonsdale
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Brian Johnson. That's so funny.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Suburb.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
No, listen, I agree with what David with what David was saying, Jason, and it's a really important point. Also, that we should mention is that the last four years, the economy's looked okay. But part of that is because government's been hiring like mad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And so the point he made is that actually, you know, having twice as many people, you know, harassing me, I just got back yesterday, no action on an audit that's been harassing me on for three years, they found nothing. Having twice as many people doing things like that or running TSA or pushing papers around in the Department of Labor doesn't actually add output to the economy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And so it does seem like it makes a lot of sense. Let's take a million workers out of the consulting class around D.C., out of the paper pusher class around D.C., and let's actually deploy them to the actual productive economy. Elon and Trump have both been saying that. I think David's 100% right. It is true. A lot of my companies, thanks to the tariff stuff, are looking to build stuff here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
So I'm not a huge fan of tariffs personally, but they definitely make sense for things in defense. They definitely make sense for negotiating with countries. And it is true. It is pushing certain people, including me, to build some more things in America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And Shamath, there's another twist on that too, which I think we should all acknowledge is that America does have some really tough environmental laws. Despite what Jason may think of me, I actually don't want my daughters growing up with messy air, messy water, screwed up country. Oh, I don't think that of you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
But here's the thing, in China and Indonesia and all these other countries, they are just over the environment as they make things. I think tariffs are very reasonable in that case. It's not fair to make it more expensive for us because we're doing it well, and then we outsource it for them to destroy things. So there are some things there where it does make sense.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is dangerous though, right, Shamath? Because I agree with you in theory, but then there's something where if everyone's lobbying for their thing to be an exception, you end up getting this very crony system that you don't necessarily want, right? So you have to be very careful how you define these things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
People loved it. You know, you guys gave me no warning. So I was like on a mobile phone sideways, but it worked out. It was great. Everyone saw it. I guess it looks like people actually watch your show, Jason. It was surprising. Apparently.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Yeah, and it's gone up massively with the NGOs too. So you've had about 4 million people employed by contractors in DC, 1.6 million more at the states actually by federal spending. And then you have the NGOs. No one knows the NGOs. Biden administration took down the data. I used to see things in 2020. So we don't even know how much money, but we know it was hundreds of billions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And so it's pretty crazy. The number one thing about how Doge is not being done fully is that Elon is doing an amazing job. Whether or not he cuts 500 billion or a trillion or a lot more, but the senators and the congressmen are not willing to take it out of their bill. The reconciliation bill right now, they're talking about cutting one to two trillion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
So rather than, like, this is over 10 years.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
If it was equal to what Elon was doing, it'd be at least $5 trillion. And I push a bunch of them. They say, oh, the Congressional Budget Office and all these things. And I'm sure there's some tough things there. But like, this is crazy. We need to see what these cuts need to be on Doge. And we need to cut $5 trillion. And none of these people have the balls to do that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It's not the political will to do it, is my interpretation. And
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is why it's so frustrating to build for the government, guys. This is what Palantir and SpaceX had to deal with. This is why they both sued the government, is that all the friends who used to be the CIO, used to be the general, made the right donations, had the right kid on the board. It's all corrupt. And then the actual substantive people, you have to work like hell.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Let's let's talk about this. I mean, when we go to DC, when I go to DC, what I am asking is I want there to be a fair competition. And if I win, I want my company to actually be able to win the contract because the way it's worked for 20 years, like like Everest, you just raised $250 million this week. It's a great company. We had a big contest four years ago. L3, Raytheon, Northrop.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
These guys, you know, in and out of government for decades. They've gotten tens of billions of dollars to the same technology area. When we went head to head with them, we didn't just like beat them by a little bit. We shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away. Same size, same power. Nine and a half times. Completely wiped the floor.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Massive money. I invested only 30, 40 in the whole thing at that point. And they spent billions and we have much cheaper, much better, not even a question. And you talk to the and you talk to like at the time, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the guy who wrote the four star. And he says, well, Joe, this was written three years ago. It looks like Raytheon probably did help write it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And they required all these things and your way you're doing it. I'm like, I'm like, yeah, I'm using a chip instead of a cathode ray tube. That's why it's working so much better. It's like, yeah, but it was written for the way they're doing it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
and i could overrule it but it break a lot of glass so you'll probably win again in three years because everyone knows you're the best but it's too it's too frustrating you know it's too stressful to give it to you right now like that is that so so so what i'm doing is i'm not going and saying give my company's money i'm saying i'm saying make this actually a functional logical process and give me a chance to win it from the best and that that is a hundred times better for our country to push it how do you but how do you make that transparent and how do you avoid
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Well, it's acquisition reform, right? So, like, this is a really important story. You guys probably know. We were in the Philippine jungles in the early 1910s, needed new pistols. Our pistols were terrible. They had, like, a one-page thing, what they needed. There were six-arm manufacturers competed. That's how we got the Colt 1911 in, like, three months. It won by a large amount.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It's an awesome gun. Twelve years ago, we had a 700-something-page document that the bureaucrats spent years on outlining what they needed for a new pistol. I'll probably need to do DEI stuff. I have no idea. It's like a long comical document. They still don't have a new pistol today.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And so the way, the way we do it is we have a very clear process where it's very specific on the outcomes, not on the inputs and you have a contest. And then, and then you make sure that, you know, it's not, it's obvious who wins guys. It's not like we're like slightly better. It's like, we're shaming them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
So the only way they can stop us is by playing these games because we're just so much better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
So Chamath, I think you're right about the standards, but I want to push back on the incentive today. I know a lot of the people who are getting into this, and I really do think they're there to fight for the country. I don't say this naively or something. These people really are there for the right reasons for the most part.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You tell me what to think. I agree with you on that tweet. You're sneaking two things together here, though. So I want to be really precise, Jason, because let's be precise. That's what we do here. There are a lot of different possible ways that people can help politicians. And so one of them is if you're a celebrity, like even on your guy's show at this point, you can affect what people think.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
That's definitely powerful. Say more. There's other ways that if you're part of a big union, if you're part of a government union, that's very powerful. you know, influence in our society. If you're part of a American medical association, healthcare system, the doctors and health systems are very powerful, even without super PACs in our society. And what a super PAC is, it's a form of free speech.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And it's true. Wealthy people have the ability to influence things through that speech, but it's like one of many. And so if you're cutting that, you're basically saying, okay, I don't want Elon and Joe to have as much say there, but I do want to have even more say for the celebrities and for the doctors and for the union members and government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
So you have to realize you're dealing with a complicated situation with lots of forms of power. I do agree with you. As I said, and listen, I saw David and we gave each other a hug. I think we're all good. But I was very frustrated with the posts of Trump mentioning specific coins. I don't know who was trading them before. It just looks bad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
We're fighting all this grift, all these things where we have the moral high ground. I agree. I don't want to give up the moral high ground with these silly schemes. That's 100% the case.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And I actually, I actually think speech is very important. I think the ability for me to send out something and say, guys, I'm studying this. It's corrupt. It's been corrupt for 50 years, we have to all get together and stand against these health systems, these crazy defense companies that have captured and broken everything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
I think my ability to speak and do that and to convince people is really valuable. I pass dozens of laws each year in different states by convincing people, nothing to do with making me money, that these incentives and accountability are wrong. I think that's a good thing that I'm allowed to do that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You have to be careful. So the reason the Supreme Court ruled for super PACs is not just about giving... You're not giving them the money. You're actually speaking yourself. So when Elon spends $300 million, he's actually spending it many times putting out his own... speech or he's putting out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
The Supreme Court's on my side, so you guys are in trouble.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It means you can put a book. I mean, the other side wanted to censor books. That's the thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Actually, I agree with what Shabbat was saying about gerrymandering. I think we could use AI for that. It's a separate conversation. It's discussing how it works right now. However, Jason, the problem at the end of the day with defining what's political or not is the boundary cases are really tough and you do end up needing effectively a censorship board.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Example is I write a book about the dangers of communism and it explains how it's linked to things going on today. And I like give it out at like all these people are going to be voting. I mean, there's just so many boundary cases.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is not political activity. It's my art. This is an artistic piece about communism. Totally fine.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You're right. There's an economic question on the power and all these things. I actually know Brandon. He lives nearby me in my house in Montana. He's a really smart guy. And I think the really interesting thing when they built this that I think is relevant going forward is these guys were commodities traders. And they were originally buying stuff to mine Bitcoin and other stuff like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And they realized as commodities traders, there's a certain supply and demand in the market of GPU chips, but also of all the data centers, by the way. And it's really, it's really interesting. What they did is they locked down the full supply of tons of data centers, tons of the power they needed tons of the chips. And they're very, very thoughtful.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
I mean, they're effectively, they're traders, and they're and they're very economic. And they have, I think they have a lot of this stuff.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is how these things work, Jason, is they just one client tends to grow really, really fast. And they actually, you know, so they do this orchestration framework called sunk. I know a little bit about it. It's really easy for scheduling workflows and batches and all these things. I think a lot of other people are using really well. They've just bought weights and biases, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Which like everyone uses basically. That's a great buy. That's awesome.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You basically need an economist to map this all out. It's the same question for data centers in a related way, right? Which you just need to map everything. And I don't have those numbers. So you're right. It's a hard thing to figure out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Yeah, but they've kept most of their position. They're smart guys.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You know, Jason, Jamaat has a lot of interesting thoughts here. And I think it's a very smart analysis. I'm not fully aligned. It is true. Bond markets hate war. War is expensive. War is inflationary. It's very clear Europe is going through, okay, war is more likely for us to spend money. And that hurts them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You know, in the US, I think the number one thing that Scott Besson and Trump would want around this is to fight for Main Street, like they said. But that really is, you know, the kind of populist energy we have right now. And so I think they are focused on lower interest rates, lower interest rates.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You know, I have someone who works with me, their spouse, you know, as a real estate agent, and that they're having a really tough couple years because interest rates spiked up. If you get interest rates down again, there's so many different places in America where people start making money again with the title companies, with brokers, with there's so many things that happen, right, with that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Trickle down. Well, it's not just trickle down. It's like this is the part of the economy that just really does start to turn on and certain transactions can happen again. And you're right. It is cheaper debt. That is an advantage as well. So I think disinflation is very important. And I think we have to find some way to get there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Chamath may be right that it's worth hitting assets to get to disinflation. That's something that Scott could be working on because of all the debt. But it is true. What's the easiest?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It's easy. And we do. And we do need it for sure. So and I hopefully I think there's some other more clever ways to get there. But but but I do like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Well, the other ways to get there is there's two. There's really two right now in our society that are very positive. One of them is a higher productivity through AI. I'm working on a ton of things as are everyone else doing that. Like we're doing construction for much cheaper right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Yeah, we can make sure not to screw it up. I mean, David's doing good work. We can make sure not to screw it up. There's a lot of people trying to screw it up in government. So I think David's job is very important there to get us there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
And then the... And then the second thing is actually cutting spend, like just giving out hundreds of billions willy nilly to Stacey Abrams at all is very inflationary. And so I think cutting spend actually is a very positive thing. We could do a lot more of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is a central question. You're totally right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Wow. Well, you know, Jason, Putin's a bad guy. That's number one. He shouldn't have invaded.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You know, I do think the last administration mismanaged it. I don't think he would have invaded with Trump as president. He certainly would have invaded with a competent person threatening him. But now we have to have peace, and I do want peace. I don't want to have the war continuing. But to get peace, you've got to get both sides to come to the table. I prefer peace through strength.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
I prefer being really strong on Putin and showing why he has to have peace. But then you need Zelensky to be a partner for it, too. And I do think—listen, I do think Zelensky had—
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
wrong idea on the white house last week he should have been thanking them he should have come more humbly he should have actually been directed towards really wanting a piece and listen i i agree that ukraine's a very corrupt country we may find out that he and his cronies have taken a bunch of money i don't know if they are or not either way he has not really been signaling the right way to be open to peace and a piece that does i think have to give up a little bit of ukraine in order to get there i think that's the option on the table right now and that's the direction what about the nato question what's the you know and thank you for being so candid here what's the the nato
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
This is really tough for me, because some of the people I care about most in the world live in places like Germany and around there, and I want them to be safe. I also think that the historic relationship between the UK and the US is this very, very valuable thing that we have, they shouldn't just be tossed aside. These are these are critical very long time allies and cousins.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You know, I think Europe's in a very, very bad place. It's very dysfunctional, man. It's, it's, it's, I did not see European civilization going the right way the next 20 or 30 years. I think JD is right to criticize them on, on anti-free speech on like, you know, arresting people who criticize the Islamic threat, like more than the people actually doing the rapes and stuff. It's crazy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You guys missed the Shalom Hamas tweet by Trump, too, which for a lot of us is a big deal. He said, I don't know if this is hello or goodbye, but he's threatening them really strongly. So for people who care about that part of the world, it's interesting to watch what's going to happen.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
These places have lost their minds. It's bonkers. So do I want to totally give it up? No. But do I want to demand fiercely that certain things get fixed and to use our foreign policy apparatus to make sure we fix those things if we're going to stay in the relationship? 100%.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
I mean, listen, yeah. And I'm one of the most optimistic people. I call myself the American Optimist, Jason, as you know. And you have a great podcast, American Optimist.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
We live together now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
People are too busy to come on. I'll try to get you. All right, so you're 0 for 4 with besties, got it. Okay. All right, I got to work on it. Listen, I would love AI to get to the point, I think it will, where it starts to accelerate growth, where this energy stuff can be mined more easily.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
But until, I'd say until we're at at least 5%, 6% growth, because we are going to the post-scarcity world, we don't know what is coming. I do still think global trade really matters. I do think global security for ourselves, like we don't want random people with nuclear proliferation. So there are issues that are going to affect all of us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
But I think Dave makes a really great point that it is becoming less important over time. It's true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Yeah, I'm actually building something on email, like you said, that works with your team to automatically kind of like, you know, create reports on everything that comes in and route it for you. Because a lot of our friends, when you're a CEO, you basically become a traffic cop. It's actually the email is going to do it for you. It's going to be really nice.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
But listen, I'm invested in Grok3 and I'm biased towards Elon. But you know, a lot of our companies will build on top of multiple of them as well. And I think you're talking about Cogen. I'm in Cognition. I bought a lot of my companies using Dev and it's actually just like crushing it. This stuff's getting like 10, 15% better every month. It's really amazing. And it's good for companies like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Listen, Trump's negotiating, right? So I actually ran into David Sachs. Each Senator gets one guest. We were both guests in the Senate dining hall, hanging out with a bunch of these guys, multiple of the guests, Some of them were spouses of the senators. Multiple of the guests were people who had lost kids to fentanyl, right? And so it actually is a very serious issue.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
I'm mostly at that level where I'm like using all of them or using a bunch of them. So I love the fact there's all this competition because it just makes it cheaper and better for me, for all my companies I'm building.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
No, it's getting better. It's scary, actually. I thought it would asymptote, and it hasn't. So it's amazing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It's a big thing on the populist right, as it should be for all Americans. We've lost tens of thousands of young people recently to fentanyl. And Canada has done nothing about their border. And so you just reported breaking news. I hadn't even heard yet that Mexico might be off. Canada's still on. He's using this to negotiate.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
What do you got there? You can get a decent Patek for 100 now. It's like they've gone down. Yeah, it's...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
It's deflation, thanks to Trump and AI, right? Yeah, absolutely. AI in general. Okay, whatever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
You play the game and you start to stop it as fast as you could. That was fun. Exactly. You remember that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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TI-82. What are you talking about? I got my TI-89 still. 89 for me.
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I am. That's true.
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So I talked to the senators and I asked him what's going on, because obviously I import things all over the place. I'd like to know what the hell the rules are. But he wants people to actually crack down on this stuff and save American lives. And I think that's a reasonable thing to use to negotiate and force them to do that.
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Thanks, John. Thanks, guys. That was fun. Bye-bye.
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Hey, Jason. Doing great here in Texas today.
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Are you on a ranch, Joe? Well, I bought a bunch of the homes and connected them, so it's kind of like a ranch, but it's actually a suburb.
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He has a compound.
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Solar is very impressive, but in some ways, to me, it's a little dystopian to think about all these forests just covered with this stuff. And I think it's great.
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If we're going to say 100 years, though, I mean, sorry to interrupt, if we're going to say 100 years, technology changes, it's very clear you could probably do it from space if you really wanted to. I mean, this sounds crazy, but you probably could have tons of these in space. I mean, 100 years is far.
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Austin City Council is not perfect. Austin, they call it the blueberry and the tomato soup. So there may be a tiny bit of banking going on, but despite that, you're able to build there and everywhere else around it, you're building like mad. So it works. There's plenty of supply. I agree.
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I love Paul J. Kelly. I think he's going to, he's a fair guy. Yeah, I've met him several times at conferences and groups and he's a really smart guy, cares about the rules, cares about helping innovators.
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The thing that really pissed everyone off with Gary, I mean, I love you probably seen like, I think both Coinbase with Brian and the Winklevoss twins that put something out, they won't even hire anyone who worked with Gary on any of this stuff they were doing. And the reason they're that angry at them is they were purposely not defining the rules in certain cases and then going after people
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after not having to find it in order to kind of like play a gotcha game. It was very dishonorable. And Paul sees all that and there's no way he's going to allow that.
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Well, they'd meet with you if you were a big donor to the left. They wouldn't meet with you otherwise. That was part of it too. That was sketchy. That was why SBF got tons of meetings, but Brian got none, right? I mean, it's nonsense like that.
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It was worse than that. It was like a mafia letter. It was like, if you are to support this and help with this, we are going to look into everything else you are doing, and we may then find some issues. It was like a mafia threat. We can't stop you legally, but watch out. It was really sketchy. It was Sherrod Brown, who now is out of office, who led this, the senator from Ohio.
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But it was really bad. It was really bad what they were doing.
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So one represents a move towards liberty and one represents a move towards authoritarianism. If BRICS were to become dominant, if China and Russia were able to control global currency together and other players, that is terrible. It's bad for the US for so many reasons, bad for US consumer for so many reasons. He's right to fight it.
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At the same time, having to channel biology, having this pro-liberty network state, forces in that direction. For example, I think rather than just You know, Hong Kong and Singapore, Hong Kong's been lost. We should have, like, more Hong Kong and Singapore in the West to compete with the U.S. That'd be good for all of us who are on the pro-freedom side of the U.S. to make the U.S.
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wealthier, show examples of new experiments to create great wealth. And that's kind of the side of Bitcoin is you want more experiments and competition from the liberty distributed side. You don't want competition from the authoritarian side. So to me, it was very consistent.
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And we will see how different administrations react. It's a check on the most aggressive mistakes. First of all, if the debt doesn't get under control, if our deficit is ridiculous, Bitcoin is a wonderful check on that. You actually want healthy competition from something good because you want to check the excesses and the craziness.
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You need someone coming from the outside to say, no, don't do that. Let's just say at some point an AOC-like person gets in charge. It could happen in the next 20 years. You need some kind of check on the dollar. And it's much better to come from the Liberty side than from the other side.
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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.
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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.
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Imagine if Elon could raise for SpaceX, like, you know, from regular Americans, I'm sure he would have loved to do that if it wasn't crazy risky with the SEC, right? So there's all these people, they're blocking us from letting the average person be part of it. And it does keep them from climbing the wealth ladder. I think it's crazy.
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I don't know, maybe six or so.
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Joe, what are your thoughts?
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The elephant in the room that's really funny here is that you have the people on the left saying that only people with lots of money are smart enough to be allowed to do this, which I think is just a very funny position to take. You have to have a few million dollars to be sophisticated enough to be allowed to do this. I like your idea, Jake. I'll have a test.
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There should be some other way of accessing this if you really want to. I agree. Listen, I don't want to live in a world
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where we're all constantly being spammed to the average person by like stupid financial stuff that's just like we would be scammed all the time there probably should be some rules like i agree i'm not like a total libertarian on this i think it'd be really annoying but yeah but just to totally block people from participating to me that sounds crazy all right like i mean a finance college professor you know might um unless they had another job might not
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I'll see defense people down here in LA. Listen, I am very bullish Bitcoin. I love all the energy of our society around it. I agree with what you said, Dave, that there needs to be some barriers for the public taking crazy risks. And I think the risks around how he's accessing this is actually very unusual and does scare me a bit.
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And people need to do their research and they shouldn't just throw money without studying it. It does scare me a little bit how blithely people are throwing money at this without knowing the kind of leverage he's taking, you know?
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Uh, well, you know, uh, I, this, this weekend is the annual defense forum at the Reagan library room on the board. It's the biggest, biggest defensive end of the year. Everyone's coming in. I guess, I guess I'm really excited that America has like woken up and assuming we can bring back more advanced manufacturing here. I think there's enough top companies now with and roll, uh,
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with sarana we're going to be building thousands of these vessels for the navy with ai uh with epris we're like turning things off you know 10 miles away whatever fairly far with microwave radiation it's a really cool technology coming that actually is going to make us be able to deter our enemies so if you asked me six seven years ago i was panicked we were gonna like get way behind china i'm feeling really good about it now i think and and i think i think you know just the pete hegseth pick uh you know is actually someone i'm quite bullish on from everything i'm hearing so i think things are going the right direction
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Warfare has fundamentally totally shifted. We're seeing some of this in Ukraine. There's all sorts of new ways you want to swarm things on the land, swarm things in the water, swarm things in the air. How do they coordinate? How do they work together? How do you manufacture enough of these things? And how do you use electronic warfare in new ways? It's basically created by this. And so
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It's just a whole new way of doing things. And we are going that direction. Too much of the money, David, like 95% of the money is still going towards like, frankly, like wasteful legacy, like mostly things we don't need.
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But enough is shifting and there's enough good people fighting. And as long as we keep just allowing open competition, allow it to say, okay, which is better and just let the best things win. As long as we keep doing that, I think it's going the right way. I'm feeling very good about it.
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And is there a shift underway? It already has. I mean, it definitely already has.
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I think there's a role for carriers and force projection. I don't think we need like incrementally a ton more of them. I'm not like this crazy radical where you get rid of all this, but yeah, on the margin, I'd much rather have 10,000 more smart drones above and below the water than like an incremental carrier, right?
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So there's there's on a margin, there's all these things that are better uses of money. And I think we're pushing that way.
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I obviously, you know, listen, there's only been nine unicorns, I think, still at this point. And I started three of them and invested three of them in the first round. So I'm obviously pretty involved in the space. And I think it helps me if there's more money for my companies, which is really great. I think there's probably the right answer for the U.S.
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It's not going to be like a thousand businesses or a hundred businesses. It's going to be like seven to ten new primes. One of them is obviously under all. I think one is probably Saronic and Epirus, but we'll see. But there's going to be 7 to 10 new primes, and that's what it's going to be. So there's going to be a lot of zeros and a lot of bad investments.
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But yes, these 7 to 10 new primes are going to be huge. And if you can get access to them, you're going to do really well.
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Yeah, that's a great way to say it.
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It's a cost, and it's allowing us to do the refining here. So refining some of this stuff. We desperately need gallium nitride for things I'm doing with shooting the microwave radiation. The problem is refining is really messy. If you let it happen in the U.S., it will still be messy, but it will be cleaner. But we're not letting it happen. So there's things like this.
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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.
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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.
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And imagine if someone just, like, kept pumping money into that worst company you know over, like, 30 years to keep hiring people.
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It was failing. It's like the worst department there. And then like the worst department gets the most money. So it's like more, I guess you can use the word retarded now. It's more retarded than anything you've seen in a long time. And I think one of the important things is America used to have these really hard tests for a hundred years. You know this? In 1883, we said, you know what?
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I'm going all in.
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We shouldn't just hire our friends. If someone's going to run something in the government, Let's have these tough tests, kind of like China did for thousands of years. And for 100 years, we had really hard tests.
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When we went to the moon, when we fought the World Wars, when we did the Manhattan Project, the people making those decisions in hiring people had to pass things that really only like 5%, 10% of people could pass who took them. And then in the late 70s, we said,
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not only are these tests racist so we can't test people anymore of any background uh we also can't fire people anymore because we're going to give them tons of protections so for and so the last 40 years it just got dumber and then 10 years ago you started doing all the virtue signaling and and you know hiring based on your identity versus based on anything else so it's got even worse and so now it's so broken that yes we're letting tens of billions of dollars on fire and so there's really two things here one you got to take a chainsaw as elon like i said you got to take a chainsaw and just like cut a ton of broken stuff but then
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Day two is you got to say, how do we make this not stupid in the future? And there's things like maybe you bring back tests, maybe you bring accountability. The thing I'm most passionate about is, you know, right now there's over a million rules to the federal level. It's stuff that everyone disagrees on. You can be the most left person trying to build like solar or wind or whatever.
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And you're like, what? I have to do what study over how many years? This makes no sense. So we got to take these regulations and not only cut them, but we got to make a data-driven system that forces regulations to defend themselves. And that way, instead of having a cancer, It just grows forever out of control.
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You could actually have a process that like naturally trims things, naturally makes things fight for itself. And that way it doesn't get as dumb ever again.
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I mean, I obviously understand why this is important, but I want you to... The number one thing I'd say is it's usually correlated to how well the working class... doing in your country to per capita GDP to cost of goods. I mean, obviously, I care about it, because we want to scale AI for all the things we're doing, and we want to be able to do it effectively.
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But if you just look over time, it's really clear the relationship between how well is your average working middle class person doing and their quality of life, their cost of life. and the cost of electricity and cost of power. And it's crazy we're not just like ramping up and cutting things to do this.
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This is a key national security thing too, because we need manufacturing here to be affordable and competitive. in order for our national security. You know, David, when you texted me last minute to join this, I was actually in a meeting with our friend from Founders Fund who's building nuclear fuel again for the first time in the US because that's actually gone away too.
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And so that needs to be approved. But, you know, I know Chris Wright, he's a nominee for the new, you know, energy, secretary of energy. And he, you know, he's super pro-liberty guy, but super pro-cheap energy guy and he's pro-nuclear. So I think we have some really great people who care about this. We're going to be fighting hard for it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
there's all sorts of different versions of this. I think, I think one of the most common challenges is the hardest to diagnose because they don't come to you is, is this like excess, is excess pride and like not, not in like just like having so much money thrown at them because right now there's just so much money for the very best people in the stuff in AI that's starting to work.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so you get, you get this like, I think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges is like this overinflated
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
ego and sense of it's like a I think all of us who are entrepreneurs have some narcissism I think that's like a natural thing but when it gets to a real extreme that's really dangerous and you stop questioning and you and you stop admitting when things are not going quite right because you can paper over it with the money you raise so that's probably the biggest challenge is that side I think the the other the other side of things is just this like
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Even the best people will have a lot of doubt about what's actually going to work and self-doubt. And then when things are just about to work and they've had to push really hard, there's almost always this thing that happens where like a bunch of people are going to quit because it's not quite working. And then you've got to convince them to stay a little bit longer.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, you have to like find that like belief in yourself to push to those other people, right? To get it over the line.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, at Palantir, about three years in, a few of the really key people were just like, this is taking too long. We don't have any major contracts. This is just ridiculous. We're pretending we're these kids who are going to run the global intelligence framework. What is even going on here? I can't do this anymore. I have all these other offers to pay me a lot more money.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And these shares are not clear they're worth anything. And it was really hard to convince them to stay. And then when they did, of course, it worked. And then a couple of them are still running their company there now, which is great. So it's like these things that are really hard to push across the line sometimes.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, it's interesting because you said earlier, I'm not going to say who you're saying it about, but anyone who is the one guy we both know who's done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional and that's really impressive, right? It's extreme.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, sometimes I'm a good person for it because usually I'm a lot more successful than them and I can make fun of myself having...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
similar narcissistic tendencies and and then you kind of like can bring them down a little bit by seeing like maybe themselves themselves and you and like you can like if you can like if you can like respect them by attacking what's wrong with them by attacking it in me maybe they at least listen now because it like cuts the pride down a little bit but it's so like there's sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle having having been there myself and been sure i could conquer the world and like you know especially in your early 20s and you get late 20s you get this energy that's just like
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
nothing can stop me. And that's, that's like, it's both healthy, but also have to be really careful how it's filtered.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, uh, we thought it'd be great to have a world-class university here. There's no top private university in Austin. Um, we wanted to, uh, compete with Stanford, Harvard, MIT, these others. We think there's some things that are still good about those universities, but there's a lot that's gone wrong. There's a lot that's broken.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I'm personally deeply concerned about just like, you know, you used to have these young people would go to these places. You go to Harvard and it's like this like pathway to a functional elite and it's elite that's like has a sense of duty and that has a sense of excellence. And it's like, it's clear where they're going when they're there.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I think we taught just implicitly in our civilization, we taught courage, right? We taught like pride in our civilization and the duty we have, like that we've built this upon hundreds of years of progress from the enlightenment and from our classical values. And here's what the classical values were and the virtues in Rome. And here's what the geochristian wisdom was.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And here's all stuff that came from that. And this is all stuff you kind of like, you kind of built the great men of our civilization with these values. And nowadays you go to a top university, And there's no sense of duty. There's no sense of pride in civilization.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so similarly, when you get people who are really, really bright, like really off the charts, minds working great, most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world, but crazy means lots of things, but, but not able to be, to keep themselves functional in the real world because they're just too off the charts and a little too wacky.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think most of these kids couldn't even tell you what the classical virtues are anymore or have any idea about why they were important. Most of them, if anything, probably are dismissive of wisdom from Judeo-Christianity as opposed to appreciating how that shaped our civilization in positive ways with a radically equal dignity of human life.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And most of them, they've lost the lessons of the enlightenment and how that was filtered into our government and what that means for the West and why America has been an example, right? If anything, I think we're taught about why America is terrible.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so, and then on top of that, I think the worst of all, so you miss all the wisdom, but then the worst of all is you're basically taught the opposite of courage. You're taught to shut up and go along. You're taught that if you speak out, there's something wrong with you, right? You're taught that everyone's supposed to virtue signal. And so-
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
If you have a whole generation of our supposed elite that are all taught to be like beta and wimpy and scared, that's terrible for our civilization. That means we're going to give up everything.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so I think even having one university that starts to teach the wisdom, but try to create people who speak up, who debate, who have the intellectual humility not to say, this is just my way of thinking of it, but to have actual debates where they listen and they learn and to go out in the world and to model that culture and model that courage for others.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's a really big deal for our civilization.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think that some of these institutions are very good at teaching very narrow, advanced topics, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think if you want to be really, really good at certain types of physics or chemical engineering or computer science, there are other top universities with other really smart people there, first of all, so there's a great network of smart people, and there's professors who are very good at these certain narrow fields, and that's positive, but
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think there's like so much that's gone wrong with science, so much that's gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology. And the other thing that's crazy, the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average. So you have more administrators at Harvard and Yale than you have students. No way. Yeah, it's crazy.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What are they doing? they're doing like lots of policy for virtue signaling and for making sure that they can hire other bureaucrats and making sure these bureaucrats like put out all sorts of like, you know, like stuff about whatever the topic of the day is and whatever programming they need for the students to make sure the students are, you know, feel guilty about their race or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I don't know. The whole thing is crazy. Is that still going?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, of course, you know, you have to go with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life. My original chess teacher, Richard Sherman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like an intelligence officer and he dropped out.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Maybe it's like extreme autism, maybe it's something else. But, but when you have people who are just off the charts and able to function in the real world, it's actually a pretty small subset. And I think you can usually, it's a different type of person. It's like a certain type of ambition, a certain type of way of functioning. I'm not, I'm not saying that.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I don't know if ramp up's the right word, but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions, right, as the famous communists discussed. And these institutions were conquered by extreme ideologues, right? There's been multiple studies of this where, like, the administrators are pretty much universally to the hard left of the professors and their activists.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so these activists have conquered these institutions. It's not like... It's active conquer, right? And so now are they going to be virtue signaling as much about things like DEI in today's culture? Of course, they're going to be a little quieter about that because they don't want to get pissed off the donors and get fired. Wave the flag.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So they're not going to, but are they going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they going to like all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up to someone else? No way. So there's a lot of naivety in our culture just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves were fixed, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And these things are still completely conquered. And I think people are, they think of it the wrong way. They're like, oh, well, it'll probably just fix itself. Like, no, these people are in charge. The layer of administrators are in charge. The professors run their departments. The lawyers at the university set the rules.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then the board of trustees has been completely stacked with people who are either terrified of being controversial in public or on the side of the administrators. And so none of them are going to get fixed, which is why you got to build new ones. I mean, that's fine. You know what? These are somewhat broken. It's sad. Let's build new ones. You know, let's build new great ones.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's what we're trying to do.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Someone has to buy Merriam-Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year because they're not going to do it themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Remind me. I think I know which one.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, there's Conquest Law and there's Harding's Law, which is... Yeah, that's Sullivan. There's different ways of putting it. Basically, this is really interesting. And so another way of putting it, for some people, they say if you don't explicitly make an institution right-wing, it will get conquered by the left-wing. That's what a lot of people believe. And that tends to be what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But I think it doesn't have to be quite...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
so partisan is that like the goal of uatex is not to be a partisan institution and by the way it'd be a failure if it was a right-wing institution in the sense that there weren't i mean you want to have the smartest and best people there you want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with professors right it's not a healthy intellectual environment if if only one side dominates what you can do and this this is a little bit more controversial i guess but what you can do at the administrative level you could say we don't want to be conquered by
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, these are necessarily the most social genius, normal people, but they're still able to function with that kind of intellect. And that's a good combination.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
by illiberal forces. What are illiberal forces? Illiberal is stuff that's against kind of the values of freedom in our society, against free speech. So illiberalism is communism. That's specifically an illiberal force. Other authoritarian things are identity politics and that whole culture that does seek to impose a lot of those things top down is very broken.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's kind of a morphed new form of communism. And frankly, things like Islamism, like the implied authoritarian framework of that. is also something that's an authoritarian force. So those are the types of things you say, we're not going to let those conquer our institution.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
We're going to be explicit about it, but it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, you know, so when you have an institution like this, you want to bring in the top entrepreneurs in our country, the top innovators in our country, and you want to expose them to the students in a way where they're helping shape the courses. But you also want to have all the top academics on the humanities side. So we have what's called intellectual foundations on one side, where we think...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Every top college student going to a top university should be given the intellectual foundations of our civilization with history and economics and philosophy and the great books and just have that foundation. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But then you also want to have courses that are shaped not only STEM, but stuff that's shaped by, you know, I have over 100 friends who are founders of billion dollar companies who signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Exactly. I think having both, and this is a dialectic, I'm obsessed with these dialectics, but there's like truth for why both of those extremes are important and you need to merge them and have them there. And by the way, when you merge them properly, it's really fun because you can get... different debates about what's going on in the innovation world at a startup.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And you could argue about that from a philosophical perspective and you can apply some of the old, you know, debates from a long time ago and old wisdom from a long time ago. Like imagine applying Xenophon, you know, who was, this is a guy who was writing in 300 BC and, and he wrote about Cyrus the Great and his values and his principles and why he became so successful.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And all the young European princes for like 1500 years were trained, were read Xenophon and read about Cyrus to train, like, here's the values of who you should be to be a great prince and a great leader. and what that meant and be able to have that and then talk about that in the context of a startup leader we're arguing about and the principles. It's fun. You can mix these things together.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, just in general, a lot of things are not simple truths that are either on one side or the other. Most of the time in the world when there's debates, there's actually deep truth on both sides.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So if you want to apply it to the innovation world, I always love the dialectic in the product organization where on one hand you have like Steve Jobs or you have like the guy who ran Sodi in the 80s. Steve Jobs basically said, I don't care what the consumers tell me they want. I'm going to figure out what's best, and I'm going to show them a breakthrough, and then they're going to love it, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And there's some really deep wisdom in that. It's not what they're asking for, right? They didn't know what to ask for a car, right? They would have asked for something with horses. So what's the breakthrough we're going to give them? But then there's another thing that's actually really true. Even at Apple...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think no value judgment. Everyone can have different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
which is that once you have a product, there's like a hundred things that consumers want that bug them, especially in enterprise. There's like ways they're not able to use it for some reasons. They have like product needs.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So you need someone like 14 hours a day, like mapping out all these needs and understanding them and prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it so it's as good as possible. So how do you, you know, if you, if you only have the Steve Jobs genius thing, it's going to end up being something that's like too clunky and people aren't happy with it and won't get better.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
If you, but then if you have these guys over here iterating, taking over, then you never get the next burst of genius and it's really terrible. So how do you keep that genius? Like I'm going to tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing. And I'm, I'm slightly better. I've done a lot of products where I create them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I usually have someone else who's better than me at the 14 hours a day iterating process, which is really important. They're two separate things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And to me, to do the things that impact the future of civilization, to build the stuff that's really hard to build, whether it's SpaceX or Palantir, which kind of broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare or education, those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. You have to know they're both important and then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to mix them together. And usually with dialectics, The truth is on the extreme. It's not in the middle. It's not like some sloppy middle. Say more. It's like you want to have the really crisp reasoning of just pure invention with nothing interfering.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And you want to have the really crisp reasoning of iteration and pushing it back. So in general... You know, I'll give it like there's other one. There's the whole Nietzschean. There's a whole Nietzschean perspective versus the Christian perspective. And so, you know, I'm a dad's Catholic. My mom's Jewish. I grew up Jewish.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole Nietzsche framework is a 14 year old. I thought it was really cool. I know if you've read Frederick Nietzsche, the will to power and all this stuff. And you if you get too into it. And the one thing he talks about is.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
is how is how the most the world's mostly driven forward by like the top one percent of like talented people in uber mansion they're the ones that kind of build the future and that they're the ones that matter in a sense of what the future is going to look like because they're creating it and if you and there's lots of truth that the very very most successful people and most talented people you know thomas jefferson called them the natural aristocracy they do run things and drive things forward and it's really key now if you only have that side of the dialectic it's really dangerous it turns out
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
by the way, that Hitler was very obsessed with that too. And that's dangerous, right? And so what's the other side? Well, one of the great insights of Judaism that became a great insight of Judeo-Christianity is a radical equal dignity of all human life. This is something that Rome did not have, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Rome celebrated like watching people kill each other and whatever, and they're not us and they're slaves. And there's all sorts of kind of pretty nasty stuff. And a big breakthrough with Christianity, with Judaism, then Christianity, which spread it all around,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
was that actually every human life matters and every human life has equal dignity and that our whole civilization is based on that respect for everyone and for every life. And that's a dialectic, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Because on one hand, it's true the top 1% are driving forward the future, but it's also true that every life matters and that you're not a good person under the geochristian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone. And so does that mean that all of our money should go towards helping disabled kids and nothing should go towards like the most best gift to kids.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's what they've done in a lot of blue cities now, which is, which is that they fail. They've got just only one side of the dialectic, right? They've only helped the bottom, but it, but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either. You got to help both. It's like a you, right? So there's things like this that I think if you understand, okay, there is a dialectic, these both matter.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How are we going to keep both of these in mind as people running a society, as leaders in society, it becomes a helpful framework to understand. And is the middle where you go to die? Yeah, exactly. It's just sloppy thinking. You don't want sloppy thinking. You actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive. And it's the right thing to do.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's an ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and that we're investing a lot more in them. But you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years from now if you're not also accelerating the very top very aggressively, which is something we've stopped doing in a lot of parts of our country. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Because these really brightest kids, by being able to pick them out and then push them further ahead, they do create the future and giving them an edge. It's not that it's inequity. It's that I want there to be like 100,000 extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future. They're going to cure diseases.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
When I'm an old man, they're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone, right? So it's like you kind of want both.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's a great dialectic. Like how do you do perfection and how do you do not procrastinating and taking too long? And it's tough. Dialectics are hard because there's no perfect answer, but you have to play with both extremes.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. This is why it's so hard in the world is that there are these conflicting truths. It's like a, I guess they call it a cone, I guess, in Japanese wisdom, right? There's always different, there's two different sides of it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
This is a tough one. I apologize. Nothing right away is coming to mind. I read this long piece about this like 12 years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
This is such a key thing to push education forward this way. And the only reason it's not happening at greater scale is because there's no market mechanism right now of competition in education. Just because you have the best thing doesn't mean people are allowed to go to it. So we're trying to put market mechanisms.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah. And, you know, in general, it turns out that if you personalize the app and personalize the learning where you can map out like an ontology or a schema of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area, you can and you can have something interacting with them. You can see where they're good and where they're not good.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And a lot of times what happens, for example, is a kid will get like way behind in one area, like two grades behind.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
they never get caught up because they never no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills but if you have an app that's really good at like measuring and teaching then it turns out with two hours a day you're actually able to get kids way way ahead and i think you can get the majority of the kids you know in in in alpha school for example i think are a 99 percentile and some of them are are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead and this with this personalized ai learning that like teaches you know to how they need to learn and what they need to know and it's
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's amazing because in two hours a day, they do the academics and then they have time for projects and for life skills. And I think there's going to be schools they're doing where like kids get to play video games because these young men aren't studying otherwise.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
He's doing some really cool things with that. There's There's other schools for sports and for kids who want to get way ahead in sports. You're going to stay ahead in academics for two hours, then you're going to train and you're going to be the best at the sport you want to play. So I think there's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and we could try out in education.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, maybe I'm a little off and stuff, you know, too, but I think I can at least still talk to the people, understand the systems, work with them. There are some people, we call them artists in our company. Alex Karp, my co-founder of Palantir, I always refer to them as artists who are just absolute geniuses. You kind of have to protect them and put up with them, right? So it's like...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's awesome to see a successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this for our country. It's really amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
100%. All these kids are just being tortured. I think a lot of the way we teach school right now is just like this torturous daycare that's terrible for kids. And to actually exactly two hours a day at your level, you need to know you're going to be more focused, more interested than being able to run around, be in charge.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think the alpha school model is built on top of what's called the Acton school model. And Acton Academy is this really cool breakthrough model. where they just basically gave the kids a lot more control of the school and then got to build their own constitution, their own frameworks, give them a lot more responsibility, which I think is a very cool kind of libertarian model.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
The inmates are running the asylum. That's what you're telling me. It's awesome. And it creates this like responsibility. It works. It works if it's done right. You still have guides and adults there, but it works. And then I think on top of that, he's put like competitions. He's put like really good A.I., And listen, it's just like smart people getting together and building.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And this is what education clearly to me should look like, you know, in 10, 20 years in America. And the real question at this point is how do we roll it out to other places? And unfortunately, we have some really powerful special interests that don't exist for our kids. They exist for their own employment and the school administrations right now.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so that's going to be a big battle in our country.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
A little bit. It's much more just like the just the teachers unions in general and the administrations locally in the school districts. Texas, for example, has something like twelve hundred school districts and they're not accountable and they're overpaid. And it's just like in terms of these administrators and stuff and. I don't even know what they're doing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's just the whole thing is just like very sloppy. And there's a big war right now for school choice in Texas, but we're only fighting over putting $1 billion towards school choice, which is not big enough anyway. So it's like, hopefully we can make that a lot bigger next time and just get a lot more parents able to send their kids.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
The ideal situation is the middle class can afford to reallocate the money the government's giving them for education to go to one of alpha schools or another school of their choice and not be stuck on something that's not as good.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, you know, in general, I think a lot of, like, any kind of learning of math and science and any of that, like, can be driven forward with AI, and you're going to start seeing a lot more of that, too. You know, and there's probably lots of ways in which I think people already are learning in higher ed, like, what would Plato think of this based on this?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, well... I mean, a lot of the university experience is about being around other young adults who are exploring the world and learning and interesting professors and having an intellectual environment where you're socializing with and you're exploring ideas with other people. And I think it's really important to have this in-person experience.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's like when you're running a military brigade and like you have an operation, you might have like a drill sergeant where you yell at them and you have to do this and do the pushups and run and do this and get this done by this time. And that's not at all how you deal with these like super genius, like slightly different technical people.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing. And so I think that's not going to be something you just have with AI. You have to have people around you. You have to be learning. You have to be... debating things in a classroom. And can AI make some of that better and augment it? Certainly.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Oh yeah. I, uh, I was in the dorky fraternity at Stanford. I have friends who are in the cool fraternity. So then sometimes they would still be my friend back then, which was nice. Ended up working for me later. So it's good. But, but like the dorky fraternity, and I remember going to spring break and back then my friends like, Joe, you can't tell the girls that you're a computer scientist.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think he faked his own death and he was kind of living like in poverty, teaching chess and was like this chess master sensei who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting, crazy people I met over the years, you know, really shaped my life. Talk to me about the story of how you sought Peter out as a mentor.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's not cool. You have to pretend you're like American studies or something. And, I have some bad stories. We figured it out initially.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
high end Western civilization university experience. Like, like that's Oxford, that's Cambridge, it's Harvard, it's Stanford. And these places now are more broken than they were, but, but there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs and whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of, you know, group or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think, I think having these, these things in your life are tough. So I think, I think what Jordan Jordan's is really talented guy. I'm a fan of his. I think he's going to have something that's very interesting to learn online. I think, by the way, I think, I think we may do things we learn online too. I think it's a very positive part of that, but it's not the full experience.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, this is always a dangerous thing to talk about for many reasons, because I'm helping the administration and I'm advising people on the DOD and HHS, which is the healthcare part with all these different areas, and I'm helping friends in Doge, and I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on. And tariffs are a very complicated topic. So the kind of typical...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Maybe some days they're a hundred times more productive and some days they're just, you know, they're working on something weird and they don't want to come into the office and you just, whatever, you kind of have to tolerate it a little bit. And you have to protect them because most big corporations, they will spit these people out, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
like libertarian framework it's just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage right and you have people who could specialize and and like and there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all for example if you have like tribes people making you vanilla or coffee they're growing and they're very poor but they're making a little more money now because they're selling it to you and then you say oh we have a trade deficit with you like the guys growing the vanilla aren't going to start buying all of our products right so it's okay to have some trade deficits now
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
The part where I think the administration, frankly, is completely correct is there's a lot of really unfair barriers everyone's put up against U.S. companies all over the world. And it's not just tariffs. So tariffs is one problem. But the other problem is they just make all sorts of crazy rules that effectively mean no one other than their companies could sell in certain sectors.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And every country does this. What like? like the fruits have to be grown here or have to only be sold within a certain amount of time or a certain amount of distance from where they're grown or the cars have to have all these exact specifications and it's designed specifically ahead of time where someone whispers it to all their companies and no one else passes the test other than them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But there's always different ways you can kind of cheat and make rules to keep people out. And like all these countries do this. And it kind of made sense. America was so dominant after world war two. And it kind of made sense for how we were like building a global order with allies that we kind of gave them an advantage a little bit to work with us.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, and they did take away a lot of our manufacturing, you know, in certain areas. And then, and then like, we had this naive view that like, if you just give China, uh, this like WTO entrance and you trade with them and make them rich, they're not going to be communist anymore. And that naive view is shown to be totally wrong. About 10 years ago, you had this crazy communist in charge.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
He's murdered a bunch of people. He's like, he's like completely in charge. He's not, he's not, he's not a pro-market guy. He's not a freedom guy. He's, he's clearly like, he's, you know, if in his youth, he would sing poems about hardening your heart to destruction of America. He's clearly doing things to hurt America. And so these people have taken advantage of us around the world.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
A big corporation, standard corporation, they want you to fit in a box. Those artists will come in, they won't fit, they'll be gone. And it's stupid because you're getting rid of someone who could have made you win in this whole category if you just could figure out how to morph the org around them and use them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
China has definitely not become free. It's definitely stolen away a lot of our manufacturing base. And so what are the tariffs that are good? I'll give you a few examples. One tariff is definitely good. Let's say it's cheaper to manufacture something in like Indonesia or China because they're polluting and because the pollution to not pollute costs a lot of money. So that's obvious.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
First, tariff that right away, right? Because you don't want to just let them pollute, right? I don't think anyone would disagree with that no matter what your view is. I think another one that's good is that we need something for our defense industrial base where we need to be able to make it here in order to our defense department to be able to win.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever. Obviously, tariff some of that supply chain. We need it here. We need to build it here and subsidize it here. I think those are obvious. And then you get into more complicated things. I'm generally pro-free trade, but if you look at what happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, she was very pro-free.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
free trade and she opened it up to the EU and in 1989 she said it was one of her biggest mistakes she ever made because what she didn't realize is that when she opened up UK to the EU market they basically put Brussels as a bureaucracy in charge of everything which was terrible it's a total mess and so you gotta be very careful what you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge effectively now of your rules you give up sovereignty so that's the reason it's bad
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then, I mean, finally, and this is where it gets like everyone really argues, but like in general, I don't think small consumption taxes are bad. I think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes. So I think a small one probably makes sense. And then I guess the very last one, of course, is yes, we went from 30% manufacturing to 10% over the last 30 years.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Should all of that be in the U.S.? Probably not. Some of those jobs are just not things we want. Should more of it probably be in the US for more of what we do? Probably. So listen, it's not totally insane. There's dumb tariffs, which is like tariffing coffee or vanilla, and there's tariffs that are too high to break things with our allies.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So we definitely do work with these people, but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the organization.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But there are tariffs that let us take away these barriers I talked about and put things back here. So it's not as crazy as people think. I think the way they implemented it was maybe a little too aggressive at first, but the reason they did that is to get everyone's attention. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, let's let's be honest, President Trump, I think he has very good intuition in general. I think he also in general loves to be a center of attention and have to have everyone come to him. So I think making the maybe my personality would not have been to do is quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, ah, everyone it off on a piece of PVC. But A, that's his personality.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And B, now they're all going to come make a deal. So you know what? There's different ways of doing things. And this is who this guy is. And if he makes some great deals over the next few months, it could actually end up being a great thing. So I think you have to say that there's logic in what J.D. Vance and President Trump think they're doing. And the jury's still out, is my view.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What are the things that have stuck with you? oh gosh, so many things. He's always approaching the world from some kind of like orthogonal perspective and finding new ways to pick apart the most important reasons for things. Every time I see him, I learn something. You know, I wrote this piece online a while ago, like with my team about 15 years ago. It's like main lessons from Peter Thiel.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which we're engaging. America has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And that way we've been subsidizing it, they would argue, has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of capital and are able to invest here and around the world and partner, has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that have got hollowed out. And I think
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think they want to change those dynamics a bit. I am concerned to have America still be a very important, powerful force to the world for good. I don't like the fact that even today, thanks to the Biden administration's actions, if you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
to like enforce like, like freedom of navigation on the Red Sea. Like if you look at a graph, like a flex support graph, you can get, you know, it's just a company that tracks all these containers. It's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world order started to break down because of how we're handling things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So there are things like that that aren't good. And I think we should be stronger on them. But there is going to be a changing relationship for sure.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What concerns me the most right now is the regime in Iran. This is a regime that was actively promoting lots of different terror organizations. We now find it in comparable evidence that they funded the October 7th attacks and rapes and murders. They've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about. Oh, that's their doing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
but the people it's like this country was conquered it was communists and islamists together and then the islamists and then islamists killed off the communists and they just took charge and this is like it's like a modern day country conquered by like crazy theocrats right who then like whip people and like execute 16 year old girls for being raped because it's your fault if you rape under islamism and the whole thing is just like
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Crazy. You can't make it up. It's like these are insane people who've conquered a country and are taking the money and sending it out to terrorists. And we're at a really interesting point now where we've basically cut off some of their most powerful, like crazy terror people. And then there's these people in the country who desperately want to be free.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So for me, and yet they're working as hard as they can to getting a nuclear bomb. And so for me, this is very scary. And they walk over American flags every day at their government. They walk over, you know... And so they talk about death to America. They're trying to build a nuclear bomb. I think these people truly are crazy. And I think that's... To me, that's a really big danger.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So I won't repeat all of them here, but there were nine key lessons. I think one of them was to really value intelligence really highly. I think that was absolutely key. And so it just turns out the very brightest people matter a lot. Um, one of them was you have to break down like their actual reasons for things and their core components.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And we could end it for a long time. So I'm hoping we do. That's that. In terms of... In terms of Overblown, I actually... Listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts in Africa. I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa by Islamists. That's a separate problem, but also one I maybe there's something to do about.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time. Obviously, we're all very worried about China. The Russia-Ukraine thing is a mess. But I think overall, it's not like Europe's in tons of conflicts right now. I think overall, we're a pretty good place if we can take care of these few crazy people.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, you know, after founding Palantir for a while, I didn't do defense because it's so annoying to have to work for the government. I built companies in other areas. And then I went back into defense. about 10 or 11 years ago because really what happened is we saw Xi Jinping again take over China.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
We saw him forcing a lot of our friends to have their best engineers in China working on things with the PLA. And it was clear he was becoming very militaristic. And then it was also clear that they were innovating and doing things that were ahead of some of what we do here. What like? Well, they had better hypersonics in certain areas.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
They were starting to do swarms of drones that could attack in different ways. And it was just none of our defense hardware companies, none of the big primes, you know, have. So what a prime is, is that in the 1990s, the Cold War ended and we had all the best companies in defense, but we weren't going to spend as much on defense anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And usually the number one reason should be like much bigger than everything else. So if you tell me I have four reasons for doing this business thing, that means you haven't really thought about it enough. There's probably like one thing that's dominant. Hmm. Those were really big. One thing that you always talked about was that effort on any project is convex.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So they all merged and they formed these like nine giant companies. These companies started to become very bureaucratic, almost like they're arms of the government. And then in the late 90s, all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating. And so these big companies just fell way behind in software, way behind in all these new possibilities.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so China had this like new dynamic sector. And we had this like kind of old sclerotic legacy failing things. We're like, oh my God, we got to get our best people to work on this. And so my friend Palmer Luckey, who we backed at Oculus before, he partnered with three Palantir guys to form Andral, which is a very... famous company now it's raised at 30 billion plus valuation.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Then shortly after that, as we back that, we went all in and now we started Epirus. Epirus is named after the bow of Theseus, which had infinite arrows, but it's the best EMP company. We could shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation. It's just really cool at turning off swarms of drones. What's happening now is you have swarms of drones in the air,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You have swarms on the water here in Austin. We're building hundreds of smaller ships. We're teaching the Navy how to use AI to weaponize autonomous vessels. And then you have things under the water that are new. You have things in space that are fighting. And so you have all these new possibilities, new missiles, new ways of turning off bad guys.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, warfare's changed a lot over the years. One of my favorite books was The Shield of Achilles, which is like this thousand page book on constitutional government in Europe. And it shows how every time there's like a new form of warfare that's best, it changes the structure of governments as well because the structure of government has to be able to support that form of warfare.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So for example, if you need like, if like a knight who's fully armored with modern technology could take on like 50 peasants, everyone needs to make knights, which means you have this very feudal society that forms and the feudal societies conquer Europe. And then another example of this
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
If you have all these aristocracies that came out of the feudal societies and run certain ways, and then suddenly you're able to mass-produce rifles and give everyone a rifle, the aristocracies have to sort of become republics of some sort, because you can't give everyone a rifle and have them fight if they're your slaves or your serfs or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So Napoleon goes after Europe, and it forces the aristocrats to basically give up a lot of their power and arm everyone to fight back. And so it totally changes the form of government. And so you have had warfare change a lot over the years. And you have this concept, which is interesting to me, is defensive versus offensive warfare. So the question is, what's better?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So it used to be defense was much easier. It was really hard to take a town, right? When the Ottoman Empire at its height You know, even by the 17th century, you know, September 11th, 1683, the height of the empire, the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and save the town because it was taking them too long to take it before the Polish and French knights could get there.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And what convex means, it's a shape of a curve where if you spend like 80% of your time focused on something, that's maybe half as good as spending 90% of your time focused on something because that was that last bit of effort.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then, of course, the cannon becomes stronger. And all of a sudden with the cannon, it's just much easier to build, like just like massive empires all over Europe and
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, you know, I think right now we're going through interesting change where I do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before, thanks to EMP, thanks to the way swarms can cover shorter short distances and they kind of block things. And so I do think this does favor asymmetrically. city states in small countries, once again, to be very, very powerful.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
For the cost of one aircraft carrier, you could have 100,000 missiles in space that can land on anything effectively with these rods. So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard to break through defenses. And I hope that's where it goes. Because in some sense, it used to be that all these free city states are all around Europe. That was a good thing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then you had the kind of jerks build the empires and take away their rights. And maybe we can have small states to get with. Because when you have lots of small states, you can kind of, if someone gets to be too annoying, you just go to another one. So I hope that's where things are going, is that defense is stronger. But that's an important question. We'll see.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's, I mean, I mean, I mean, there's all this like smart bombs, I think were like the big thing for the desert storm that we hadn't had before, where you're able to basically target everything and take it out really precisely and just like, just like completely like surprise and wipe out, you know, Song of Saiyans army in a way that was just, it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's one of those things where like being 99th percentile is worth so much more than being 90th percentile also because that means you're number one and being number one is worth a lot. So there's a lot of things like that that you just kind of gave me all these concepts that we all kind of learn when we work with them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, you know, I think the new thing today that we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is that it's like you can all of a sudden have like 20,000 or 100,000 things at once in a semi-coordinated way actually move and attack and swarm. And it's just really, really, really hard to beat. And so you are seeing things just change entirely.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
We have this video for Epirus where there's like these like thousand drones coming at you. And then these like old fashioned people are trying to fire the missiles at them and you can take out a few and like, what are you going to do? Like it's, and it's crazy.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Even people who only have like five drones attacking our ships, we're spending these super expensive missiles, exactly a million dollars to shoot down something that's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars. And yeah, so if you can get, It turns out that you want to have all the power hit the gallium nitride, the emitter, at about the same time.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So you have these AI chips that control power on very small time scales. And you get all the power, hit the gallium nitride at once, which means it's much better. Gallium nitride is an emissive material. It's the most efficient emissive material for like sitting out like a 10,000th of a second burst of microwave radiation. Uh-huh.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And if you do it with enough power, the micro radiation is so strong that it can like even turn things off, you know, miles away, depending how you do it. So, and so basically you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming in. It's like a Star Trek shield and you turn them off.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And we can try to put EPRESS on the tanks. We could defend some of them. You know, we have a company called Overland AI. And they've won all these DARPA challenges. We're the best in the country. It is driving over complex terrain. And so everyone's using it for that. But the vehicle of some kind, any vehicle driving over terrain is what we're realizing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's just similar to how Saronic here in Austin's building thousands of smaller vessels for the Navy. And we're going to start building larger ones too. And having them swarm for the Navy that are, you know, armed and autonomous. We want to build thousands of overland vehicles.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's very, very hard. And I think the most important things I've accomplished has been when I've been able to really focus on something for a while. And whether that's Palantir, whether that's Adapar, whether that's spending months on a thesis at 8VC and a framework at 8VC that we're going to work on for our investing, it is really important to focus. And, you know...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's really interesting doing these things because when you spec out the vehicle, the traditional defense solution is like, it needs to have these 37 capabilities, needs to have this armor, needs to do this, needs to do that. And you're like, wait a second, you could give it all 37 of those capabilities, or you could build a thousand of them for the same cost with like 10 capabilities.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So it becomes this like fascinating problem where this is a really important point in warfare. Like warfare has this engineering aspect to it. Like if you want to build a bridge and you want the bridge to never fall down, If you give me a billion dollars, I could build you a bridge that will never fall down. It might be ugly, but it'll be like so much metal, so many supports.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It'll never fall down. But the point of engineering is not to build a billion dollars. It's how do you build it for $50 million and never fall down just as much, right? And it's a similar thing in warfare. You always have scarcity. So it's not about what are all the really cool specs on your jet or on your tank or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's, okay, if you're going to spend a certain amount of resources, I'm going to spend a certain amount of resources and we're going to fight. Let's do something that just overwhelms. Even if the tank is better in all these ways, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just going to swarm you and crush you and keep going, right?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So there's things like this now where it's... And this is why advanced manufacturing, going back to the tariffs, is so important to be good at. Because if we're not good at that here and the other guys are good at it, that's scary.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think people are still very important in a lot of different things. I think the way warfare is morphing, it goes towards a special forces model. So I think Elon Musk has been really clear. Obviously, you don't want tons of troops running forward, and then there's tons of drones coming. That's terrible. I don't want to be that guy on the front line.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
This is like the really sad thing in World War I where like the British aristocrats had been treated like crap for 30 years. And the aristocracy, your role was a warrior who defends society. That was like kind of how you were taught. And so they were so excited when World War I came that they'd get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their society and be proud.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And they all jumped on their horses and they all charged and they were all mowed down by machine guns. Like the whole generation was killed. It was terrible, right? So even like a hundred years ago, you didn't want people charging that way. Now it's insane. But what you do have is you have a special forces model where there's like,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You probably have everyone have like multiple robots around them and they're controlling them in different ways and complimenting them. You probably have them calling in airstrikes, calling in drone strikes, like figuring out what's going on, using the tools. But you are going to want people on the battlefield or near the battlefield. They're just going to be like using a lot of stuff around them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But you're probably still going to want them there for quite a long time is my view. What were you saying about rods from space? What are rods from space? I mean, right now, I think it costs as much as an aircraft carrier to get 100,000 of these in space. I don't know what the ratio is. It could go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
At some point, it's just like obvious how you want to be spending that money.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You get to a certain point where I have obviously a lot of financial resources now, a lot of influence in the world. And so I'm able to help others who are focusing. But anything I invest in or do, it has to be someone really amazing is making it their main thing. And someone, the CEO has to be all in, you know, for the things I do.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's a huge part of it. I mean, when we do these Saronic ships with the Navy. Saronic? Saronic is a company that just raised $600 million at a $4 billion valuation that we helped some of the amazing talented guys start. Dino Maroukas is a Navy sailor who started here in Austin. And so it's an Austin-based company. It's building like hundreds of these weaponized vessels.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, you know, I think the current ones are mostly 24-footers and they could do certain things. And, you know, I think if you build- Unmanned? all unmanned for now. And if you have 130 foot or mostly unmanned, but maybe you make people go on if they want, that lets you shoot things that take 80 foot of ship to, to fire. Otherwise you couldn't fire from 24 feet.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So, so yeah, it does become like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
autonomous submarines looking like that to me seems like the most obvious place to and again it's it's about the scarcity scarcity question as well right because it's like what does it cost versus having a swarm of things on top of the water you want both i think so yeah andrel which again i'm a big investor in palmer and my friends are running uh they have a facility in rhode island that's pumping out a couple hundred of these a year and there's these very advanced submarines they've also just i think last week introduced these like
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
new underwater sentries that can detect certain things and do certain things underwater too. I think you can use them as mines and stuff as well and all sorts of possibilities. So yeah, you definitely want complicated things underwater. And it's interesting, that becomes, again, a game. How do you detect things underwater?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's very hard to detect things underwater, but there's a lot of new technologies where if you, for example, string fiber optics along the bottom of the water, then based on the gravimetric distortions, you can detect whales, you can detect all sorts of other things moving around. Mm-hmm. So I always wonder, like, how advanced is China in this area? How advanced are we in these areas?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear triad too easily right now.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And there are certain things we work on, even at some of these companies, I mentioned that they aren't putting into Ukraine, for example, because they don't want Russia and China to learn about them and learn how to respond to them, which is not my judgment, by the way, I'm not, I'm not in charge. So we're doing more to defend Ukraine, whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I'm Palantir and Andrew are doing a lot, but it's not up to me. We have leaders.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And they're going to be rational by decision. And you're right. I mean, when it comes to nuclear deterrence, this is a very scary topic and you actually probably don't want perfect knowledge on either side because it makes, it makes things more likely to happen. And you actually don't want anything to happen. Say more on that.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
you really just need to like be courageous. I think a lot of people in our culture nowadays, a lot of them want to do incubators or they just want to do a fun, never having built something, or they just want to say, I'm going to help five different projects. And that's actually kind of like a form. It's a type of cowardice. It's a type of saying, I'm afraid to go all in.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, the whole point is like you have the nuclear, nuclear triad and the different ways you could respond and, you know, in nuclear, nuclear war.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And you want them not to know everything and to be unsure they know everything and to be worried because if they get to be very, very confident, they know exactly what it is and they could potentially be confident with some strategy that they've found a way to stop it and then they could strike and then they can know they could strike.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so it's actually good for both sides to be a little bit unsure about these things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review, and he was just someone who I thought was just a fascinating intellectual character at the time. And, you know, honestly, what it was also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been interested in is what are the most interesting, brightest, harsh-working people doing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Exactly. Which is probably healthy. None of us want nuclear war. Like the reason I work in defense, probably 20% of HVC, my firm is a defense. We're doing things in bio to save lives and healthcare and other areas. And I work in defense to deter the bad guys and to make sure that we have the best technology so they're afraid to fight us. I don't want there to be lots of war.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Like I said, I do think freeing the Iranian people is a good thing, but in general, I don't think what we did in Afghanistan for that so long was right. I think we've wasted a lot of money on crazy adventures. In general, I want less war is my bias. But that's the goal with the better technology.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And by the way, there's good people at these places in some departments. There's some great things they do. There's some things where it's, I think, crony and corrupt and broken too.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then what happens is they try to lobby and block the other people. And they mostly succeed at doing that because so they become these bureaucracies whose main job is to do innovation theater, pretend they're innovating. and then to keep new things out. And so both Palantir and SpaceX were the first two companies to like break through and become new primes.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And in both cases, they had to sue the government because they were being treated totally unfairly and they were destroying records. They were people ordering not to tell people that something was better because they were going in and out working at these primes. Like you work for the government, you work for the prime and they're all friends.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I'm afraid to say this is the best and I'm going to crush it. And like 99.9% of the people who are crushing it and who are changing the world and who are really, you know, building the future of our civilization, they're focusing on something.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so they're just like, don't let any of these like obnoxious, weird tech guys in. Like I didn't know how to play golf with the right people or anything. We're like the weird outsiders. And so even now we're the outsiders, but we've broken in enough that we're in some parts-
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
SpaceX just dominates that now. Paltrow dominates certain other areas. But if you look at the overall revenue the government spends with companies in defense, we're still tied. We're tiny. We're tiny. No way. I think Palantir is like still well under $2 billion of revenue of like, you know, a couple, a few hundred billion in the same areas.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus. And so they're- But that was cost plus. That means you get, say you go and you say, I spent- $10 million on this, so pay me $11 million for delivering it to you.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so it becomes this really weird incentive where you purposely get all these expenses and spend way too much money on something so you can have a little profit so that your profit's bigger from the government. And so there's this weird model where... Oh, you're incentivized to be inefficient. Exactly. This is how we built this for 50 years.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so you have things where Palantir or Andral, as an example, will come in and do something like attempt to cost better. It's just like... Crazy. It sounds like I'm lying. They do something like they'll have a drone versus Lockheed and their thing will be literally a 10th of cost to make. And it'll have like, you know, 60% more battery life. It'll be like twice as fast.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It'll carry 50% more weight. And then it'll literally be like a tiny fraction of the cost. And still you'll lose it first because Lockheed or whoever it was, Raytheon does this really well is they'll write the request for proposal with like a 300 page document specifying all these requirements that no one actually needs, but that actually make it so it has to be their solution.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Headlights need to be exactly the same game being played by Germany and even Israel and other countries with their internal trade barriers against outsiders. Everyone plays is a game being played by the prime, stopping anyone from breaking in. And so these, this is what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats in the complexity of the bureaucracy is a feature.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
this is what happens in wars and one of my favorite books on this is uh the first world war by winston churchill where he's appointed the first lord of the admiralty and his job is basically to go in and just like knock heads the british navy and get rid of all the old fuddy-duddies he was super unpopular right he's unpopular as hell that's why they framed him at gallipoli in world war one and then threw him out and he was out of his career for a while because by virtue of having to fight the bureaucracy to fix it everyone hated him and wanted to like
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
make him look really bad. And then he goes through this really tough part of his career for a long time and then shockingly comes back and saves the West. But it really is interesting. If you are one of those people who's just really bold and smart and just push through and fix things, yeah, it pisses a lot of people off. But it's necessary to win the war. Is...
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, I think we're all really lucky today versus the past. I think it is true that the conditions under which all of us evolved, if you go all in on something and you fail, you might've starved to death. You might've been eaten by lions or some kind of giant old cave bear. You might've been crushed by the local tribes. So I think we all evolved statistically
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's even more important now. Of course, come on. It's even more important now. Here's the thing. This is a dialectic. Again, if you're going to go back, you wanted another. The dialectic is there's two things that are true. We have this like inexorably powerful system that pushes history and pushes things in certain directions. It's really hard to overcome the system.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You can't just be a great man and just walk up to the system and like slice it all in half. That's not how it works. You're not just like, I exist outside of history. No, the way great men work of history is you understand the system deeply.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And the way, you know, Peter Thiel, I was talking to earlier today, talked about it is you see there's this big wave coming and you get in front of the wave and you surf it and you use it to cut through and fix things. And you use it to build things and you use it to do things because you're working with the system in the direction of it. But then, but then like fundamentally the,
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
breaking through the bureaucracy, breaking through this other area, inspiring people with a better solution. So, so that, so it is dialectic where it is a really hard system to change and there are certain things you can't change, but then you desperately need the great men who are bold and who do study it and who do like change things and make things possible.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And thank God we have Elon Musk and SpaceX is just one example. Like America would be screwed from a defense perspective and from other perspectives. Oh yeah. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, space is just absolutely critical to everything we're doing and knowing what's going on in the world and projecting power and just, it's just, I mean, certain things you can't talk about with space warfare, but you can imagine, it's just critical. We now dominate that globally. And there's no way, we'd be way behind. We'd have nothing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I mean, you've seen, there's videos where they try to do the thing where they landed. They haven't figured it out yet, but they're trying, I mean, they're trying to do the chopstick. I haven't tried the chopstick that I saw, but they definitely try to land. Cause the smaller ones are self landing without the chopstick, the chopsticks for the really heavy, big one.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So they're still, they're still back. They haven't got Falcon figured out yet, but they're trying. Then, then the biggest starship, they're not even close, but, but listen, I mean, the Chinese are really good at copying stuff. It's actually extraordinary. He's that far ahead of them. And there's some really smart people there. So it's just the fact that we're this far ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Every time you do something, they're so fast at copying. It's actually amazing how good they are.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
They got some team of crack. I think it's the culture. I think it's the culture of their education system to take something and to learn it and regurgitate it tends to be how they teach there. So I think there's something about their smartest people being forced to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And it's, and then, and then they take things and it's really funny because they copy and they iterate on it and they, and they do steal. I mean, I'm not going to say which company, but one of our companies was like training open AI and anthropic on a certain very specific area where they'd measure them every week, give them, get feedback and get it ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And they, and they got like certain scores and they really was open AI. They were doing it the most with, and they would score open AI and they got to the point where it's really good for what they needed. And then deep seat came out. This is when in China had their own AI that they trained and they said, Oh, that's interesting. Let's measure it. And they measured it in the six different areas.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
to have existential risk and to be really afraid. And it's not that it's great not to have money in our society. I can't speak to that. Obviously, it's not great. But come on. It's not like 3,000 years ago where you might just die if you don't succeed. So I think there is enough of a safety net.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, and it was exactly the same scores as open AI from four months ago. And this is something they trained and iterated on to get there. So it's clear they just exfiltrated it, which is what China's good at.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's really funny at Palantir, not funny, but serious too, obviously, because we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and tracking all these things. And I remember when I was still there a long time ago, there was a
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
PhD student who was Chinese, uh, who'd been friends with some of the people at our company and they caught him with like, like in server room, like with like inserting and stealing data and he, and he broke down crying and he said, you know, I have family in China. I didn't want to have to do this, but I'm worried for them. They kind of made me, and this was quite a long time.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It was fully infiltrated. And, uh, and well, in that case, like, like they didn't, didn't get it out. And then he, like, he left the country right away. And so, you know, and he went back to his family and, and like, it is interesting at that point on, you had to be really careful hiring people with family in China to work in any of the
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
government sensitive areas, of course, because they can just use the family against them. Ironically, when Peter Thiel then spoke out at the RNC for Trump in like 2016, Obama's justice department, a labor department right away sued Palantir for not hiring enough Asians. We had 25% Asians, but it wasn't enough. Which is just funny, though, because we couldn't hire people who were born in China.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And of course, they sued us for that. But DOD agreed with us, but Labor Party disagreed with us. The government doesn't always agree with itself.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
think what that was i'll tell you what i think that was uh this is speculation but i've talked to a bunch of people there actually were a lot of uh kind of chinese mafia operating in shenzhen which is like a area that had a lot of this historically and it's a very powerful groups and xi jinping was doing a really big crackdown in china and some of his crackdown was on stuff that was kind of messed up like i've had friends caught up in it who disappeared and died in the tech world where i don't think we're bad guys i think they just didn't just didn't just didn't agree with ccp but some of it was cracked down on actual elements i think a lot of those criminals
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And listen, it's easier for me to say that coming from a middle-class family when I grew up that I knew my parents would be able to take care of me if something didn't work out. So obviously, I had some privilege. But I think a lot of people with that privilege still aren't willing to take the risk they should be.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
fled and are doing criminal activities now in the U.S. and across the border because they weren't safe in China anymore, so they came here.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, we don't want these people in our country, and I think some of them probably came here even without China knowing it, but I'm sure they're smart enough to take advantage of it and use them, too, so it's very scary.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
There's something really special about having a crazy idea about something that should work, how the world should work, and then, like, working with lots of other smart people, convincing them of it, and then building and iterating towards it. I love that. It's one of my favorite things.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things, and it's just so fun when you have these big, bold ideas. They don't always work, but with enough smart people around you to iterate on them, a lot of times they do.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, you know, the ownership thing, it's fascinating. This is a lot like I think you can go back and study the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries where there's just infinite room and infinite space for the new world and all these places you can get. And you can fight over some big land bodies, of course, that people did.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That really ties into the 99.9% tile thing is like getting something just to be the absolute best. I remember working with him when I was 21 years old and there was some speech that was going to go on in New York the next day. And we were like basically pulling an all-nighter with a few of the guys in the office to be ready to like have this thing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But there's just so much out there that it's much more like once you can start using it in a way that is actually helpful and you're using it for something useful, it kind of becomes yours. And there's so much out there that we're not gonna run into scarcity for a long time.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So the way we think of it on earth is probably, like today, is probably the wrong model because we have this bias where there's a certain amount of land and a certain amount of resources and it's scarce and do I own it or do you own it? And there's just so much stuff up there and so much room up there that it's not, that's not really the problem for now.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Like, like we could, we could, we could, every country could have their own moon base, uh, and like, be like doing whatever we want to be doing on the moon. And then we're not going to like run out of room on the moon for now. Right. And then same thing with like, there's just.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
and there's millions of asteroids right so so so i'm not i'm not too concerned about that i think the scarier thing is you probably don't want wars in space right at all because a it will screw up all the global satellite stuff we do which is i don't know about you but starlink's pretty useful for me it's pretty bad and b is just like there's lots of things where if you can get good at like doing things in space and then throwing things at the planet that's really scary you go you screw a lot of things up so i hope i never i hope that's not something we
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
We don't want that. There's a funny technology I saw the other day that was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on. Of course, it was a Japanese, which I love. This is like what you expect them to do, of course. It's the cleanest country. It's a dog. It's a miniature dog as well. It's shaped like a miniature dog. No, that's great.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It was about inflation versus deflation and the risk for both of those. And it was just a natural thing to do to just try to make it like absolutely perfect before we're going to go present to the investors. And it was really funny. Actually, it was with Ken Howery, who's an ambassador to Now to Denmark, he was ambassador of Sweden last time. He was a good friend.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
But I mean, in theory, there's things like that hopefully we could do. But yeah, you don't want a war up there.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
My wife, Taylor, and I are very traditional, but we love having six kids. We're probably done. That's probably enough. But that's really the most important thing in my life. We're running our firm. We're doing all sorts of new things in AI, backing great entrepreneurs. There's amazing companies in construction, doing things in bio.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
He was our age and very successful guy in the background. And we were just like going back and forth with him and a few others, just like working hard and then jumping on the plane and sleeping on the plane on the way over. And it's just like everything has to be as good as possible and you push as hard as possible, which if something was wrong, it's totally unacceptable.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think there's a lot of ways we could save a lot of lives with the breakthroughs in bio, especially applying it to things that cure rare diseases and help young kids there. I think there's a lot of new ways of doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases that right now kill kids very young.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And so I think there's tens of thousands of children we could save with stuff there. So there's a lot of promising things there. And then, you know, on the nonprofit side, I have the university, which I'm really passionate about. We have getting so many amazing young students there and partnering with them on things. And then I have my policy work. We have teams in 20 states at Cicero.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And we're just trying to make government smarter and dynamic and less stupid.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I can't help it. I can't help it. There are good people, but it's just like, I'll give you just one example. Like, let's say we all agree we want... middle-class, working-class people who maybe they're not going to be like the top investor entrepreneur, but they want to have a good job. They want to have a good vocational job with skills.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Anyone with the right teaching could get like a high-end vocational job if they're willing to work, right? And some of these jobs pay $100K, $120K, great stuff. And so all these states all have vocational schools. And the problem is a lot of these vocational schools are terrible. And so what do you do? Well, here, you know, average politician is like, let's give them more money.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
If there's an idiot guy running it, it's looking at not doing well. So how do you help the 100,000 people coming out of these schools? Well, here's one. I'll tell you how you do it. You say, okay, there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools in Texas. We're going to only give them money in proportion to the salaries of the students coming out. That's not something they can gain.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Take the average salary coming out for three years.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Average salary for three years coming out. And we're going to rate the schools based on that. And you know what happens when you start giving them all their money tied to that? The school starts saying, wait a second, what skills do we need to teach to get our kids better? Incentives, incentives. Look at the incentives. What businesses do we partner with?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas over the last decade, the salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And this is the thing, like, so I think vocational schools are a little different from universities. Vocational schools is 100% the profession. There is a theoretical role for moral action and courage and other frameworks of a university. But you're right. One of the things we should be doing with our government, by the way, the part of education and our policy thing.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
is only give loans to students for majors where the major is going to, on average, let them repay the loan. So stop putting people in the debt to get like terrible degrees, right? That's something we can do right away. So there's things like this we're working on. We're making huge impacts on prisons, fixing technical schools. What are you fixing in prisons? Well, think about it.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How should probation and parole in prisons work? You need to have some incentives, right? You need to have some framework. Right now, if you're running a prison, a lot of the guards hate the prisoners. The prisoners hate the guards. Everyone's miserable. People come out. They're just let go into society. A lot of them commit crimes again and come right back. And it's a mess.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And there's no incentive to fix it, right? What if you say to the people running probation and parole in prisons that part of your job is rehabilitation, that part of what you're being measured on is can you run this in a way
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
where you're all working to have a culture that teaches skills, gives them exposure the year before they come out, figures out how to help them as they're coming out, and figures out how to make them less likely to come back. Isn't that better than what we have right now? I don't care if you're on the left or the right. If you're on the left, maybe you want to let all the criminals out.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
If you're on the right, maybe you want to lock them up too much because whatever. Those are both extremes that I don't think, you know, they're both extremes. Like whether you're left or right, if they are coming out, let's make sure they succeed as best we can. Let's have incentives around that, right? There's things like this we could be doing for our society.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And we fixed a lot of probation and parole programs to like start having the right incentives. And it usually impacts these communities because you all of a sudden care about people. What?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
west coast move fast break things mentality is there a tension between these 100 i think if you have really tight fast deadlines it's probably good so it had to be as perfect as possible given that it was coming due in the next day but we weren't going to be able to work on it for five weeks right so i think i think there is something about about really making things as strong as possible but but sprinting and having really tight deadlines and getting it done right away i think i think if you use perfection as procrastination then it becomes a problem
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like it has the conceptual... for solving these types of interesting problems around the things I was just talking about. These are types of things that, if it really had the right intelligence, it would be analyzing them and pushing them forward and taking my ideas, maybe it's like the Chinese, and make them even better. But no, you're right, it's not doing that.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I guess you could say in certain mathematical situations it is doing that. I think when you see some of the contests where it's actually solving math problems.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
There's stuff like that where I think there's some things that it's doing new methods and like, you know, the great example was the very famous Go game, right? Where it like played that new type of move that was like move 37 and it was like everyone studied it and like, wow, I never thought of that before. And it was like really, really cool that it figured it out.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So there are some constrained ways areas worth doing that. But I think reality is too unconstrained. It's not good enough yet to build the conceptual structures to do that. Can it do that the next five or 10 years? Very possibly, but you're right, it's not yet.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You know, it's really interesting. All I have to admit is that, you know, some of my friends were involved in building open AI. Some guys worked at Palantiraki there and I was watching them a little bit. I wasn't that focused on it and I thought it was pretty interesting, but I just, I didn't realize the breakthrough they're going to have.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
So I have to admit, I would have loved to say I'm so smart that I knew this was coming. I didn't realize the emergent properties that would come out of GPT-3, you know, at that point. Once that happened, you can kind of predict GPT-4 and 5. You know, it seems like it keeps getting better, which is scary.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's good for the world in some ways for productivity and other things, but it's, I don't know where, you know, I don't know where it asymptotes. I don't know where it starts to stop getting better. My intuition is that it's going to asymptote and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I don't think for the things we were just talking about, that it's like fully understood all the properties of intelligence necessary to do what we do. And I think it's fundamentally a different type of intelligence.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That's my intuition. But listen, I have people who are, I know who are geniuses who disagree with me. So this is, and because I didn't predict this in the first place.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Exactly. So it's hard. It's hard for me to really know. I, what I do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars of industries already today. We can make twice or three times as productive as that's where kind of I'm working. So I'm like, I'm like, if you're a muggle, I'm like, maybe like, maybe like a mid-level wizard.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And then there's a top level wizards who are actually pushing forward AI and I'm taking it. and understand it quite well and understand how to build quite well. And I'm deploying it to add productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it. But I'm not the guy who's like pushing for the LM itself. Sadly, that's not who I am.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Well, thanks for having me on. You know, we have an American Optimist podcast myself. You joined us. And yeah, I'm just trying to learn to follow in your footsteps here in content. And, you know, we got UATX. We got a lot of amazing students still applying and going there. This is the second class. And, you know, we'd love to hear from people.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And a lot of the smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal. And these are people I was really impressed by. So I said, wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want to learn from them too.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
No, that's totally right. You do have to constantly keep adjusting for what makes sense today. And it's interesting. There's different versions of this. One version is as you're successful, something you would have been really excited about before, you have to be like, I don't have time for that now.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
Because all of a sudden, you could just have things you were really excited about before 10 times a day. And I do fall into this myself sometimes because there's lots of really exciting things to do and you have to, so it's like really hard to say no enough.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
When you go through periods where you don't say no enough, you might be, feel like you're getting stuff done, but not actually getting things done. And that's, it's really tough. But you know what you said, what you said earlier about like things you don't want to do. To me, that's like one of the most important things that we focus on is what do you like to do?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and who they are today and that all these companies would come out of it, like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and 16 others. But I did know it was a lot of the brightest people and I wanted to learn from them.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And as you're successful, you should probably mostly only do things you like to do. Because what like to do means to me anyway, is that it's like stimulating your entire brain, right? So if you look at like a grandmaster chess player and the very best chess players, when you map out their brains, when they're playing, there's all these emotions that are turned on.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
There's all these full parts of their brains that are turned on and it lets them be a lot better at what they're doing. And I think this is true in anything we do. If you really love it, then your whole mind is engaged and you're just able to bring like this, this power to bear on things and
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
That if it's something you don't really like, you're probably never going to have that top, top ability there, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You have to be observant. obsessed and love something. And like, this is not to say that like everyone should only do things they love to be successful because you got to do all the grunt work too. But then once you have a certain level of where you are, you should structure your company and structure your life where you do the parts that you love and you're good at.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And other people could do the parts, you know, that you're not as good at that you don't love.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
You can get into the flow. You could just be great if you love it. And so that's how you should structure your life as much as possible is what are the things that you love that you're good at that are worth doing? And that's going to do more of those and do less of the things you don't like. But have someone else do them if they're necessary.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
How do you avoid cynicism? It's a very easy trap in the modern world. This is the debate I was having with Peter Thiel earlier about stuff. He tells me I'm too naively optimistic. He's like, you want to be kind of optimistic in general, but you don't want to be overly so. In general, I think it's easier to be pessimistic and cynical. I think it's an easier thing to be.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
And, you know, I had a very strong interest not only in computer science, but in economics and history and philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet, you know, through the Stanford Review, I think you got along intellectually.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I think it's like you can just always say why things won't work. And it actually takes... It's a little bit of a challenge to say, okay, this is really broken. The system is really broken. Other people haven't been able to do it. How are we going to make it work despite that?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
It's kind of like being like the hero warrior champion to say, even though this is a mess, what are we going to do to make it work? And it's a leadership quality that I think if you bias towards that it can be figured out, I've just found oftentimes things can be. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
What was he thinking privately?
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
As a leader, you have to suffer things that no one else suffers and you have to deal with the things no one else deals with. And it's actually really interesting because I invest in a lot of great leaders now and try to help them and try to mentor them. And it's very funny because you end up sometimes having to be their therapist a little bit because there's no one else they could talk to.
Modern Wisdom
#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
I imagine so, yes. Yeah, we didn't really grow up with therapy in my house. It's not something I do at all. But I think I imagine it's something similar when people are dealing with struggling through something really hard like this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's interesting, though. In this case, I think it's not the right way to think about it because it's not like there's some evil genius behind Raytheon or something. Raytheon is like a conglomeration of... of all of this stuff that merged together in the 90s. There were some great families, great people, maybe in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, who created some of this stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And back then, by the way, it was legit. It was the best stuff in the world. And so you have this conglomeration, and then you have all these bureaucrats and all these committees. And the problem with the military industrial people is they become more like the broken bureaucracy in government. And these bureaucrats... They're mostly cowards.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're mostly people who just automatically want to fill out more forms. They want to go along with whatever's safe. I think part of the problem with these companies is the fact that they're actually not bold, and they're not thoughtful, and they're not courageous. I'm not really afraid of the bureaucrats. I'm kind of just disgusted by them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Brothers, sisters? I'm the oldest of three boys. I have two amazing younger brothers. I was with one of them yesterday in Miami. They both live in Austin, although one of them spends a lot of time in Asia. Right on. What did you grow up doing? What were your hobbies? A lot of sports, a lot of video games. What kind of sports? I was a baseball player. I was a swimmer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Got the gold medal in breaststroke for the East Bay Swim League. Nice, nice. My family's very competitive. We're very competitive, whether it's sports, whether it's games. Each of my brothers and I were state chess champions. My dad was the top chess coach. We thought it was because we were smart. After we left my elementary school, he kept coaching.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They kept winning the state every year for 20 years. No kidding. My dad was super competitive. You still play chess? For fun, yeah. You know, when you're playing at that age, when we were playing seriously, competitively, it wasn't about being smart. It was about my dad training us, and we had to do it 30 hours a week if we wanted to stay on top.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So it was a very serious commitment from the age of like 6 to 12 or so.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think I am. Don't ask my brother, Jeff. Are you teaching your kids chess? We're starting to. It's actually really funny. So my oldest kids are daughters. I have five kids. So my daughters, the older ones, are four, six, and seven and a half. And they do little tactics with me and stuff. But I came in the other day when I was trying to teach them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they said, Daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore. They're getting married. I'm working on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Like every Nintendo game. We played baseball a lot. I was a pitcher. We played a lot of video games. Parents think it's bad for kids, but I thought it was pretty fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
42.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I was lucky to grow up in Silicon Valley. I obviously was nerdy myself, but I had even nerdier friends who were teaching me stuff. I had a small group of friends who were way ahead in math and stuff. Programming and math have a lot in common, so I got these guys teaching me how to program at 9, 10, 11 years old, which is normal nowadays, but back then that was pretty unusual.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And, you know, one of the friends, his dad was at Intel, and they got these, they called the Pentium chips, remember, back in the 90s. And they'd get them, and we did this rig where you'd, like, figure out how to overclock them and, you know, use, like, liquid nitrogen or whatever to cool it off. And it's just silly stuff, and it makes the Quake II game work a little better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But it's just, I kind of was in that whole scene, and a lot of my friends' older brothers and people were building companies. So I was really lucky to be exposed to this stuff. Very interesting. Yeah. Where did you go after high school? So I went to Stanford Computer Science, which is right in the area. It's in the Bay Area as well. And it's actually funny.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
My mom made me apply last minute to Stanford. I was always going to go to Caltech or MIT. Actually, I went back and read it. It was the most obnoxious application thing ever because I was so eager for them to think I was so great. When you read it, you're like, screw this kid. We shouldn't let him in anywhere because he thinks he's the coolest guy ever. It was terrible. I was 17.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
pretty overconfident. But Stanford won because I did it last minute and it didn't sound quite as arrogant. I think they let me in. So Stanford, you started interning at PayPal. Yeah, so all the really smart and interesting programmers. I met a bunch of them who were a little older than me. I was lucky to be a little bit ahead in programming already before I got there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I got to know some of the older kids. And some of the really bright ones were going to work at PayPal and were interning at PayPal, et cetera. And so I applied my freshman year. I thought, this is really cool. I want to go work with these people. And I'd known who Peter Thiel was. He'd founded the Stanford Review, which I was working with and became a big editor of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they actually rejected me in my first year I applied there. So I applied again. I got in sophomore year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They were definitely not big names. No one knew who any of these people were, not at all. It's such a coincidence that all these companies came out of PayPal. But now that we know who Elon is and who Peter Thiel is and who these guys are, it's like, of course, they're all together there. There's got to be a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of it. There's a power law.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There are actually two groups. It was Elon had x.com and Peter had Confinity. And they had a bunch of their smartest friends each building stuff. And there were about eight companies in the space, in the payment space. And these guys were at war with each other. They were obsessed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
This really talented team was trying to win, and they finally realized they should merge rather than destroy each other. And the companies merged. And I hear Elon kept trying to rename it X. He finally got his way later. But no, it was an amazing group of people. I was just a kid. I get no credit at all for anything that happened there, but I learned a hell of a lot from all these people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's a hell of a group of mentors. Do you keep in touch with all these guys? A bunch of them, yeah. David Sachs has that show. They let me on last week. They're all entertaining. Peter's someone I see a lot and he still backs a lot of things I do. Elon lives in Austin, Texas now and is a He's a good friend. I text him and bug him sometimes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm trying to be helpful with the stuff going on in government. You are involved with that, right? I do my best to help. I have a bunch of friends who are involved full-time. I've passed a bunch of people in, and I'm obsessed with the policy world. I'm trying to be helpful there. Good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I didn't build anything in social media, but I worked for Peter Thiel after PayPal. He had a global macro hedge fund, but he also was the first investor in Facebook at the time. I don't get any credit for that either, but I got to know really well the Facebook founders and the office and the culture. Then right after that, he backed me to start Palantir with my roommate from Stanford.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'd always been pretty interested in it. If you look at So computer science is like maybe a young man who likes things young men like. There's games and there's cool defense stuff. And when you grew up in computer science in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff the NSA was doing and the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
government was doing that was way ahead of everything else back in the 60s and 70s. So it was almost this mythical... where there's just some of the coolest, most talented guys were there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's literally stuff that was done by the NSA in the 70s that the very top academics at Stanford and MIT and et cetera only figured out 15 years later what the heck they were doing and why they were doing it that way. It was just this, this is what the cool guys are doing and the smartest people are doing. They're working on these problems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
As a kid, you watch James Bond and you look at this stuff, you want to get the bad guys. You want to stop the bad guys. I was always fascinated by that world. At PayPal, The thing that came up, by the way, was central to this, was the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money. You know about this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So PayPal was losing several million dollars a month, back then that was a lot of money, and it was very unprofitable because you'd go use your card down the street at 7-Eleven and the cashier there is not getting paid very well. So they're secretly taking the numbers and they sell 100 numbers online to the Russians
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
for like 500 bucks, and then the Russians would take those numbers, run them through accounts, pretend you did transactions. And you get this thing later that says, PayPal, $200. And you're like, I didn't do PayPal $200. So you say no to your credit card company. It's called a chargeback. PayPal has to eat it. And so this was happening at massive scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And PayPal and its competitors were going under thanks to this. And so we had to figure out at PayPal How do you go after it? We actually ended up taking a bunch of our customer service people, building these tools for them, building investigative tools, and then helping them figure out how to stop and catch some of the bad guys and then turn them into Secret Service and FBI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I ended up getting to know a bunch of these Secret Service and FBI guys around 2001, 2002.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It was kind of a cat and mouse game because every time you'd figure out what the bad guys were doing, they'd change their method. So we tried to use AI. It wasn't nearly as good 20 years ago. The AI could detect some things, but you really needed the human intelligence layers. You'd have a machine learning layer and you'd have these tools to let people see what was going on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And you'd keep just iterating, staying ahead of them. And the tools were good enough. We cut down the fraud by about 90%. And that made it profitable. And then PayPal was sold to eBay. And so the anti-fraud thing was a big piece of what made PayPal work. And we got to know these Secret Service guys. And these are good guys. A lot of them are good old boys. They're not tech guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're just trying to figure out what the heck this internet thing is and how to deal with it and how to catch the bad guys. And so they'd come to us for advice. And I got to know quite a few of them. And they'd come to me for advice on other stuff. And we started chatting with them, because cybercrime was a new thing, and you're helping them out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then 9-11 happened, and then we kind of saw the government spend billions of dollars trying to build new tools to help them do better, stop future stuff. And the stuff they were building horrified us. It was stuff that was based on principles from maybe like 20 years ago. And we're like, wait a second, guys. Silicon Valley exists. We've done all these new things with all the top talent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it was just so disconnecting. We realized this is actually really scary, because our country's spending... actually tens of billions of dollars on this stuff that doesn't work, that's 20 years out of date. It's just completely not what a top software culture is. And that's when we realized, well, we've got to figure out how to get involved and how to fix this. And how did you get involved?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We started Palantir with Stefan and I. I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs one summer to come and sketch and draw it up with us. And they all thought we were totally crazy. So we couldn't convince them to join. A few of them joined a few years later. What is Palantir?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
At a very high level, Palantir is an effort to take the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems in these institutions that didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world. But what is it actually doing? There was really initially four pillars of Palantir. It was data integration,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
search discovery analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is a really big, hard product. So what happens if you have a government department? At the time, government was spending, say, $36 billion gathering data. So you're you. It's your job. There's like 5,000 databases. There's all sorts of signals and humans and other things coming in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see, depending on the context. What the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a weird, crazy problem. And you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Our job is to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions like, okay, take this guy we found next to Sam Bin Laden, show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
and just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and bringing things in more easily. So it's a hard problem to solve.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data. Because there's no way that any single human is going to be able to keep 5,000, 20,000 databases of stuff in different formats in their mind at a time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So you're going to have to organize it in a way you can interact with it, ask questions, preserve your investigations, share with others, collaborate. So that's a problem. Now it turns out that organizing all this information in all these ways, is very powerful to then apply AI on top of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
As AI has gotten to be more advanced, there are now a lot more predictive, a lot more magical AI-like things that it could do thanks to that. Palantir was lucky in a way to have a top technology culture and to be solving these data organization ontology workflow problems, we call them, that when AI came along, it was really powerful to add AI to it and go even faster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
To be able to take all the data and figure that out. We first started working with a bunch of the special forces groups and we really helped them figure out some of those hard problems and partnered with some really smart guys that taught us, here's the data you should be looking at. We brought it together with our partnership and did it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then the Army Brigade said, well, we need this too, because they needed it badly. And they couldn't pay for it, of course, because they have some giant bureaucratic process. We just gave it to them. We said, just show us the lives you're saving. That's all we want to see. That's really inspiring to our engineers. And they started showing us the lives they were saving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then it came up for bid. It's called the Defense Ground Control System, DSIGS, remember? It was called back then, I remember. And of course, some general gave it to his friend for like $5 billion at some other company. And everyone protested, like, we're using Palantir. We don't want to wait years for this giant contract. So we ended up suing the government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And I never sue anyone, but Palantir had to sue because they purposely just gave it to their friends, and we won. And it took years, but they eventually used us. You know what was shocking to me?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
is when they finally eventually used Palantir, I'd met a bunch of the guys, and they all said, it's the best thing ever, it's amazing, we thought you guys were fake, we thought you guys were liars, because the people who were competing against us had just talked shit about us for years. But we finally got in and made it work. Man, that had to be... That had to be pretty enraging, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's pretty frustrating when you're saving lives and you're doing it for free and you have all eyes forward to play people just working their asses off to really help and then they treat you like crap.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Because Palantir went through that and because SpaceX went through something similar with their whole competition, we've paved the way now where a lot of the generals and admirals in Congress is more on the side of new innovation. They're more open to it. They're more willing to let it compete, which is important because that's a much better place we're in now than we were 15 years ago.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
First of all, I come from this background in Silicon Valley with these tech cultures. First of all, to build the really top companies, you need a really great technology culture. You need a place where the very best engineers, they're fighting to come in. So I think a typical company is like, you're looking for engineers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Like, oh, I have this idea, I got to find these people, I got to find who's going to help. And what you want is you want the very most talented technologists in the world It's there, and you want people lining up from the top places to try to come in. That's a very hard thing to build, but to me, that's number one, if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's absolutely A++ tech culture, because what you could do with a really great tech culture is you can try 10 things or 100 things at a time that the other guy is still building their thing. You impress people, you make it work, you iterate. With Palantir, We'd be back and forth every couple weeks to DC. They'd have all these objections. We'd come back two weeks later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We would have done the equivalent of six months of work for a typical contractor in the two weeks. We showed them, look, it's ready now. We did what you said. And we'd do that over two years, 50 times. Eventually, you get somewhere really fast. So I said, tech culture is number one. I'd say number two is you have to have a vision about this is a gap in the world that you're really confident in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Because building companies is really hard. Things go against you. Things take a long time. No one else actually believes in you and believes you're going to make it. So you've got to be really sure there's this gap that you're going after and really sure you're right. It takes a certain overconfidence on us to be willing to go after that and do it. You'd be a little bit crazy, maybe. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'd say more middle class. One of the most obnoxious stories I remember is when I was like four and a half and we were flying on a plane economy. And I asked my dad, I said, dad, why aren't we in the front? And he said, well, you know, this costs a lot more money and we're comfortable here. I said, dad, but you're really smart. You're smarter than all those people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Why don't you have enough money to be in the front of the plane? Super obnoxious kid. My dad, it was really smart. And he just prioritized spending a hell of a lot more time with family. He was one of eight. He brought, I'm the oldest and 19 cousins. So he brought them all out to the Bay Area from Massachusetts. And he did a great work, but he never really, he grew up lower middle class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So for him being middle class, And having enough money was fine. You didn't care. Which I admire, by the way. As a kid, I was obnoxious. But there's a lot of lessons in that. It was really cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's a good question. At Palantir and also at Adapar and my other companies, we actually usually try to pay lower salary, higher equity. So you give them more upside in the company. So they had to believe in the company. And it was interesting, whenever we gave someone an offer, we'd give them three choices for the offer. You could say you take more cash, but they get a little bit less.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Medium cash, medium, or take less cash and take more, take more upside. And the very best people, the ones who are the really best, they always wanted even less cash and even more upside. It's like they're just confident, we're just going to fricking win. And it was fun. I used to give them a table. Here's what their shares would be worth if we had a certain level of success.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And we'd give them the different types of options. And the biggest option was if we make this company worth $5 billion, here's what your shares are going to be worth. And everyone says, Joe, you can't say $5 billion. That's too high. That's ridiculous. So that was kind of fun. It's 160 now, but that took 20 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I mean, so for an early, really strong engineer, they might get, depending on where we are, you might get a really strong one early on, you might get 1%, but it gets diluted over time, so you get those down. But later on, people get a half percent, a quarter percent. And dilution is when you raise more money, so you go in a little bit less than that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But let's say you started with a quarter percent, you get diluted down to... 0.1%, but 0.1% of a few billion is still a really big number, and 0.1% of 100 billion is a lot. So a lot of these guys did really well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Actually, three years into Palantir, we were building this off reiterating. A few of the top guys for the engineering side are basically ready to quit. They're like, Joe, this is just not working out. We haven't got enough contracts. It seems like it's really unlikely it's going to be there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I found this in life is oftentimes right before the breakthroughs, you get this really hard time where people are just giving up. I convinced a couple of them, let's just push for six more months because we have these other things coming. Alex Karp did a really great job of figuring it out. how to get both the FBI and CIA to move on something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And all of a sudden we had these bigger contracts and it was good that we were building. But it came really close to dying early on. This stuff takes a long time to build, right? And like I said, you got to be a little bit crazy because you just got to push really hard. You're building a bridge and you don't know if the island's there or not that you're building it to, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I was helping Peter with the hedge funds, my other passion, and I did a lot of finance and was mapping that world out. It was after the financial crisis in 2008. We were thinking, there's a lot of things that are not organized in this space and they're messy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We realized one of the ways to really make things work better in finance would be to have a platform with root access to everyone's wealth and organize those problems, organize better from there. I also just made some money myself. I had what's called a little bit of a family office, a small one. And I was talking to people, how do you run your family office?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I was talking to what are called REAs, the registered investment advisors, and it was a mess. They all hated their technology. So I was pretty arrogant at the time, having just had some success, and Palantir was starting to grow really well. I said, I'm going to build a company that fixes this space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But today Adapar is doing really, it took us a long time, but Adapar is now by far number one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We're going to be at the Army-Navy game, and so I'm bummed that I don't... I'm going to find out tomorrow probably from all these guys, because I'm sure they know. I'm sure they know, but I haven't texted them and asked, you know... If it's not ours, then it's really incompetent, right? If this is not ours, then it's also kind of weird. Why are we doing this and freaking people out?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Because it just makes everything cheaper. And I think it's a really good chance we get there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And if you look at the standard of living the last couple hundred years for the poor middle class, it's tracked almost one to one in a lot of cases with the cost of energy. It's a really big deal to innovate on that. It's just been this very predictive thing for how well people are doing. What's the holdback with nuclear energy? Well, there's two different holdbacks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The holdback on the fission side, which is what we should be scaling up now, is that we have an insane regulatory apparatus. And so we had this like It was like this atomic energy group in the U.S. that was very innovative. We used to do things very quickly in the 50s, 60s, and we built a ton of plants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then in the mid-70s, they shifted it, and it became what's called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as far as I could tell and all of my friends could tell, had a mandate of just stopping anything new. So if you graph new nuclear stuff, it was like this, and then it flatlines. And these people... It's just crazy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So basically, my father, for his job actually, was at something called Raychem and he was selling heat tracing. And he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants. And sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he had to sell it to a nuclear plant, he had to bring like 60 binders that they had to work on and all this stuff of just nonsense information.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It made it 10 times as expensive for him to sell to nuclear plants. So what these bureaucrats did is they created so many rules and so many laws that made no sense whatsoever. And by the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just like way aggressive beyond that. And so it made it unprofitable to do new nuclear plants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so what happened is starting from the mid 70s, you no longer could innovate on this technology and you only have what you had. And so it really crushed the industry for really almost a couple of generations now. And finally, Finally, thanks to great work by a lot of people I know, one of my friends who started Airbnb, his wife is a model who's a big nuclear energy promoter. It's really cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But if it's not ours, what the heck, man?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're just really into this. And a bunch of other friends who are pushing nuclear energy. It's finally coming back as a bipartisan thing that it's cleaner for the environment. It's good for everyone, including the working class. It's good for American business. we should be innovating again in nuclear energy and building it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So it looks like we're going to start fixing the regulations and allowing us to do more things there. I think this new administration, Chris Wright's coming in, Secretary of Energy, he's a very big fan of it. So I'm seeing really good things. So that's going to come back there. That's what's been blocking that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
On the fusion side, we just haven't had the technology, but this big investment might get us there the next decade.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's very possible that part of the reason, there's probably like, if you look at Germany, the Green Party in Germany, which is a left party, was basically founded around an anti-nuclear energy policy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There is a crazy part of the left that's against nuclear energy, but I bet you on the right, there's some interest from oil and gas that I can't go back in time and see those conversations in the smoke-filled rooms, but I bet you some of those guys, I love Texas, but I bet you some of those guys in Texas, they might have had a thing to say about that. Now, today, are they blocking it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
No, they're not really anymore. I think we're going to break through and fix it. Most of the guys I know, Chris Wright comes from, he created a giant fracking company, Liberty Energy. I think a lot of these guys nowadays are, they have a lot of money, they love the country, they just want the best solutions to win is what I've seen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm sure there's some of them that don't want it, but I think overall the vibe shift we're in is just like, let's do what's best for America. So I think we're going to break through and fix the regulation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I got a good answer on that, though. I'm sure it's public by now, but I think because of the fact that we let it stay up, we were able to hack into it, trace back where the data was going, and find out a lot about the Chinese. And so it turned out, in that case, it made sense.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's going to become a bigger problem. I agree. Especially as you go to more electric vehicles where it's distributed and everyone wants to charge. That's going to weigh on these grids. They need to be modernized. The way we've built them right now, Sean, is the regulation again is a problem here. The incentives are all screwed up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You're only allowed to charge certain amounts or spend certain amounts. And it's very much like one of the areas of our society that's like one of the commie areas of our society. I mean, it's like controlled by top-down by government and told what to do. And I have two concerns. One is it's not ready to work with what we're going to need in terms of future demand in the next five or ten years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Two, it's not protected very well at all. So if I was an adversary who wanted to go to war against America or wanted to harass America, probably lots of ways to break in, hack in, take down these utilities. And it's kind of crazy. We spend all this money on defense. We haven't defended any of that stuff at all. I think we just leave it to the local towns.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But I'm sorry, these small towns aren't going to know how the heck to defend against the top hackers in China. So there's definitely a lot we could be doing to fix that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Oh yeah. I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective, it's extremely dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And if we want to be ready, so in World War II, it wasn't that we had a bunch of big defense contractors, it's that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war. And we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base. And I think we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this. He shifted it back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree, we need to fix this. This is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are not totally insane at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think an effort to do more advanced manufacturing here and to give some kind of general subsidies and have a competition is not totally insane, again, to rebuild our manufacturing base. And then I think you have to look again at how it's being regulated and what the incentives are for people to update these things. And you need people to have the proper incentive to update them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it turned out that Xi Jinping didn't even know his underlings had put this bioballoon up and were doing it, and it was actually bad for China because we used it to hack in. So I think in that case, there's a competent answer, which makes you feel good that there's not totally incompetent people. They met with Biden, they said what they're going to do, he agreed to let them do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Let's take a quick break here. Awesome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm most excited about Elon and Vivek and the Doge effort because this is something I've wanted to see forever. I'm probably one of the only guys in tech that's done a lot in policy on the right, on the small government side for the last 10, 20 years. And it's like the world just shifted this way. The vibe shift is exactly... in line with stuff I've been thinking and talking about for a decade.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I'm so excited about this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're already doing it, man. They can't really officially do it yet, but they're already making all the plans. There's people working hard there. There's guys picking me, Joe, we need another engineer for this. We're trying to map this out. We need more lawyers for this. I mean, they're going right now as hard as they can and getting ready. So it's going to be really bold.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Do you think they'll have it all mapped out before they even step in? Well, I think the way Elon works in general It's just like, what can we do right now? And then what can we do next? Let's just focus on what we can do right now. So they have what's called their day one priorities. And they're just focused and sprinting on everything they could do day one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And I think they're going to have a lot of stuff ready for day one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're bringing in at least well over 100 people for the Doge effort. They're going to put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs. There's these policy placements that are all working with Doge and being liaisons with Doge. They're going to come out of the gate with
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And that was fine. So hopefully there's a competent answer for these drones, but it's a weird thing, man. I mean, do you think it's ours?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
a bunch of general things, a bunch of removing certain people, a bunch of removing certain regulations. There's all sorts. I can't go into the details exactly of what they're going to be doing, but it's going to be really aggressive right from the start. How much pushback do you think they're going to get, and will it affect their
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I mean, it's a really good thing that the Supreme Court of the United States right now is controlled by the pro-liberty side that's skeptical of the special interests of government bureaucracy. The government bureaucracy is one of the most powerful special interests in our country. It's such a strong force. You know what happened is that in the late 1970s,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
in a very, very government-union-biased Congress, of Jimmy Carter's Congress. They just put in all these crazy rules to try to make it impossible to hold people accountable. I'm sure you've seen this a lot in government, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So they will fight it really hard, but a lot of us believe, and I think the Supreme Court believes, that the intent of the Constitution is that the president is supposed to be in charge of the executive branch, is supposed to have unitary authority to remove people and to fix things. There's another thing called the Empowerment Act from the 1970s as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They tried to force Nixon to say, you know what, you have to spend every last dollar that we procure and tell you to spend. And I'm not sure that's constitutional. That's an unconstitutional thing coming from Congress on the presidency.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I think controlling the presidency, controlling the courts, we only partially control Congress because you really need 60 senators to really do something bold, but we partially control that too. We should be able to get a lot done here. I hope so. The whole world's watching, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I was with someone, even like freaking Keir Starmer's government, which I have some issues with over in the UK, obviously. They're kind of more of a really hard left side. Even people out there, they know they have to cut their bureaucracy. These bureaucracies are like these cancers, man, that have grown out of control. They're unelected. They think they're in charge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're laughing and saying, don't worry, we'll be here forever. We're going to stop whatever you do. It's just level of broken arrogance. We have to. If Elon and Trump and Vivek and a bunch of my other friends, my smartest friends are going in to help right now. If these guys can't do it, it's not possible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We all have to root for them for the sake of our civilization because if we can even get part of what they're doing right, that's a much brighter future for everyone. Who else are you excited about? There's a lot of great people coming in. I think we were talking about, I think cleaning out the DOJ with Kash Patel is going to be just so much corruption, so much mess there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The stuff you see coming out, it's like they're spending all their time going after white supremacists as opposed to real criminals. The whole thing is just crazy. And by the way, there are good people in the FBI. There's still people in the FBI trying to find communists, trying to find bad things happening in our country. So I think we ought to be careful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's not that the whole agency, like if you have friends in the FBI, they might be a great person, but there's just so much corruption, so much waste, so much nonsense in these places.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You know what I found out about government, man, is that there are some really great people. There are some amazing special forces guys. Every once in a while on the DOD, you'll have this genius person, the strategy group, and then the vast majority of them are incompetent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I don't know. Maybe he just knows. There's a vibe shift. He knows he's not supposed to be in charge anymore. The vibe before, it was bureaucratic. It was cowardly. It was guilt-ridden. That was the vibe from the whole woke movement. Now instead, the vibe is It's greatness. It's courage. It's joyous ambition. I mean, the whole country has just shifted away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
These guys, there's this overvalue on credentialism, right? It was just fake credentials. And now we're shifting towards human judgment and common sense. It's like nature is healing here, man. Things are going back to the right way. And I think a lot of people know that their time is over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm scared of that. I'm scared of, I don't know. I mean, I get him pardoning his son, although the way he did it was super sketchy because he basically did it for the whole Ukraine period. I hope he can still do that investigation and find out what went on. I mean, the guy, it's such a corrupt family. It's just terrible. You saw the thing where he paid one of my friends in a booklet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It was art that was made with his own shit. I can't even say it. It's crazy to see this stuff. It's like he literally was $300,000 behind on rent, so he tried to pay it with the art made from his shit. And he did. He got away with it. He's a pardon now, so I don't think you can go after him for anything. Yeah, I'm worried you're going to see a bunch of more mass pardons. I really hope not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The joke is he'd pardon SBF because SBF gives so much money to the Democrats and, you know, the crazy guy. I really hope not. It's just the whole thing's crazy, man. Do you have any concerns with the upcoming administration? Yeah, listen, I think you can't agree 100% with anyone. I actually posted on X recently, like, you know, I disagree with the longshoremen decision that came out recently.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The what? So Trump said that we're not going to automate the ports and that it's a waste of money to automate the ports. I know about equipment and it's not worth buying this equipment and we should just let the unions keep going. And what I posted is, I think Trump's clearly wrong on this, but it's okay to disagree with someone and still respect them and follow them in other areas.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so it's just hard for me to say, but I'm hoping they're ours, because if they're not ours, that's actually a little bit scary, and it's really incompetent that we're not doing something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I don't think we have to agree. I'm never going to agree with someone 100%. I'm never going to be afraid to say it. I think that's how America's supposed to work. And if people don't think America works that way, too bad. I'm just going to keep speaking out. And so I 100% love the Trump's president. I agree with a bunch of stuff he's doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
but giving in to these crazy corrupt union mafia people. Not what I would have done. I get it in the sense that A, there's a vibe shift where you want the union vote for the right, and B, he doesn't want a giant strike to deal with as he comes into office, so I respect that, and that's his decision. I wouldn't have done it in a way that attacked automation. I think that's silly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, that's interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
With Epirus when it got started?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So the thing we were talking about earlier is... Basically, we realized that China was going to be an adversary, that this crazy guy is actually a communist who's coming in, that he's forcing his best and brightest to work on new ways to get us. And we said, okay, what does a war look like in the 21st century? What is the warfare going to have happen?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And you're going to have these massive numbers of drones is by far the best way to fight, and you're going to need ways to stop them. And so what are the most important weapons? Well, if you could have force fields, if you have the Star Trek shields, that's pretty freaking cool. And it turns out that in venture capital, there's two things, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
In venture capital, there's what's the best talent in the world and what's possible now that wasn't possible before. We have access to the best talent. We're lucky to have that. So what's newly possible? Well, it turns out these chips are now fast enough to control power on small time scales to make our electronic warfare weapons work way better. So we said, okay, this is a really key area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Because we know there's a new possibility here, let's prove it out. And it was really fun, because with about... $30, $40 million on our side, we're able to go to the desert and have a competition against guys who've raised and spent and given billions and billions by the government, tens of billions by the government for their stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And when the hardened drones flew for the same size, same power, we shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away. Nine and a half times farther away than the guys who got billions of dollars of contracts. And it's because there's these new possibilities that they didn't know how to do. How was it developed? Where'd you guys develop this? El Segundo.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Nathan Mintz, Bill Maher, a bunch of guys, Andy Lowery, a bunch of really key guys on their team. And the DNA was a combination. We have the DNA from the Silicon Valley world, and we have the DNA from the electronic warfare world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So there are some people who have worked at some of these other places, because there's just certain expertise that's been built up in America that no one else has that you need to build on what already exists and build on the kind of knowledge of how gallium nitrate can be worked with, as well as what's nearly possible. Is Leonidas an offensive weapon as well as a defensive weapon?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's lots of ways. At its core, it's a defensive thing in a sense that you can have something protecting a city or a base or a squadron. But if you're going to be attacking the bad guys and you're going forward, you want to have these things. You want to have ways of stopping the drone and other attacks from getting you during an offensive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Or, by the way, you want to just turn off the area you're attacking. Imagine if there's an area you're going after and all the electronics go dead. That's probably pretty useful right before an attack.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
If there was another story, then maybe, but I don't know. That's an interesting question. We're going to find out really soon. I'm curious. I don't want to make a bunch of stupid guesses and I come out to be an idiot because it's hard for me to know. I actually don't know the answer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's pretty crazy, right? It is. We used to think about this in terms of when I was a kid, you thought about the EMP from a nuke going off in the high atmosphere. That's actually a much more aggressive and scary version of these things. But this thing, that can only be used once. This thing could keep being used without hurting anyone at all. Could this take out a nuke mid-flight?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So it's frying electronics. So if you think about it for satellite defense, for example, which is not what we're doing right now, but it's just me talking out of my butt, so excuse me if I get something wrong. But my bias would be that if something's targeting a satellite, it needs to be adjusting its flight in order to hit it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so probably what you'd want to do with a satellite is you'd want to blast this, and you'd blast it a certain number of miles away. And then you could just adjust slightly and the thing's not going to know how to hit you. Same thing, a cargo plane's a better example, probably, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I think if you've got a big, slow cargo plane and the bad guy's trying to take it out, which is key for contested logistics, you can put one of these on it. You know, you always see the movie where the missile's trying to follow the guy. You blast the missile. Now it's a dumb missile. And then you turn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So there's things like that we're probably going to be doing for defendant planes and things like that. Wow. So these... These might be deployed on planes. I think some version of these will definitely be deployed on planes at some point if we're going to be having battles. Now, the question is what type of planes and drones we have or use in 10 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But yeah, you definitely want cargo planes no matter what, I think. So you definitely use them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Boat ships are... I mean, our company Ceronic, which is building the, you know, hopefully thousands and thousands of these smart, autonomous, weaponized vessels you're going to want. That could be one of the things you put on an autonomous vessel, obviously, during a battle is to be able to go around and turn things off with this. So I think you're going to have stuff like that, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So the ones that are Leonidas is a certain size, which takes out a certain distance. It's much farther. If you wanted to, for example, if, for example, this was put in an Androil Roadrunner, if we did that kind of partnership, there's only a small cone inside the Roadrunner.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So there's only a certain amount of stuff you could put in there that might only shoot things effectively like 20 or 30 meters, for example. But that might be okay because the Roadrunner can fly up, fly next to the swarm, and shoot a bunch of times, then go back and land again. I love that video that Palmer made with the guys on that. It's such a cool weapon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So combining it with stuff like that would be great. Man, can you go into the Roadrunner a little bit? So I'm lucky to be an early investor in Android. Brian Schimpf, Trey Stephens, Matt Grimm, a bunch of our superstars from Palantir co-founded this with my friend Palmer. Palmer before had started Oculus, was the VR company. And I actually backed him at the beginning of that. He was like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
crazy kid, like 20, 21 years old. We met him and he had this prototype and we're like, this is too crazy. Let's give him a little bit of money though. It's so impressive. And then we actually co-led the next round because it was starting to work and then Facebook bought it. And he very famously got kicked out of Facebook for being a Republican. That's a longer conversation. What?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
This is the future of warfare. It's like lots and lots of manufactured, smart, weaponized, autonomous drones, whether they're flying, whether they're on the water, whether they're under the water, whether they're on the land. That is the future of warfare as far as I'm concerned.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You didn't know about this? I didn't know that. Yeah, no, he put up a billboard against Hillary and was outspoken. I mean, listen, you're all of a sudden a billionaire in your mid-20s and you have opinions and it's right in the middle of woke Silicon Valley. So Facebook's famously on the other side of it. So they just attacked him like crazy and all these people were really nasty to him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
A lot of people have come out from Facebook and apologized to him now because he's now this really important leader in our country doing great things and they realized they were wrong to treat him that way. So it's like a whole saga in his life of being beaten down and out and discarded. Not badly, he's a billionaire. Just because we're talking about Palmer, I was at his wedding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You're not going to like this, maybe. I was at his wedding, and I was sitting next to Peter Thiel and Senator Cruz and all these people, and it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy when he's getting married. And all of a sudden, all the music goes off, and Top Gun music comes on, and then a helicopter flies over us. We don't know who it was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it lands behind, and Palmer's flying it. He comes out in tails, and he never dresses up nicely. The helicopter goes away, and then the normal music comes back on. His wife comes in normally with her dad. But that's the kind of guy. He's just hilarious. Damn, that's awesome. He's basically America's Iron Man. He's a hilarious inventor guy. Amazing guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So he invented all this hardware for the first real VR in America that worked. And then... And then he partners with my Palantir guys and they start Yanderel. And so Yanderel has all these crazy cool products and they're running circles around the primes. They're basically like the next new prime, right? They just raised like billions of dollars at like, you know, 15, $20 billion valuation range.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so one of their new products, which is amazing, It reminds me of Elon's rockets. It's a missile that can open up, launch, and if it's not used, it comes back and lands and waits and gets used again. Which is not something that I think the generals knew to ask for, but if you think about warfare, it's all about dollars per effectiveness.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
If you have a bunch of things attacking you, fire 50 of these things, use 10 or 20 if you need, and have the other ones come back and use them again. It's way better, right? And by the way, this thing is like a tiny fraction of the cost of similar competitive missiles. He's literally competing against stuff that costs, depending on what it is, one to three million.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think we're selling them for 250k now and still have much better margins than our other guys. Which is why you want to let people not do cost plus, because you want to have them re-engineer from scratch, what makes the most sense. Because if you charge someone cost plus, your job is to make it as expensive as possible because you get to keep a piece of that cost.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But if you don't charge cost plus, then you have this whole better framework.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's still some really, really amazing expertise in our military industrial base. It's like America's military industrial base that's important and that exists inside some of these primes. I don't want to say they're not going away. We don't want them to go away. As much as the military industrial complex, like you talked about, is an issue,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
you have some stuff we need to know how to do to keep America safe and to be the best in the world. And so these companies are going to be important, but in terms of anything really new and innovative, anything with really hard software, they just don't have the cultures they used to have. And they don't have the top people they used to have, for most things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So it's really important that we have, Silicon Valley just got so far ahead, and it's really important we take some of that culture and apply it. When I first wrote the check in Neanderthal, it was 2016, I think, I had a bunch of people who we work with in the bio world say, we're not going to work with you anymore if you're doing defense. This is so wrong. You're just evil.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Why would you do this stuff? It's just wrong to do. And a lot of fun just wouldn't even mean it. So it was like a thing you weren't supposed to do. And what's really cool with the bio shift, that's totally changed. You have a lot of the best people going in. It's popular now, which maybe it's too popular now, but that's another problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's a lot of that going on. Listen, Zuckerberg is an interesting case. He is fundamentally, himself, not super political. And he himself... and I'll get a lot of flack for this, but he himself has always had an appreciation for some of the liberty side and some of the conservative side, which is shocking given how his company does things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But I've sat next to him not that long ago at a wedding or whatever, and he's interested in his kids learning about some of these ideas, like the Tuttle Twins or whatever, these conservative libertarian shows and stuff. I think he's open to different sides. I think the culture inside of Facebook that comes from the universities
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
is so poisonous and so leftist that I think they get away with things sometimes that they don't even tell him about. So I'm not saying he's like a perfect good guy on this. I think he should be way bolder and hold his company accountable to stop censoring conservatives and stop doing the wrong thing. So I think he's maybe a little bit soft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Maybe I would say a little bit cowardly sometimes about these things, despite being amazing in other areas. But he himself is not really a driver of that. And what happens is a lot of these guys, maybe I'd say he started off moderate, moderate left, but with an appreciation for both sides. And he'll start like a foundation. It's called the Chancellor Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And what'll happen with these moderate leftists is they're not good at keeping out like the crazy far left. And so his philanthropy org becomes run by these activists. And he's busy with his business. And his wife and him, I guess, don't want fights or whatever. So you get these crazy activists, and they just start doing terrible stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they're very good at sounding maybe to him like, oh, it's a reasonable thing. It's not actually affecting things. But when you saw it actually change the 2020 election, the way they put the hundreds of millions of dollars to work, my guess is he didn't even understand or might not even still understand how much it would screw things up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Which is not an excuse for him, but I think that's just the reality of how these orgs evolve with these crazy activists inside of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
He's not George Soros. He wasn't doing the crazy bad stuff himself. I think in general, Silicon Valley, people who are moderate on the moderate left... have been way too tolerant of letting these crazy activists take over their companies, take over their philanthropies, and break things. If we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We need these guys to have a little more boldness, a little more courage, and they need to come out publicly and excise these parts of their orgs and say, you know what? I was way too tolerant of that. There's 47 people I just fired because they were all found to be doing this crazy stuff, censoring conservatives, turning things down, screwing with them, shadow banning them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We're not going to let them do that anymore. That's what he needs to do. And he can still be on the moderate left if he wants, but you can't freaking tolerate these crazy activists, man. That's what I would tell him. I haven't caught up with him in a bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You got to be really disciplined how you hire. You got to be really fast to fire. And by the way, I've worked with a ton of people who are on the left, on the right. This is not about left versus right. This is about the activists. This is about the crazy kind of woke, like cancel culture, illiberal people. And as soon as you see that, You can't tolerate it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Do you build culture under your companies? You have to. You have to. You have to have CEOs. You set the tone by how hard the top's working. You set the tone by the values and principles we talk about. One of the values of AVC is patriotism. You have to explicitly have these values and say, this is what we stand for. This is who we are. We're principled optimists. We're patriots.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We're, you know, we're going to fight for the truth. And, you know, you want to live in a world. I think the vibe shift we've been talking about is like a lot of people are comfortable living with lives safely. And I think it's important that a lot of people come over to live with the truth, even if it's dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Well, I mean, I think the fact that we let China and Russia become such close allies is ridiculous. I think that was a huge strategic mistake. And I think they're not necessarily natural allies. I think that was something where we drove into each other. So that concerns me. I think the biggest concern right now is Turkey. And on top of that, Turkey. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So Russia and China, obviously the biggest concern. Iran, obviously. But Turkey is like the biggest kind of wild card going out right now. So Turkey... You know, Ataturk created Turkey as the first really successful secular Muslim country in the modern world. And it was a really big deal. And there's a lot of problems historically with Islamists, today with Islamists.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So he built all these institutions into Turkey to stop the Islamists from taking over because he knew that would always be a threat. And one of the most important institutions was the army to make sure that Islamists did not run it. And that his job was to fight and stop Islamists if they were going to take over society. And Erdogan knew this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Erdogan, we thought, a lot of us thought, when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate when he came in 20 years ago. That's how he ran. But he secretly, like very strongly on the Islamist side. And so in order to make the Islamists win again in Turkey, he had to take out these organizations in society that had been built to stop Islamists.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so when he did the coup eight years ago, a lot of us believe, a lot of intelligence agencies believe it was purposely tripped off as a coup in order to get all these people to come up. and see who's going to be anti-Islamist and then wipe them out. And so what happened in society is he ended up killing and torturing tens of thousands of people eight years ago when this happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Anyone who was going to be against Islamists, anyone who was kind of built in to stop that. And so those people were all eliminated. The people in the army who were against Islamists were all eliminated. So for the first time, all of Ataturk's protections are gone. So now you have this very Islamist leader who's very pro-Islamist, and he just, with his forces,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Epris is a really important company, and I'm proud to be a co-founder there. I can't take credit for it by myself. There's a few other people who are critical. Nathan Mintz, Bomar, other guys. Grant stepped in and played a key role. The background on that, by the way, is I'd gotten out of defense for a few years because after Palantir, it's hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
conquered Syria because of what's going on in the Middle East for Islamists. He also now is wiping out, reportedly, huge numbers of Kurds. You can go look online. I think a lot more Kurds have died in the last month than people in Gaza have died this entire last year. And you're not hearing protests about it, I guess, because there's no Jews involved, but it's crazy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're just killing off the Kurds. And by the way, a lot of the Kurds were close allies with a lot of my friends in the special forces who had to deal with stuff over there. They were our friends. And they don't have a country, which I think they should. A lot of their territory is inside of Turkey, a lot of it's inside of Iraq, a lot of it's inside of Syria. And they're the Islamist enemy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The Islamists don't want these guys to have their own country. And so he's wiping a bunch of them out. And I'm very scared what Turkey does next. Turkey has nuclear weapons, because it's in NATO. It's a wild card. Are they going to go after and help the Islamists take out the Jordanian king? I don't know. But there's lots of really scary things. So I think Iran's on the run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We need to finish off the whole story with Iran, but now there's this other Islamist threat there that's a wild card that we're going to be dealing with and figuring out. That's pretty scary to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You know, China has a bunch of advanced new technology in all sorts of areas, whether it's hypersonics, whether it's massive numbers of submarines, whether it's all sorts of new projects they're working on that I'm sure I don't even know about. all sorts of things. They're trying to copy SpaceX. Thank God we have SpaceX, and they don't, but they're trying to copy it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I don't know if you've seen the videos, it blows up when they try, but they're going to get there eventually, probably. Elon's really smart, and we have a really great program, but eventually they catch up and they do things in space, which scares me. What am I scared by? I'm scared by the space stuff, to tell you the truth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's very funny, everyone's like, don't weaponize space, don't weaponize space. And I agree, I don't want there to be wars in space, it would screw up a lot of stuff for the world. At the same time, if someone else weaponizes space and we don't, we're kind of screwed. I have no insight into what's going on in space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I don't have any clearances around this, and so I might piss people off talking about it, but I'm not clear, so I'm just going to go ahead and tell you a few things. But the number one thing I'd say, there's a natural network effect in space where it's very cheap. For the cost of one aircraft carrier,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
you can put up probably 150,000 things up there that you can accurately drop on people within one meter. And they're much, much cheaper than missiles. And if someone does that and no one else does it, then the person who has that first, you can never launch a rocket again because it's very easy to see if a rocket's being launched and you can just take it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So there's a network effect that really scares me that if there was going to be a war, whoever conquers and has stuff up there first that's really good could probably stop the other guy from getting stuff up there. I don't want stuff exploding in space, but it's just such a powerful thing to own for any future battle. We need to be thinking about it. I think some people are thinking about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm not sure our budget reflects that we're thinking about it enough. By the way, this is why a lot of us were usually in favor of Space Force behind the scenes and really glad that President Trump started that. It's obvious you need Space Force. We're talking about how warfare changes. The space thing is a scary angle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You have to go talk to senators, you have to go to the DOD. It's stressful stuff. I built companies elsewhere, like you mentioned. But then we saw in the early 2010s, we saw a lot of our smartest friends in China were being forced to have their engineers work on military projects. And we said, wait a second, this is not good. And then we saw our defense primes
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's a big one. I mean, the other thing in general is that, that I guess I'm most afraid of, is that China has about 200 times our shipbuilding capacity, if you want to say. And I think you probably talked about this before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
In World War II, you get these, like, I have this cool painting at my house in Montana, our ski house, of these American ships hunting down a German warship and taking it out. But we needed multiple ships to do it because the German battleships were actually better than ours, I think. Now, America...
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
battleships, destroyer, we don't have battleships anymore, but American destroyers, everything else, they're way more advanced than Chinese. But, you know, if someone has 200 times your capacity, that's really scary because eventually they have a bunch of them hunted down, right? And so the question is, what the heck do we do? We need to get our capacity up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So my friends and I started this company, Saronic. We're going to hopefully build 500 ships in Austin next year, working with a bunch of the admirals, a bunch of the best people in the Navy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We're teaching them how to use AI to have swarms of these weaponized vessels and how they can work together with the fleet and how we could eventually have thousands of these in any kind of mission or battle scenario. Because that's really what you want, because for the cost of one big ship, By the way, all of our shipyards are delayed. They're all behind. It's pathetic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're all run by administrators of turbulent relations. So this Navy is just way behind and broken. So we need to have an alternate path to help create thousands of these ships that have turned the bad guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, but we really don't want there to be war in space because it may be the case that you start just blowing up certain things. They figure out how to get missiles or whatever and to blow up certain things. And then you have lots of junk up there and then it's just a giant mess. I think Starlink's really good for the world. I don't know if anyone destroys that shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's what we were just talking about. Exactly. The reason this is so important, man, is that there's no interfaces right now for controlling one-to-many that actually work, right? So if you ever play StarCraft or Warcraft when you're a kid, right? Oh, yeah. And so there needs to be modern AI-enabled versions of this. One of my...
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Friends is a really impressive video game guy who built Riot Games with League of Legends and stuff. There's tons of really great American talent around there. Part of what we need to be doing is iterating on and practicing on what interfaces work for these things. Right now, if you have a drone, there's five guys flying one drone in the Middle East, which is fine for that project.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's not going to work for a battle with thousands of these ships. If you have a Hellscape, it needs to be some AI. I still want people in charge, but the AI needs to be augmenting them and helping them, just the same way your troops were in your Warcraft game.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
were not able to attract the best talent at all. So we had in America, these defense primes had all consolidated in the 90s, and obviously Palantir had to compete against them in software side and crushed them. But their hardware side was also going downhill. It was also getting worse. And this is a big problem that China's getting better. It's getting worse here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, so Anduril is the one that Palmer Luckey, who got kicked out of Facebook, and my three-pounder colleagues started. And it's doing the Roadrunner we talked about. It's doing a bunch of other great stuff. It's a really important company. What do you think about Neuralink? I think it's cool. You know what actually is really neat?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's a bunch of talent for Neuralink's move to Austin, where we are. A lot of their tech talent, people have shifted out of California. A lot of the head people are there. They're making amazing progress. There's probably all sorts of things you can do with Neuralink eventually, with people who are paralyzed, fix that with back pain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's a little bit scary if you really get a high bandwidth into your brain, maybe see what's going on. I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know everything about that. Yeah. I mean, does that worry you at all?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Well, I would say I trust Elon and the people working on it, but in general, having companies have access directly into the brains of huge numbers of people, if it spreads to be a thing that lots of people are touching, that is a little bit of a scary kind of concept. Overall, it's really positive. Overall, for the near term, 100%. There's guys, I can't even imagine. I'm claustrophobic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I don't know about you. I don't like being stuck in a small space. Imagine if you're paralyzed and all you do is blink your eyes. There's guys who are literally getting this thing and suddenly they're able to effectively communicate, play games, do all these things that otherwise they were trapped in their head. It's like a God's gift for for a huge number of people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So it's like, is it a good thing? 100% it's a good thing. But sure, if we're going to speculate 30 years from now where society can go if we're all plugged into our brains, we got to make sure that crazy things don't happen, obviously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's all sorts of these amazing things you could do with this. So I think for people who have issues or are injured, it may even be, like Elon said, at some point for a really bad back pain or something, you could just adjust it and stuff. So there's lots of really, really... I think we're going towards a golden age. It's really positive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think whenever there's these positive things, there's always some negative possibilities. And it doesn't mean we should stop doing the positive things, but we should just keep those in mind and do our best to make sure we avoid them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You know, even at the Stanford Review, there's a version of that that was going on there. It wasn't called wokeness back then. It was political correctness run amok, run out of control. And it wasn't as extreme back then. There were bad things. There were dumb things. But it was always like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then it turned out the Xi Jinping guy is clearly a commie who's going to try to confront us. He's going to be a serious adversary. And that got scary. And then a bunch of my friends, three of the best guys from Palantir with Palmer Lucky, started the Android. And so we backed that early.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
it was always like there's just generally, you can kind of assume there's going to be common sense in charge and things weren't that broken. And I noticed things really started to get crazy, maybe 2014, 2015. It's like something in society snapped and all of a sudden you just had all these like, irrational activists and it wasn't about truth or what was right anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it was just like everyone had to virtue signal and go along. And if you're not virtue signaling and going along, you're a bad person for saying anything else. And I remember it started getting crazier and crazier. There were these like Black Lives Matter groups, which were clearly like they'd be on TV saying, we are Marxist trained, we're Marxists.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And then my friends who are not Marxists would be like giving them money. And like, guys, these are Marxists. Like they believe in like creating division. That's like part of what you study as a Marxist is how to divide society and how to break things. They hate you as someone who's building things and creating things. They want to take it and give it to everyone else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they're like, yeah, Joe, but this is like the thing to do right now. We want to be helpful. And I was just like, I've always argued, it's drove me crazy. Like, why are you giving these people money? This is insane. That was literally their answer?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
This is the thing to do right now to promote racial justice. We're just trying to be good citizens and show that we care about black people. What the fuck is that? If you want to steel man something, there have been things in our country from 80 years ago, 60 years ago, that were particularly egregious that should piss everyone off, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
In World War II, Secretary Knox didn't want any black people fighting in the Navy, and was kind of a dick about it. And there were even some of these heroes, like Dory Miller in 1941 in Pearl Harbor ships. gets attacked, he goes and he saves a bunch of these people carrying him out. Then he's never even trained. He runs up to the anti-aircraft gun and he shoots down four of the Japanese Zeros.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it basically convinced me at the time, looking at all these things and looking at Android, we better get back involved in defense. So we said, okay, we're back involved in defense. What are we going to do? We need to get more of our best and brightest from the tech world, which I'm lucky to come from and have access to, to work on these problems. And we mapped out about 20 different areas.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's total badass. And they still treated him like shit because he was an African-American at a time when people were being treated like shit. So I think there's this generation that's traumatized correctly from how horrible we were. And I think that's still in the psyche. So that's the steel man. Okay, there is something there we should be remembering and pissed off about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But then the answer is not to do things that divide us further and to spread Marxism. It was very weird. It was very cowardly because everyone kind of knew, yeah, this is kind of wrong. It doesn't really make full sense, but I don't want to think about it. I just want to go along because I don't want to have trouble in my life. And so this is swept through our country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah. It's just like this anger. It's just like just anger expressed aggressively and righteously. And it was people fanning the flames of that anger and that divisiveness. And it's really sad because I feel like in the 1990s, we'd got to a really good place in our society where it had become much less racist.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Everyone of all backgrounds was much more optimistic on how we're going to work and live together. And I feel like there were frankly these race grifters who just reignited a lot of stuff and cause a lot of trouble. That's the perspective from my perspective. And the woke stuff's not just about race, by the way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
The woke stuff is about just general illiberal energy and a general kind of like it's not about truth. It's about conquering things for the far left and demonizing anyone who stands in their way. And it's just a very scary time in our society in the last decade. And a lot of our universities have basically been been conquered by these forces, by these neo-Marxists.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's all, like if you stand up and you speak out against anything that's part of their Omnicos, they do their best to crush you. And if you're a professor in a history department, in a sociology department, in an anthropology department, like you do not allow any professor to join who doesn't agree with your kind of woke view of the Omnicos and your neo-Marxist view.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
for quite a long time now, we've not been graduating professors who even understand, you know, the history from the other perspective. And, you know, John Stuart Mill, one of the great kind of like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
liberal theorists, liberal in a pro-liberty sense, in a classical liberal sense, one of my favorite things he would say is that if you don't understand the other argument, you don't understand yours very well either. And this is the case now in most of our society, in these institutions, is they don't actually deeply understand the other side because they've demonized it and they've kicked it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it's very dangerous. How are you combating this stuff? There's a lot of different ways. One way is as a leader to role model speaking out and role model courage. The classical virtues are really powerful against this stuff. The more one person shows courage, a few more people show courage, and it snowballs. Once people are showing courage, they can't get us anymore. They need us to be afraid.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And we decided to start EPRIS first and decided to build that because exactly the future of warfare seemed very clearly to be heading towards drone warfare. And it's just not sustainable to fire missiles at drones, right? You're spending a million dollars or $100,000 to shoot down something that costs a lot less than that. So you need a one-to-many effect.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Another thing, We got to create new media, right? You know, investor Barry Weiss is Free Press. I think that's really important what she's doing there. I'm an investor of my friend, something called Arena Magazine. We're trying to build more of these media sources.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Arena, A-R-E-N-A. Arena Magazine. Yeah, we're creating new, so basically what happened is there used to be all these things in technology world like Wired and Scientific American and TechCrunch, and they're all conquered by the crazy woke people who hate markets, hate America. And so I don't want my entrepreneurs going on a talk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
to this TechCrunch thing when it just constantly is attacking us online about us. Let's talk to something else. Let's build new media. So things like Arena, we're pushing, we're growing that quickly. And then I think University of Austin is based on this as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So my friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson, Neil's probably the greatest living historian, taught at Oxford and Harvard, really, really bright guy. And Barry Weiss runs the Free Press. We thought, listen, there needs to be at least one top university in the country that's not conquered by these goddamn Marxists. Man, I mean, when did the University of Boston start?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Our first class actually just started. It took us three years to launch it, which is pretty fast because there's lots of barriers, thousands of pages of regulation. The new universities don't want competitions. They try to block you out. The creditors try to block you out. But, you know, in this case, we found one that's pretty good. And we've got 92 students in the first class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
A lot of these kids turned down the very top schools to be there. The idea is pursuit of truth. The idea is, you know, it's a patriotic institution, but we have people who think on both sides. This is not like a conservative institution. And I wouldn't want to be. That'd be a failure because you need to understand both sides, right? But it's an institution that
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
really is going to engage with the last thousand years of great ideas and the great debates that kind of built Western civilization. If you look at Western civilization for me, there's three great traditions you have to understand. You have to understand the classical virtues and the classical role in Rome and Greece and all the wisdom that comes from that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's a core base of who we are, amazing stuff. And you have to understand I think Judeo-Christianity. I think you have to understand what the wisdom came from that gave us modern Europe and really the dignity of the individual, right? So I think if you only have this aristocratic, like, uber-Manchinichian kind of classical view, then I think human life becomes very cheap.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And that's very dangerous because I think Christianity has a lot of wisdom in the fact that there's a radical dignity to every human life. And so you have that base. And then on top of those two traditions, you have the scientific enlightenment and the philosophical enlightenment, which really started in the 17th, 18th centuries.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They kind of gave us this understanding of the modern world with Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and how trade works with scientific revolution, that kind of led to the industrial revolution, led to what we have today. So we have these really important three traditions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And if you want to be a top leader in society and you want to be an educated leader in society, I think our school should be teaching those traditions to these people. We should be engaging them, debating about them and applying them to today. And if we're not doing that with our leaders, by the way, that is what our leaders had who created our country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You need to be able to shoot cones of energy. And the thing we realized...
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Our founders of this country, they understood deeply and were well-read in all of those traditions. And they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our constitution. We're really lucky to have that. There's this amazing thing based on all that wisdom. And if we don't apply that, today to our modern problems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Instead, we kind of go off in these kind of woker nonsense directions, like we're going to break our civilization. So let's have leaders who are courageous and who know these things, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So 92 students is the first class. We're going to try to do more than 100 next class. You know, it's very funny. You're not allowed to be officially accredited fully until you've graduated the class. Interesting. So all the trolls are like, oh, the undercredited university. It's like, yeah, that's the rule, but we're doing our best, man. How big do you think it will get?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
really with the help of some really smart people like Beau and Nathan, is that it turns out that the chips in Silicon Valley had gotten to be so powerful and so fast that they can help you control power on very small time scales and get the power to hit the emitter and then fire way farther than anything anyone else was doing. And so the emitter was called gallium nitride.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Stanford and Harvard have 1,600, 1,900 kids. I'd love to scale that over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to go too fast because you want to have really top experiences for the students. There's going to be things that aren't perfect. There's going to be parts that are amazing that they love, and there's going to be parts that we've got to keep building, keep improving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I want to launch a master's degree in a couple years. I want to compete with Stanford and Harvard Business School and have an innovation master's degree where if you want to be part of the innovation world and you want to work with people who have built the top companies, come here and we'll teach you how to be part of our innovation world and bring you as a leader there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Obviously, there's a tech and STEM side, but again, we want to train leaders how to think about our civilization and how to be kind of fighters for America. We call them philosopher builders. We need more philosopher builders, people like Elon, who are going to fight for our civilization as well as build. Wow, how many applicants do you guys have? We got several hundred applicants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's interesting, the Common App is where most applications come through for most universities now. We're not allowed on the Common App until we're accredited. So our number of applications, even though it was still 100 in the first class, I think would have been a lot higher, but kids couldn't check it off on that. But we're still getting a lot of great people trying to come.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
How are you vetting the professors?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
uh so neil ferguson himself is a really great professor and then we have like we have a set of amazing people are we have a bunch of really really top deans who are who their job is help recruit the new professors and getting some pretty famous names applying right now and coming in so hopefully we'll announce some really great great new people but we have we have a really great set of about 25 really top professors that i'm yeah it's really fun for me actually get to learn from these guys too so it's it's a good set of people are you spending a lot of time there yeah i'm the chairman of the board and
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
trying to design this new master's degree, trying to make sure we create opportunities for the students, giving scholarships for really top students to come. Right now, all the students are on scholarship. I even give extra scholarships for really, really top students to turn down the very best places and come. And just trying to make sure it's a great experience for them. Wow. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Any scholarship? Was that? Any scholarships? Yeah, so basically everyone there gets their tuition covered right now, which is great. And we're giving scholarships beyond that, too, for great people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
60 Minutes was surprisingly positive. I really appreciate that they came and they looked at it and they gave it a fair treatment, which was great. Listen, when we launched, everyone attacked and mocked us. These other universities, they don't want competition. They don't want something else there. But we're getting a lot of positive news from a lot of people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think we have several thousand donors now. I think we have dozens of donors who have given over a million dollars each. So a lot of good supporters have come out of the woodwork and A bunch more are really helping us. It's a movement whose time has come. In America, it's what you do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
If things are broken, if things aren't doing what they can, you get together, you build something new, and it teaches everyone else. And so right now, you have dozens of other universities that are referring to us on their boards, that are saying, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? Why don't we take these ideas? Which is great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's just a super efficient way of shooting. Gallium nitride. Gallium nitride. It's a GAN, they call them. G-A-N is the element, you know, code. The gallium nitride, these are super efficient emitters and these exist in other places too. It's a big breakthrough that was really started to be used in the last kind of like 10, 15 years in a bunch of different contexts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's the whole point, is let's bring everything back in the same direction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So basically what we do is we work in states, not in DC for the most part. It turns out there's 50 states in our country and our founders intended stuff to happen at the states. This is called the United States. This is an alliance of states. So that's supposed to be where most of government actually happens the most in our country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Like obviously we have federal, state, and local, but states are supposed to be. Now federal has gotten too big, so it does too much right now. But states have a lot of power, and they're really important. And we've seen, obviously, people moving between states a lot, because some states are doing the right things, some states are doing the wrong things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And so there's a lot of different ideas for how to make things work better. You can test and prove out at a state level. And what we tend to do is we like to fix broken systems. We like to fix things that governments usually have a stake broken or special interest is broken. So for example, I'll give you one I like is vocational education. Vocational education was a lot more prominent in the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
in the 60s and 70s. And a lot of people said, no, let's send them to college instead. It's racist not to have everyone go to college. It's bad not to have all poor people go to college. And it turns out a lot of people went to college. They get these studies degrees. They don't come out with any real skills or any real jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think they should be doing what they should to get a great job. And a lot of people agree with me. So we fund these vocational education schools. They're starting to come back up. The problem is, what if it's a badly run vocational education school? What do you do? How do you decide to fix it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So for example, in Texas, there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools teaching you to be like a high-end manufacturing job, like really good jobs coming out of these if you do it right. But they weren't working that. They weren't working nearly as well as they could. And so what we did in Texas is, Texas said, we're going to fund these schools based on the average salary coming out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So we're going to tell each of these schools, you better figure out how to get your students succeeding. And if you do, you're going to get more money. If you don't, you're going to get less money. And you know what happened is the school started saying, okay, what skills do we have to teach? What businesses do we partner with? How do we figure this out?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Salaries doubled coming out of these schools. No kidding. And so that's the example of where you could take a law. So we draft the law. We kind of go to the legislature, find the sponsors, go to the governor's administration, convince them it's right. We help write op-eds along with the people in the legislature. And we have to hire lawyers to draft the appropriate law for that state.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You get all the stakeholders involved. You say, here's who's not going to like it. These special interests aren't going to like it, but here's why they're wrong. You kind of prepare them ahead of time. We have this 20-step process, and you partner with all these people in the state, and you get the law passed, and then it fixes the problem. How fast is this spreading?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It takes usually two or three years to get a law done, and we've been doing it for eight years. We got dozens of laws passed in 17 states last year. We have teams in 20 states now. What you'll do is you'll hire someone who used to... be the lieutenant governor or speaker of the house or whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
But it turns out if you use the AI chips, get the power to hit the gallium nitride, you're taking a bunch of power and you're kind of condensing it into like a 10,000th of a second or even less of a thing. And so you have this burst, it's a super fast burst and the burst is intense enough because it's so condensed that when it hits the drone, when it hits the electronics, it fries them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they're a lobbyist, but it's the coolest type of lobbyist relationship because lobbyists are usually sick of having to help businesses try to ask for things for themselves. And these guys charge us way less than anyone else because they get to work on something they agree with. And so you'll hire these guys, like, yeah, this is really cool. I get to work on this with you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And they'll work, because every state's different. Every state has different ways behind the scenes of getting things done. And so you just have to do it and push it through. But rather than play the lobbying game for the bad guys, it's playing it for the good guys, which is a lot of fun. Are you guys in Tennessee? We do. We do have teams in Tennessee.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Governor Bill Lee has been a great guy to work with. He has been. He has been. He's a strong governor. A lot of pro-freedom things here. There's a bunch of stuff we're working on for next time. I apologize. I should have checked the notes for exactly what we're doing here. It's all good. All good. I just love that you guys are operating in here. You got a strong set of leaders here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think that all three houses, both sides of Congress and the governor are red, and there's a lot of bold things I think we can get done here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
What other states are you guys in? Do you know? We do a lot in Florida. We do a lot in Texas, of course, where I am now. You know, Missouri, you know, does a lot of stuff in Georgia. There's all sorts of places. We're all over the country. Arizona was a big place for us. It's harder now with the current governor. But even sometimes with moderate Democrats, we get along. I'll tell you what happens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Most of the time when our laws pass, we get people from both parties voting for them. And the moderate Democrats love a lot of our stuff too because it's like we're helping fix things with incentives and accountability. The far left hates us because the far left is tied to those government unions I was talking about. They don't want anything to be held accountable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They don't want spend to be tied to metrics because then they can't capture the spend for their corrupt groups. So the far left tends to be really against us. And so therefore, when you have a left administration, usually you can't get through the far left. But we're still getting a lot done in purple and in red states. What about homelessness? That's a big one for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So we've passed a bunch of laws in a bunch of areas there. So I come from San Francisco, remember, originally, in the nearby area. And San Francisco is just totally screwed because of homelessness. And what happens is you get these special interests, the NGOs, And these guys lobby for money. And then even 20 years ago, people were like, wait, we're giving you all this money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
How about we like tie the money to results or to outcomes or to goals together? And they're like, no, no, no, you can't do that. And they screamed and yelled. And they're so powerful because once they all lost money, they become the biggest donors. And so all the politicians don't want to piss them off. So they don't hold them accountable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And when you look at it, these NGOs, they started giving free houses to a lot of their friends, the people in their groups, because their houses are given out, of course. You started actually having incentive to bring more homeless there with super generous stuff. You started giving free drugs to all these people, because that's what the homeless people want. It makes them come.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
you know, destroys them. And then there's all sorts of things you do to kind of tune the burst and figure out how to actually do it most efficiently and effectively to fry these things as well. And, you know, we're now, I'm not supposed to say quite how far away, but you're shooting things down from miles away. You're shooting miles away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's just a total mess. I think the worst part of it is the vulnerability index for homes. Have you heard of this before?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
If you talk to the people in the very far left, they're not really big on incentives. And some of them are well-meaning, of course. And so they say, well, we want to give homes to people who need homes. It sounds like a nice thing. But, of course, there's an infinite line in America for homes. Everyone wants a free home. It's okay. We have to prioritize people who are more vulnerable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So how do you prioritize them? This is something that came from both HUD and a bunch of these blue cities. So they said, you get more points towards a free home if you're on drugs. If you're on drugs. You get more points if you're not in a recovery program because you really need it better. More if you're not in a recovery program. You get more points if you commit a crime.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You get more points if it's a violent crime. More points if your kids are truant. So basically there's all these points you get for bad things and they say, well, these people deserve a home because they're going through all these bad things. I'm like, no, no, no. If you give them points for bad things, you're creating an incentive. So you look at our cities and say, why are they so effed up?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Is you literally have insane amounts of money being given out based on points for bad things. And so we like followed a homeless guy around and a bunch of homeless people around Austin, try to be helpful and we map it out. And like one of them goes in The first time he goes in, he says, I'm trying to look for job training. What do I do to get out of my situation?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And this young, blue-haired, progressive woman says, no, no, sir, you deserve a home. And I'm not sure we're going to have enough from right away because Republicans aren't funding us enough, but you deserve a home. Sign this. Here's how you get your tent. He's like, oh, I was going to stay with my cousin. And she said, don't tell me that. It's better if you have a tent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You're going to get home sooner. So he gives her the tent to go set it up in the city. And he comes back two months later. And he doesn't quite qualify for a home. And he says, but you know, I heard that if I was on drugs, I'd be more likely to have a home by now. And she said, yeah, that's technically true, but we don't like to think of it that way. Can you believe that? This is enraging.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, exactly. Why do you think I get so involved in policy? It pisses me off. It's crazy. It's breaking our country. And so we passed a bunch of laws in Georgia and Florida and a couple other places where we're actually just completely fixing the incentives, completely getting rid of this nonsense. The red states still need to hold these NGOs accountable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There's these really sketchy NGOs and it probably shouldn't be illegal to run one of them in the red state, but at the very least, if you get any money from government, you should have to be way more transparent on your outcomes, way more transparent on everything you're doing. Because a lot of these things are just actually lobbying groups for the extremes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it's not just, it's not just the, it's not just like the little tiny, like, you know, you know, DGI drones or whatever they're called. It's like, you know, these are the big things that Iran's making for Russia as well. They could take down quite a far distance away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Do you think any blue states will start to adopt this? I think so. And this is one of those things, is you have to first do it somewhere and prove it works. And then it becomes clear that the moderates are going to do it and the blue state to fix it as well. So I think that is the fight. I have a lot of friends who are moderate Democrats in SF, and they're fighting hard against the far left.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That's the battle. It's the moderates against the far left. And I think the moderates are going to win, and they're going to start putting in these accountability, putting in these incentives. defunding the stuff that's corrupt. That's what we have to do to fix our cities. I'm bullish it's going to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's a really tough battle because there's so much money for these extremists in our country right now. In California, there's over 2 million people working for the government. They all have to give a piece of their paycheck to the government unions who then are part of funding this whole complex.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So there's a lot of corruption in our country and there's a lot of money going towards the wrong things. But you know what? I think, like I said, there's a vibe shift. It's a vibe shift away from the bureaucracy, away from the cowards, away from the people who are acting based on guilt. And it's going towards greatness, going towards courage. going towards kind of like a positive ambition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So I think we're going the right way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, and that's really similar in some ways to the vocational thing we talked about. Obviously, they're different systems, but think about it. If you're running a probation system, if you're running a prison system, Whether or not you're on the right or the left, there's certain things we want to have happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We don't want people to have to go back to prison, but we want people to succeed and not commit a crime, right? If someone's going to come out of prison, you want them to have a job, right? You want them to be employed. So what do you do? You want to create incentives in the system for the people running it to hit certain goals, to have more people come out and be employed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And it turns out there's lots of programs that work to make people more likely to be employed, and there's lots of programs that don't. And in fact, right now, most of our prisons, they're terrible cultures. The guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards. It's run badly. There's exceptions to this, but most of them run really badly, and there's bad leadership.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And what's really cool is you're not just doing it, so you're doing it for bases, you're doing it for forward attacks, but you can like put these things, you put smaller versions in the cones. So for example, you know, Anduril's Roadrunner, you've seen that, right? The thing that takes off and lands again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And I mean, you can't automatically create good leadership, but you can replace bad leadership. You can incentivize good leadership. None of our states do this pretty much right now. So it's just stuff like that that we're trying to work with the governors and work with the legislators and like, let's just make these systems work better for society, you know? Am I missing anything with this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Well, you have to have really great people around you who are in charge of each of the organizations. Somehow Elon stays as CEO. I don't know. I think he's an alien. He's great. He's a genius. But for me, I can't be in charge of all these things at once, nor would I be as good at it if I was trying to do all of them. It doesn't make any sense. So you get someone who's better than you at it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And I work as usually a chairman with them or as a co-founder with them. and we partner together. The more you can surround yourself with attracting more and more great people who come and want to work with you, who are inspired by stuff you're doing and want to be part of it, the more advantage you have. It does kind of snowball the advantage. You just try to find and get really great people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We don't always get things right. Lots of our things screw up. There's lots of mistakes you've got to iterate. It's not like we're not infallible. We're making mistakes all the time, but you've just got to do your best to push in the right direction. Do you want to talk about any of those mistakes? Anything big that you've learned from them? Oh, goodness. There's everywhere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I mean, there's just a general thing. For me, you asked how I do it all at once. I think when I was younger, I thought I could be in charge of a lot of things at once. And if you're in charge of too much at once, then a lot of it starts to break at once, and then you're really screwed. So my new rule right now is I'm only responsible for the failure of one thing at a time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I'm going to take that advice. It's important, because especially once you start to have your success, it's happened to all my friends who've been really successful, is that all of a sudden you try to do a lot at once, because you're like, I can do that thing, I can do these five things. And it turns out, no, actually, now you're totally screwed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
So you really want to have other people who are each responsible for whatever's going on. You want to have teams that are great, that are responsible. By the way, they have to own a piece of it, too. This is why nonprofits are really hard for me. Because I get a lot more for-profits because I'm for-profit. The people there, they own a big piece of it. They're going to sleep thinking about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You can put it in one of those missiles, and that one's not going to work as far because it's a smaller form factor, but that missile can get up and get pretty close to the bad guy drones, fire a bunch of them, and then come back and land. And so there's things like this that you do now, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're waking up thinking about it. Equity works really, really well. You give people real upside and things and then they own them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
We have a pretty big talent network. We spend a lot of time on this. We have fellows and people we nurture and take relationships with at about 20 different universities. We have people on our team who spend a lot of time figuring out where is the top talent right now, making sure we're helpful to them, make sure we get to know them, be in the right circles. But I'm still figuring it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's one of the reasons I'm happy to be on here. Maybe some smart person will hear about it and want to come work with us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think some of the, I mean, obviously defense stuff's really exciting. I think some of the bio stuff for me is really important because it's cool because it's saving lives. Defense does save lives too, but there's almost nothing that feels more pure than when you build a therapeutic company that's actually treating and saving lives where you invest in one of these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can keep things functional, you know? Wow, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Leonidas is the first version of the product that's being forward deployed with CENTCOM, and it's just going out actually in the next month, which is great. The tests have shown you could do about 100 drones at a time in certain contexts. 100 drones at a time? If they're together and flying together, and then the thing moves, so you fire, fire, fire. You know why it's called Epirus?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Epirus was the bow of Theseus. Theseus was a guy who started Athens in legend, right? And in legend, his bow had infinite arrows. And so that's the point here, is you're firing electronic power, so you effectively have infinite arrows. See, this thing can fire thousands of times. And each shot costs almost nothing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And if they want to, they could shoot it down right now with any number of different types of missiles, I'm sure. But this, exactly. I mean, I think there's probably rules from the FAA about, there's always regulators about what you could do on shore and where you could do it and how you could do it. But eventually, you'll probably have things like Leonidas protecting stadiums, protecting airports.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
That was another reason we started it, by the way. When we were building Palantir, One of the big focuses was stopping terror attacks and working and partnering to stop terror attacks with the United States intelligence community, which I think we're very helpful in doing. And so I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a sick thing, but what's a bad guy going to do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
You kind of have to put yourself in the bad guy's shoes. and figure it out. And one of the things a bad guy could do, which would be horrible, maybe I shouldn't talk about it too much, is you can attack a stadium. You can get lots of little drones. You can put little explosives and cameras on them. It'd be really scary. So I think our stadiums are going to need to be defended by things like this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Yeah, it pisses me off. That's crazy. There's some really amazing judges I know who are, one of them actually was just involved in this, well, it doesn't matter, really great decision against the SEC last week. But they would go down to the border and they assign them to help because they're overloaded with the cases.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
And some of the Biden administration judges were letting in people on the watch lists. And they're like, what are you doing? You can't let them in. He said, no, we're instructed to let in everyone. I'm still saying that, I don't even believe it, but this is what I'm told by multiple people. I think Chip Roy, the congressman, wrote about it as well. Isn't that crazy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
They're letting in these people into our country. What are they doing? What do you think they're doing? I think it's this weird ideology where they just, A, they're probably trying to spend a lot of money while bringing down inflation by bringing in more people, and B, it's just some weird open border ideology. I don't understand it. But the fact that you'd let people in, even on watch lists,
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I guess they think it's not actually dangerous. I don't know. These people don't think in terms of like you and I, in terms of there's bad guys and there's good guys and we got to keep people safe and we have this like adversarial relationship with some other countries. It's almost like they're just like extremely naive people who live in a different type of world than we do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's weird stuff, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
There could be someone who's that sick in the military-industrial complex. I mean... I fall in between these factions because on one hand, I think we wasted trillions of dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq and probably shouldn't have been there in the way we were.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I think we had to do something after the 9-11 attack, but we probably shouldn't have gone and stayed there and spent all the money and all the lives. But at the same time, we do need to stop the bad guys from causing problems. But yeah, I think there are some pretty sick people who are much, much more aggressive about just always being at war, which is terrible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
It's not sustainable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
This is the goal. We're not cost-plus people. I think there's this really sick disease of people that their whole incentive is cost-plus. They just want to use more of their stuff and sell more of their stuff. Their incentives are pretty screwed up. I think the better way to do it
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
is uh exactly you gotta you gotta you gotta make things you gotta make things much much much cheaper and better and then change the incentives around have it be more like a software thing not like a you know not like a thing where you're just selling as many as possible at six percent i mean you gotta that brings up a whole another topic i mean what about your personal security i'm genuinely curious i mean you've got to be off you know lockheed
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I thought you meant killing all the terrorists. I think the guy who runs Lockheed, Jim, he ran American Tower. He's a great businessman. He's not from the military industrial complex himself. He's been brought in to figure it out and fix some things because there's some things that are broken there. He seems like an honorable guy to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
I don't think those kind of guys are... Let's be honest, I'm a step down from... Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and Fain. They're both 15 years older than me. They're both important mentors to me. They're my co-founders. I think they're the ones who have more security than me. We have my security guy outside. I'm not that worried, though.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2138 - Tulsi CONFIRMED, Trump Pushes UKRAINE DEAL
I have mentors in the Reagan administration who came in looking for these things, and those people were not technical. And so when they went to the bureaucracy and they asked questions, there's so many ways of obscuring and blocking and deterring. And so what Elon did is he got root access and he went to the tech systems themselves. No one has done this ever.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2138 - Tulsi CONFIRMED, Trump Pushes UKRAINE DEAL
No president ever has had tech people around him. And they went to the systems and they started finding things like, oh my goodness. And these people who work for the agencies try to confront them and say, no, you can't look at the systems. You're getting around all of our ability to block all this stuff. We thought you'd never actually get to see any of this.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2138 - Tulsi CONFIRMED, Trump Pushes UKRAINE DEAL
And they're freaking out because they're looking. And so it's very transparent. They went to the systems. They actually saw the payments and the payments were going out to crazy.