Joe Lonsdale is an entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Palantir Technologies. What is Palantir really about? You’ve probably heard the name, but what do they actually do, and who’s the brains behind it? Today, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale joins to break down the company's origins, his story, and where the future of the world is headed. Expect to learn how Joe got Peter Thiel to mentor him, how Joe thinks about ambition and drive, how to avoid cynicism, the advice Joe has for people who want to become best at what they do, if Trump is a mastermind with these tariffs, the biggest problems Joe see’s with higher education at the moment, how to judge a good founder, what the future of warfare looks like, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Palantir really about?
You mentioned you'd just been with Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. He talks about non-fungible people, like N of ones. Mike Israetel, good non-fungible person. Yes. Who are some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm. How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful. And it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need to assess founders. You need to assess businesses. Yeah. Everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Joe Lonsdale find Peter Thiel as a mentor?
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.
So that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things.
right so you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills skill sets you might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads right the tech lead or whatever it might be but uh and i guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking congress or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself and if you're in there blinking too hard it's just not going to look right
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...
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.
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?
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.
So we definitely do work with these people, but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the organization.
Right. What do you learn from your time with PETA?
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Chapter 3: What qualities define a great founder?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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