Shawn Ryan Show
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Wed, 18 Dec 2024
Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor known for advancing defense technologies and national security innovations. As a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, he helped develop powerful data platforms to address global threats. Through his venture firm, 8VC, he has supported startups in AI, cybersecurity and battlefield intelligence, driving innovation at the intersection of technology and defense. Lonsdale is a leading advocate for emerging military technologies, particularly directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and microwave systems, which he sees as vital for missile defense and counter-drone operations. Committed to fostering public-private partnerships, he works to ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of defense innovation while maintaining ethical oversight. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://patreon.com/vigilanceelite https://shawnryanshow.com/newsletter https://shawnryanshow.com/collections/shop Joe Lonsdale Links: X - https://x.com/jtlonsdale Website - blog.joelonsdale.com YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Joe_Lonsdale Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joe-lonsdale-american-optimist/id1573141757 Firm - 8vc.com Policy Group - ciceroinstitute.org University of Austin - uaustin.org Sesh - https://seshproducts.com/shawnryan Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sean. Glad to be here. Man, I am super excited to talk to you. I've been following what you've been doing and a lot of your different companies for a while now, and... I know you're a busy guy, and I just want to say it's an honor to have you here.
You're involved in so much with technology, and also I love what you're doing with the University of Austin. I'd love to hit on that, but I really appreciate you coming, and I've been looking forward to diving into this for a long time. I'm excited to be here. It's an honor to be on the show. Thank you. Thank you.
But everybody starts off with an introduction and we could go on for probably an hour here, but I tried to summarize it up here. Joe Lonsdale, you're a real titan of industry and innovation, a man whose journey from Silicon Valley to the halls of policymaking reads like a modern-day epic.
You're a Stanford-educated visionary who co-founded Palantir Technologies, a company that's become synonymous with big data and analytics, helping governments and businesses worldwide to make smarter, more informed decisions. After Palantir, you ventured into the world of finance and founded Adipar. revolutionizing how wealth management works, making it transparent and data-driven.
Of the nine U.S. defense unicorns, billion-dollar companies, you founded three and were one of the earliest investors in another three. You're deeply invested in education reform. You co-founded Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies.
Your influence extends into policy with your involvement in 8VC, a venture capital firm that doesn't just fund startups, it pushes for policies that encourage innovation. You've been an advisor to leading political figures, advocating for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges.
You shape the ideas of the future with your op-eds and articles that often delve into intersection of tech, policy, and culture. You're a father of five kids. You just had your first son, and you've been married for eight years. Yep, that's right. Congratulations on your son. Thank you, Sean. He's not a second percentile. He's a big little baby. Yeah? Nice. Healthy boy, huh? Yeah. Well...
Joe, I want to do a, I want to do a life story on you starting from childhood and get into all of your different companies and involvement, uh, with different things that you're in. But, um, but it just so happens that, uh, you know, I've been super interested in your company, Epirus. And, uh, I've had several conversations with your business partner, Grant for standing and, um, and, uh, love him.
Amazing guy. But, uh, We got a situation going on literally right now in New Jersey with all these drones, and nobody seems to know what it is. So I just want to kind of start the interview right there. What the hell do you think these drones are? This is funny.
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?
But if it's not ours, what the heck, man?
It was like two years ago, we're freaking out about a spy balloon traversing the United States from Washington all the way down to South Carolina.
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.
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.
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?
I assume it's ours because if it's not, that's insane. Why wouldn't they fly this over Area 51 or some testing grounds?
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.
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.
Do you think this might be a distraction? From something going on in the Middle East? I don't know, maybe some... Some bad juju's going on somewhere else and they're just throwing these things up to distract everybody.
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.
Well, I mean... Drone warfare is becoming obviously very prevalent. Absolutely critical.
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.
So, you know, people... One of the reasons I'm bringing this up is obviously I'm just extremely curious of what your thoughts are. But another reason is, I mean... You know, I've been reading reports on CNN. People are posting the neighborhood watch groups and the Facebook groups and stuff, and people are, they're freaking out. And what I find,
probably isn't a coincidence because I believe in a higher power, but you have, you founded Epirus. And Epirus is a directed energy, basically a directed EMP weapon. And it is, I mean, it seems to me from the reading I've done on it, it's... It's defense against drones.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You need to be able to shoot cones of energy. And the thing we realized...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So how many... How many drones could one of these, what do you call the actual weapon? Is it Leonidas?
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?
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.
Wow. Wow. I'm just... So that gives us hope. So basically, all these drones in New Jersey, if we wanted to, they could deploy a Leonidas. Take it down that way.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, I mean, we just, I had a former CIA targeter in here just a couple days ago. We just released the interview now and actually yesterday. And she's talking about, you know, there are at least 1,000 very well-trained terrorists within our borders right now.
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.
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?
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,
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.
It's weird stuff, man.
Do you think that they want something to happen for a particular reason? to start a war? It's possible. I mean, if they come in... Yeah, it's possible. And do another terrorist attack, then we go right back to war. That spins up the military-industrial complex.
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.
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.
Yeah, you know, that's one of the things, that's one of the things I love about what you're doing is, you know, with the traditional military industrial complex companies, you know, we're shooting down $500 drones with million-dollar missiles. It's crazy, man.
It's not sustainable.
With a company like what you have, Epirus, it's not that way. It's an energy weapon.
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
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
For those guys, that's funny.
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.
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.
Right on, man. There's a lot of money at stake here for those companies, Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, companies like that.
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.
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.
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.
Does that make sense? It does make sense. It does make sense. All right, let's break from warfare for a second and let's rewind. Let's go back to your life story. Where did you grow up? Grew up in Fremont, California, the East Bay, near Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
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.
So it was a very serious commitment from the age of like 6 to 12 or so.
Who's the best chess player in the family?
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.
And they said, Daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore. They're getting married. I'm working on it.
Nice, nice. What kind of games were you into?
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.
How old are you?
42.
Okay, so same age. So yeah, you grew up with Nintendo. Nintendo, Super Nintendo. Right on. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. Right on. What got you so interested in tech?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And they actually rejected me in my first year I applied there. So I applied again. I got in sophomore year.
No kidding. Yeah. What was it like, I mean, I don't remember what it was like back then, but Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sachs, Reid Hoffman, I mean, were these big names in the space?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's good to have you in there. After PayPal, you went on to build in social media. What were you doing in there?
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.
What caught your interest in national security? It sounds like you made a switch there.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
So I ended up getting to know a bunch of these Secret Service and FBI guys around 2001, 2002.
I don't remember that at all. How long did it take you guys to solve that problem?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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,
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.
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.
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?
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.
From a layman's term, it seems like it helps predict
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.
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.
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.
100%.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
man that's uh that's great to hear i don't have much trust in anybody in government but um there's some good ones every once in a while who really care and you just gotta partner with those you know becoming one of the top serial entrepreneurs in the 2000s i mean what are some what are some lessons learned you know when it comes to building companies you know
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't ask this about your childhood, but I'm curious. Did you grow up in a fairly wealthy household?
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.
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.
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.
How did you... How did you get going? You're talking about lessons learned and basically what you're saying is hire the best tech people there are. How were you able to find the capital to afford to bring that in?
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.
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.
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.
Wow. What kind of percentage of ownership are your shares like?
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.
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.
Wow. How long did it take you to start? I mean, was there a turning point?
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.
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.
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.
Man, that's super inspiring. So from Palantir, what was next for you?
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.
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?
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.
And I thought it couldn't be that hard if we're running data globally for all these intelligence agencies and defense stuff to do this little finance thing. And so we started it off and it turned out it was a really hard problem as well. It took about, again, about three years to get it to work. It was called Adapar.
But today Adapar is doing really, it took us a long time, but Adapar is now by far number one.
in the country we just crossed seven trillion dollars reported over at a par so so it's a leader in that space you just crossed what seven trillion dollars reported over out of par so if you think of like a big investment advisor a big bank with wealth managers or family offices even some of them here in nashville you know with friends you mentioned like those guys are probably running their family office and their wealth off of that apart to do all their data and reporting and decisions and
How does their accountant see it? How does their lawyer see it? How does they bring together all the information, figure out what to do next? It's really good for finance to be more data-driven, because if things are not data-driven, it becomes an old boys club. It becomes just like insiders, just doing things like insiders do.
Whereas once you have all the data, it's able to bring in and help new solutions work and help people actually break into it. So I think it's been a good thing.
Very interesting. Very interesting. We're talking about all things pretty much AI. What is powering all this stuff? Because AI takes a tremendous amount of energy, from what I understand.
Yeah, because a lot of those companies initially were just in the cloud, and that was a pretty expensive thing. Amazon and others and Google and Oracle set up these big giant things that made a ton of money, like the infrastructure powering the cloud, powering things like Atapart. was become a big business.
And now all of a sudden, there's a whole new infrastructure, of course, with NVIDIA chips and everything else to build for AI. And this is like a trillion dollar investment. And it's one of the biggest investments we've ever made in infrastructure in our civilization to power all this new AI stuff we're doing. And I'm sure you guys on your team are using it for different things.
We're each using it for things. We're going to need more power. A lot of us are big fans of nuclear, but right now we don't have a lot of nuclear in our civilization. We do have some, by the way. It's 20% of what we do is about that. But a lot of us want to ramp up nuclear. I think this administration is going to do that. But a lot of people want to ramp up solar in different ways.
There's a lot of good options for how we do this, but it is a big problem to make sure we do that if we're going to keep growing this stuff. Is solar actually a realistic option for AI? Yeah. You know, so the problem is, it's actually funny, there's this term I like.
So a lot of people, the old term is clean energy, of course, because they call it cleaner, which I don't know if solar panels are that clean. It takes a mess to make them, but it's clean in the sense that when you're using them, they're just very clean. There's another term called intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is stuff that's not always on, which is wind and solar.
So if you're going to use intermittent energy, first of all, we've probably oversubsidized that, because if you have too much intermittent energy, it just screws you, right? Because it makes energy cheaper when the sun's shining, and then everyone's screwed and you have to pay people even more who are running all the time when the sun's not shining. Batteries are getting better.
There are certain things, for example, with air conditioning, that works really well because you need more energy anyway when it's sunny outside. I think solar is a big part of the solution. But I think for the base load, I think natural gas and nuclear are the obvious things to scale off for now.
Do you know anybody that's working with cold fusion?
There's a lot of stuff. There's a few different companies. There's one called Commonwealth in Massachusetts that a bunch of my friends are invested in. It's interesting because Fusion is one of those things where for a while, when I was younger, I was just really skeptical because it's always supposed to be coming and you're like, this is never going to come. It's crazy.
But it turns out you can actually map out the ratio of the energy you put in to get out and you graph that. If you graph that, it's called the I think it's called the Q ratio or something. If you graph that, it was like 0.2 like 10 years ago. So you only got back a fifth as much energy out and it kept going up and up and up. And now it's over one.
So fusion is now over one in terms of energy coming out. I don't know exactly. It's like 1.2, 1.3. It starts to get really economic around 1.5, 1.6 and really economic at two. And it looks like if you graph it, it's going to cross. I think it crosses two in the early 2030s. I think some of these new designs make that very likely. This is not something that just happens magically.
There's a ton of billions of dollars of work. But one thing I will say about America that's awesome is even people I disagree with politically I have a lot of friends in the tech world, for example, that might be on the other side.
But there's people on both sides, including Bill Gates, including all sorts of other guys, who are putting just a ton of money into this fusion research, these fusion companies. And I think we're going to get there, and I think it's really, really good for our civilization if we do. If we have cheap energy, man, that helps everyone, but it helps the working class more than anyone else.
Because it just makes everything cheaper. And I think it's a really good chance we get there.
Can you go into a little bit of that? Because I don't think people understand why... cheaper energy would really help the economy and middle-class, lower-class homes. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the cost of everything.
Cost of food, the cost of driving your car, the cost of building stuff, the cost of building a manufacturing plant for things you buy, the cost of running the manufacturing plant. Everything comes back. to energy. If you make energy cheaper, you make everything cheaper, and it means all of us can afford more stuff.
And by the way, it's not just like, if you make energy cheaper, it's also then cheaper to clean the environment. It's cheaper to make things more green, right? So there's all this stuff that just, in our society, there's just tied to that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the fusion side, we just haven't had the technology, but this big investment might get us there the next decade.
Do you think that big oil and gas lobbyists have something to do with it?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm hoping. I mean, a lot of people, me included, are very concerned about our power grid. Yeah. And so I would like to kind of hang out on this subject for a little bit. Sure. A lot of people are seeing rolling blackouts. The power grid structure is extremely outdated. It's old. It doesn't seem like it's getting updated anytime soon. How much is our outdated power grid holding us back?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you concerned that China manufactures a lot of our energy equipment?
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.
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.
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.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Where do we start with updating the grid? We're talking everything from power lines to power plants to transformers.
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.
Let's take a quick break here. Awesome.
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We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We had a little side conversation about the incoming administration, and we're both pretty fired up about it. Who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular?
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.
So I'm so excited about this.
I mean, how fast do you think they're going to start cleaning this stuff up?
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.
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.
And I think they're going to have a lot of stuff ready for day one.
I mean, where do you think they're going to start? You think they'll go from agency to agency? Will they do it in sections or will it be all one big sweep at different stages?
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm ecstatic that Cash got in there. I think he is going to do a phenomenal job. What do you think about Chris Wray resigning? Why do you think he did that? I think these guys are probably afraid at this point.
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.
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.
Do you think we're going to see some mass pardons?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've never thought of that. Interesting. Well, let's move back into... I know we already talked a lot about Epirus, but I'm just fascinated with the subject. So how did that even pop up on your radar? What was going through your head when it started?
With Epirus when it got started?
Yeah.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
So what would you point the weapon at? If you wanted to take out a, could you take out a city?
Yeah.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
But yeah, you definitely want cargo planes no matter what, I think. So you definitely use them.
What other type of stuff are these things going to be deployed on? Naval ships, I would assume.
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.
100%.
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.
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.
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,
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if you don't charge cost plus, then you have this whole better framework.
You had mentioned that Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, these companies, the big guys, you guys are underneath them. Do you see that flipping?
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,
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.
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.
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.
You know, you had mentioned Facebook kicking him out because of a billboard. What do you think about Zuckerberg trying to get in with the conservative crowd? It's pretty interesting to watch the, you know, I mean, well, four years ago you kicked the president off your platform. Now you want to buddy up? Yeah. What's going on here?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. So you're basically saying he wasn't necessarily the catalyst, but he... He wasn't the George Soros.
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.
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.
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.
You're obviously a major player in tech as well. How have you kept that rot out of your companies? Yeah, you got to.
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.
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.
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.
That's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. Back to the future of warfare. I mean, what are some things that other countries are getting involved in that concern you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shit. That wasn't even on my radar. What about technology? Are you worried about, is China developing anything that you're aware of that we should be concerned about? Or does Russia have any technology that they overplayed their hand, maybe?
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Wow. Is there anything else you're aware of going on? I mean, that's fascinating in itself.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That space thing blows my mind. I mean, if that happens, we're not up there already. And with that one meter thing, when you had mentioned you could stop anything else from coming up there, I mean, that right there is global domination.
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.
Wow. That's fascinating. Let's go into Seronic.
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...
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.
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.
Man, you are involved in so many things. How about Anduril? Did I pronounce that correctly?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
100%.
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.
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.
Yeah, yeah. Let's move into... Let's move into fighting for Western civilization and your efforts to combat, basically, wokeness. Yeah. When did you start doing that?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is the thing to do right now?
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?
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.
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.
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.
And when I think of Black Lives Matter, I think of burning towns down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
What is the magazine?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Man, man.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How are you vetting the professors?
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
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.
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.
I mean, it seems like you guys are getting a lot of interest in there. I saw it was on 60 Minutes. What is the media saying? It sounds like there's a lot of trolls.
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.
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.
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.
That's the whole point, is let's bring everything back in the same direction.
Man, I love it. I love it. Let's move into the Cicero Institute. Yeah. What is it? Cicero Institute is our policy group.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I think we're going the right way.
That's amazing. That's amazing to hear. I also see you're involved in trying to fix the prison and parole systems.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What else are you working on? That's a lot. I don't know. That's fun, man. I mean, how do you... You're involved in so many things. You've got five kids, you're married. I mean, how do you manage both the tech companies, the University of Austin, everything that you're involved in? How do you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're waking up thinking about it. Equity works really, really well. You give people real upside and things and then they own them.
How do you recruit them? I'm curious because I'm trying to build my company out and I have no business sense.
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.
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.
Right on, man. Right on. Do you have anything particular, one of your ventures that you're the most excited about?
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.
So there's a bunch of that stuff that's really working well right now. For example, I'll just give you an example. One example is this company, Orca Bio. These amazing founders we backed relatively early on, and they were able to sort cells one by one using semiconductor technology. It came out of a Stanford lab. And it turns out this is really useful for cell therapies.
And so cell therapies, there's been like a trillion dollars invested in cell therapies. They're amazing. So what they are is they used to be that all the pharma guys were chemists and they would do things with molecules and all the drugs were molecules. And then with Genentech and others in the 1980s, you had what's called biologics.
And so instead of using a molecule to treat you, you'd use like a peptide or an antibody, something that came from a body, right, to treat you. And that was a really powerful way to cure a lot more things. Now, instead of just using that, you're using a whole cell to treat someone. If this is a peptide, the whole building is a cell. It's a much more complicated thing.
Just in the last 10 years, we've learned how to program them and use them. All this is going on. But the simplest form of cell therapy has been around forever. For example, it's called a bone marrow transplant. So if someone has late-stage blood cancer, they're going to die pretty much for sure in six months. What you do is you can give them a bone marrow transplant, reboot the immune system.
Good chance it cures the cancer now. Unfortunately, it's like playing Russian roulette. You'll die 15%, 20% of the time with a bone marrow transplant, right? Because it could be rejected. It could just kill you. So you only do it if someone's about to die anyway of cancer, and then maybe it saves them.
Now it turns out with this new cell therapy sorting thing these guys are doing, they're able to make it so the rejection rate's almost nothing. And so as opposed to 15% to 20%, there's very, very few rejections, even those were not fatal. And so here's what's really cool about this.
Not only is that going to save thousands more lives per year of people who have these blood cancers, it turns out that when you reboot someone's immune system, it seems to cure autoimmune diseases. So autoimmune diseases are like Crohn's or multiple sclerosis, you may have heard of. We lost my aunt, unfortunately, to multiple sclerosis.
We're starting a phase one now with the FDA where we think we may potentially have a cure for multiple sclerosis. So there's stuff like this happening right now with bio that's really exciting. Man, that's incredible. It's fun stuff, right? There's like the breakthroughs coming out of our top universities with the latest technology. It's just really inspiring.
I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can keep things functional, you know? Wow, man.
congratulations you're doing just phenomenal things not only for the country but for the world and well i'm honored to be part of this stuff that all these other amazing people are doing too that i get to invest in and get to back and try to help because our man we live in an awesome civilization there's so many smart people doing so many great things here and we should be more positive about that you know i'm i am uh i'm just honored to have you here and and i'm so thankful that we met that you're an amazing human being who are three people you'd like to see on this show
At some point, you've got to get Elon on, of course.
He's the king of the moment. Probably my two most important mentors, Claire or Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, I'd say. Those are the guys I learned the most from in my youth. And they're both extraordinary individuals. Alex is my co-founder of Palantir, as was Peter.
And Peter obviously was co-founder of PayPal and was kind of one of the intellectual leaders that I think, even though Peter was not involved in this election, a lot of the things he created kind of led to this stuff happening. And he's someone I really admire. Well, maybe you can put a word in for us.
I'll let him know. But, Joe, it was seriously, it was an honor to have you here, and I hope to see you again. I really do. Thank you, son. Thank you.
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