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- [00:00]
Chris Williamson
You mentioned you'd just been with Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. He talks about non fungible people like n of 1s. Mike Isretel, good non fungible person. Yes. Who are some of the most non fungible people that you've met across your.
- [00:15]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean, of course, you know, you have to go with Peter Tail and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life. My original chess teacher, Richard Shoreman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like a intelligence officer and he dropped out. I think he faked his own death and he was kind of living in poverty, teaching chess and was like this chess master sensei who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting crazy people I met over the years. You know, really shaped my life.
- [00:37]
Chris Williamson
Talk to me about the story of how you sought Peter out as a mentor.
- [00:41]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review. And, and he was just someone who was, I thought, was just fascinating intellectual character at the time. And you know, honestly, what it was also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been interested in, is what are the most interesting, brightest, hardest working people doing. And a lot of the smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal and these are people I was really impressed by. So I said, wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want to learn from them too. And I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and who they are today, and that, that all these companies would come out of it like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and, you know, 16 others. But, but I did, I did know as a lot of the brightest people and I wanted to learn from them. And, you know, I had a very strong interest not only in computer science, but in economics, in history and philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet through the Stanford Review, I think you got along intellectually.
- [01:33]
Chris Williamson
How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful and it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need to assess founders, you need to assess businesses. Everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes.
- [01:51]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, it's interesting because you said earlier we were. I'm not going to say who you were saying it about, but, you know, anyone who like, is the one guy we both know who's, who's done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional and that's really impressive. Right? It's extreme. And so similarly, when you get people who are really, really bright, like really off the charts, mind's working great. Most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world. But you know, crazy means lots of things. But, but not able to be, to keep themselves functional in the real world because they're just too off the charts and a little, you know, too wacky. Maybe it's like extreme autism, maybe it's something else. But, but when you have people who are just off the charts and able to function in the real world, it's actually a pretty small subset. And, and, and I think you can usually it's a different type of person. It's like a certain type of ambition, a certain type of way of functioning. I'm not, I'm not saying that, you know, these are necessarily the most social genius normal people, but they're still able to function with that kind of intellect and that, that's a good combination.
- [02:44]
Chris Williamson
What is the advantage of being able to function in the real world? I think there's a lot of glory placed on the reclusive madman genius working away in the back room on his own.
- [02:55]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, I think no value judgment. Everyone can have like different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things. And you know, to, to me to do the things that impact the future of civilization, to build the stuff that's really hard to build, whether it's Space X or Palantir, which kind of broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or health care, education, those are going to, those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization. So that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things.
- [03:25]
Chris Williamson
Right. So you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills, skill sets. You might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads, right, the tech lead or whatever it might be. But. And I guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking Congress or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself. And if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not going to look right.
- [03:49]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, maybe I'm a little off and stuff, you know, too, but, but I Think I can at least still talk to the people, understand the systems, work with them. There are some people, we call them artists in our company. Alex Carp, always my co founder Palantir. I always refer to them as artists who are just absolute geniuses. You kind of have to protect them and put up with them, right? So it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like when you're running a military brigade and like you have an operation, you might have like a drill sergeant where you yell at them and you have to do this and do the push ups and run and do this and get this done by this time. And that's not at all how you deal with these like super genius, like slightly different technical people. Maybe some days they're a hundred times more productive and some days they're just, you know, they're working on something weird and they don't want to come into the office. And you just whatever you kind of have to tolerate a little bit that was, you have to protect them. Because most big corporations, they will spit these people out, right? A big corporation, standard corporation, they want you to fit in a box. Those artists will come in, they won't fit. They'll be gone even. And it's stupid because you're getting rid of someone who could have made you win in this whole category if you just could figure out how to morph the org around them and use them. So, so we definitely do work with these people, but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the right.
- [04:49]
Chris Williamson
What do you learn from your time with Peter? What are the things that have stuck with you?
- [04:52]
Joe Lonsdale
Oh gosh, so many things. He's always, he's always approaching the world from some kind of like orthogonal perspective and finding new ways to pick apart the most important reasons for things. Every time I see him, I learn something. You know, I, I wrote this piece online a while ago, like to my team about 15 years ago. It's like main lessons from Peter Thiel. So I won't repeat all of them here, but there were nine key lessons. I think one of them was to really value intelligence really highly. I think that was absolutely key. And so it just turns out the very brightest people matter a lot. One of them was, you have to break down like their actual reasons for things and their core components. And usually the number one reason should be like much bigger than everything else. So if you tell me I have four reasons for doing this business thing that means you haven't really thought about it enough. There's probably like one thing that's dominant. Those were really big. One thing that you always talked about was that effort on any project is convex. And what convex means. It's a shape of a curve where if you spend like 80% of your time focused on something, that's maybe half as good as spending 90% of your time focused on something. Because that was that last bit of effort. And like, it's. It's one of those things where, like, I think being 99 percentile is worth so much more than being 90th percentile also because that means you're number one and being number one is worth a lot. So there's. There's a lot of things like that that you just kind of gave me all these concepts that we all kind of learn when we work with them.
- [06:03]
Chris Williamson
Do you find it difficult to not divide your attention in that way?
- [06:07]
Joe Lonsdale
It's very, very hard. And I think the most important things I've accomplished has been when I've been able to really focus on something for a while. And whether I was Palantir, whether it's add a par, whether that's spending months on a thesis at 8 VC and a framework at 8 VC that we're going to work on for our investing, it is really important to focus. And, you know, you get to a certain point where I have obviously a lot of financial resources now, a lot of influence in the world, and so I'm able to help others who are focusing. But anything I invest in or do, it has to be someone really amazing is making it their main thing and someone the CEO has to be all in and, you know, for the things I do.
- [06:42]
Chris Williamson
Right. So an advice for talent is to not divide your focus at all.
- [06:47]
Joe Lonsdale
You really just need to, like, be courageous. I think, I think the. A lot of people in our culture nowadays, a lot of them want to do incubators or they just want to do a fun never having built something, or they just want to say, I'm going to help five different projects. And that, that's actually kind of like a form. It's a. It's a type of cowardice. It's a type of saying, I'm afraid because we're hedging. I'm afraid to go all in. I'm afraid to say, this is the best and I'm going to crush it. And like 99.9% of people who are crushing it and who are changing the world and who are really, you know, building the future of our civilization, they're. They're focusing on something how do you.
- [07:18]
Chris Williamson
Come to think about risk? It's sort of built into the conversation around courage is fear and uncertainty and risk and dealing with risk and stuff like that. How do you assess it?
- [07:28]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, I think we're all really lucky today versus the past. I think it is true that the conditions under which all of us evolved, if you go all in on something and you fail, you might have starved to death, you might have been eaten by lions or some kind of giant old cave bear, you might have been crushed by the local tribes. So I think we all evolved to have existential risk and to be really afraid. And it's not that it's great not to have money in our society. I can't, I can't speak to that. Obviously it's not, not great, but come on like it's not, it's not like 3,000 years ago where you might just get, you might just die if you don't succeed. So I think, I think there is enough of a safety net. And listen, it's easier for me to say that coming from middle class family when I grew up that I knew my parents would be able to take care of me if something didn't work out. So obviously I had some privilege. But I think a lot of people with that privilege still aren't willing, you know, to take the risk they should be.
- [08:13]
Chris Williamson
What about obsessing over perfection? Something else that I think Peter, that's, that's very big on 100.
- [08:18]
Joe Lonsdale
That really ties into the 99.9 percentile thing is like getting something just to be the absolute best. I remember working with him, I was 21 years old and there was some speech was going to go on in New York the next day and we were like basically pulling an all nighter with a few of the guys in the office to be ready to like have this thing was. It was about inflation versus deflation and the risks for both of those. And it was just, it was just a natural thing to do to just try to make it like absolutely perfect before we're going to go present to the investors. And it was really funny actually was with Ken how who's an ambassador now to Denmark. He was ambassador of Sweden last time. He's a good friend who's is our age and very successful guy in the background. And we were just like going back and forth with him and a few others just like working hard and jumping on the plane and sleeping on the plane on the way over. And it's just like everything has to be as good as possible and Pushes. You push as hard as possible, which is. If something was wrong, it would be like this. Totally unacceptable.
- [09:02]
Chris Williamson
How do you avoid that from holding you back? Think because perfectionism can be procrastination, sort of masquerading as quality control. It's like, you know, the classic west coast move fast break things mentality. Is there a tension between these 100?
- [09:19]
Joe Lonsdale
I think if you have really tight, fast deadlines is probably good. So it had to be as perfect as possible, given that it was coming due in the next day, but we weren't going to be able to work on it for five weeks.
- [09:27]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [09:27]
Joe Lonsdale
So I think. I think there is something about really making things as strong as possible. But. But sprinting and having really tight deadlines and getting it done right away. I think. I think if you use perfection as procrastination, then it becomes a problem.
- [09:38]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Well, I'm still interested in this sense of not getting distracted and trying to keep the main thing. The main thing, especially if your main thing becomes a varied thing, right? Like built into a lot of people's lives, especially as they end up getting to the kind of place that they want to is where you don't have to do things you don't want to do that much anymore. No one tells you what to do. So you end up in a world where you think, well, I get to choose. But with that comes a lot of responsibility because I have to choose now as opposed to before, where I just sat on the set of train tracks. It's got, do I want to go left, do I want to go right? The same for yourself. Do I want to invest in it, or should I sit down and spend six months working on a thesis? What about the skill set of learning to sort of let go of what was there, of how you operated previously, the sort of courage to. To do something new even as you've got something that's given you success in the past.
- [10:29]
Joe Lonsdale
No, it's. That's totally right. You do have to constantly keep adjusting for what makes sense today. And it's. It's interesting. There's different versions of this. One version is as you're successful, something you would have been really excited about before. You have to be like, I don't have time for that now. And because all of a sudden you could just have things you were really excited about before 10 times a day. And I do fall into this myself sometimes because there's lots of really exciting things to do and you have to. So it's like really hard to say no enough when you Go through periods where you don't say no enough. You might feel like you're getting stuff done, but not actually getting things done. And it's really tough. But what you said earlier about things you don't want to do, to me, that's one of the most important things that we focus on is what do you like to do? And as you're successful, you should probably mostly only do things you like to do. Because what like to do means to me anyway is that it's like stimulating your entire brain, right? So if you look at, like a grandmaster chess player and the very best chess players, when you map out their brains when they're playing, there's all these emotions that are turned on, there's all these full parts of their brains that are turned on, and it lets them be a lot better at what they're doing. And I think this is true in anything we do. If you really love it, then your whole mind is engaged and you're just able to bring, like, this, this power to bear on things that if it's something you don't really like, you're probably never going to have that top, top ability there.
- [11:39]
Chris Williamson
You know, it's almost matching up with what you said about being sort of the 99th percentile within an industry, accumulating the 99% of your brain power onto this.
- [11:48]
Joe Lonsdale
You have to. You have to be obsessed and love something. And like, this is not to say that, like, everyone should only do things they love to be successful because you got to do all the grunt work too. But then once you have a certain level of where you are, you should structure your company and structure your life where you do the parts that you love and you're good at, and other people could do the parts, you know, that you're not as good at that you don't love.
- [12:07]
Chris Williamson
Joe Hudson, who has just become the head of human performance at OpenAI, is like kind of an underground hero coach type person. I'm aware that coach has got a lot of icky associations with it, but this guy's fucking legit. Really, really great. And he says enjoyment is efficiency. And that's kind of, I think, referencing what you're talking about here, which is if you absolutely love something, it takes fewer inputs to get more outputs.
- [12:35]
Joe Lonsdale
100%, you can get into the flow. You could just be great if you love it. And so that's, that's how you should structure your life as much as possible, is what are the things that you love that you're good at that are worth doing? And that's, and then do more of those and do less of the things you don't like but have someone else do if they're necessary.
- [12:50]
Chris Williamson
How do you avoid cynicism? It's a very easy trap in the modern world.
- [12:54]
Joe Lonsdale
This is, this is the debate I was having with Peter Thiel earlier about stuff. He tells me I'm too naively optimistic. And he's like, you want to be kind of optimistic in general, but you don't want to be, you don't want to be like overly so. And you know, in general I think it's easier to be pessimistic and cynical. I think it's like an easier thing to be. I think, I think it's like you can just always say why things won't work. And it actually takes, it's a little bit of a challenge to say, okay, this is really broken. The system is really broken. Other people haven't been able to do it. How are we going to make it work? Despite that, it's kind of like a, it's kind of like being like the hero, warrior, champion to say, okay, even though, even though this is a mess, what are we going to do to make it work? And it's a leadership quality that I think if you bias towards that, it can be figured out. Often I've just found oftentimes things can be.
- [13:37]
Chris Williamson
Have you ever read Endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the anthropology. It's the best, I think, the best retelling of that. And it's really interesting because all of the guys had their own individual journals or diaries that they were writing in. And what you hear from everybody else except for Shackleton is what Shackleton's saying. But what you read in Shackleton's diary is what Shackleton was thinking. And it's this really interesting dichotomy between what he says and how he needs to show up as a leader.
- [14:12]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- [14:13]
Chris Williamson
And what he's thinking privately. And it's almost like a Bruce Wayne, Batman type split personality.
- [14:20]
Joe Lonsdale
What was he thinking privately?
- [14:21]
Chris Williamson
He is just swimming in self doubt and uncertainty and fear. He has no idea if it's going to work. He doesn't even know if he, if this is the right. But he goes out there and he needs to say to the guys, this is exactly the way that we're going to go. And we know that this is going to work and we're getting such and such. And it, it was the first time that I'd ever really thought because obviously the, the consequences are so dire. But it really made me think about, huh, there are prices that leaders pay that nobody else pays and that you can't share the burden of. And everybody, everybody has main character energy in their own life, right? Everybody is the lead star. They're the front man, woman of their own existence. And I think that a lot of the time we want to port that across onto the teams that we work in, the organizations that we're a part of. Go, okay. There's going to be some prices that you're going to have to pay for that.
- [15:11]
Joe Lonsdale
As, as a, as a leader, you have to suffer things that no one else suffers and you have to deal with the things no one else deals with. And it's actually really interesting because I, I, I invest in a lot of great leaders now and try to help them and try to mentor them. And it's very funny because you end up sometimes having to be their therapist a little bit because there's no one else they could talk to, I imagine. So the company, what's going on? And you know, we, we didn't really grow up with therapy in my house. It's not something I do at all. But I think, I imagine it's something similar when people are dealing with struggling through something really hard like this.
- [15:37]
Chris Williamson
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- [16:46]
Joe Lonsdale
Oh man. It's just there's all sorts of different versions of this. I think, I think one of the most common challenges, it's the hardest to diagnose because they don't come to you is, is this like excess, is excess pride and like not, not in like just like having so much money thrown at them because right now there's just so much money for the very best people in the stuff in AI that's starting to work. And so you get, you get this like. I think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges. It's like this overinflated ego and sense of. It's like a. I think all of us who are entrepreneurs have some narcissism. I think that's like a natural thing. But when it gets to a real extreme, that's really dangerous and you stop questioning and you, and you stop admitting when things are not going quite right because you can paper over it with the money you raise. So that's why that's probably the biggest challenge is that side. I think the, the other, the other side of things is just this, like even the best people will have a lot of doubt about what's actually going to work and self doubt and then, and then when things are just about to work and they've had to push really hard, there's almost always this thing that happens where like a bunch of people are going to quit because like it's not quite working. And then you got to convince them to stay a little bit longer. I mean you have to like find that like belief in yourself to push to those other people, right, to get it over the line.
- [17:50]
Chris Williamson
You're Shackleton coming out and saying, we know this is the direction. Don't worry, don't fear.
- [17:54]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean a Palantir about three years in like a few of the really key people were just like, this is taking too long. We don't have any major contracts. Like, this is just ridiculous. We're pretending we're like these kids who are going to like run the global intelligence, you know, framework. Like what is even going on here? I can't do this anymore. I have these, all these other offers to pay me a lot more money and you know, these shares are not clear, they're worth anything. And it was like really hard to convince them to stay. And then when they did, of course it worked. And then they're, you know, I think a couple of them are still running their company there now, so. Which is great. So. But it's, it's like these things that are really hard to, to push across the line sometimes.
- [18:25]
Chris Williamson
How do you advise the guys that need to keep their feet on the ground? You say gonna hang out with some of your friends from school and tell them to talk you a little bit.
- [18:33]
Joe Lonsdale
Like yeah, sometimes I'm a good person for it because usually I'm a lot more successful than them and I can make fun of myself having similar narcissistic tendencies and, and then you kind of like can bring them down a little bit by seeing like maybe themselves, themselves and you and like you can like if you can like, if you can like respect them by attacking what's wrong with them by attacking it, to me maybe they at least listen now because it like cuts the pride down a little bit. But it's so like there's sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle having, having been there myself and been sure I could conquer the world. And like you know, especially in your early 20s and you get late 20s, you get this energy that's just like nothing can stop me. And that's, that's like, it's both healthy but also has to be really careful how it's filtered. You know.
- [19:10]
Chris Williamson
Speaking of mentors, University of Austin. Yeah, our new place came from there, new place of residence. What motivated you to co found that?
- [19:19]
Joe Lonsdale
Well we thought it'd be great to have a world class university here. There's no top private university in Austin. We wanted to compete with Stanford, Harvard, mit, these others. We think there's some things that are still good about those universities but there's a lot that's gone wrong, there's a lot that's broken. I'm, I'm personally deeply concerned about. Just like you know, you used to have these young people would go to these places, you go to Harvard and it's like this like pathway to a functional elite. And it's elite that's like has a sense of duty and that has a sense of excellence and it's like it's clear where they're going when they're there. And I think we taught just implicitly in our civilization. We taught courage, right? We taught pride in our civilization, in the duty we have that we've built this upon hundreds of years of progress from the Enlightenment and from our classical values. And here's what the classical values were and the virtues in Rome and here's what the geo Christian wisdom was and here's all stuff that came from that. This is all stuff you kind of built the great Men of our civilization with these values. And nowadays you go to a top university and there's no sense of duty, there's no sense of pride in civilization. I think most of these kids couldn't even tell you what the classical virtues are anymore or have any idea about, about why they were important. Most of them, if anything, probably are dismissive of, like, wisdom from Judeo, Christianity, as opposed to appreciating how that shaped our civilization in positive ways, right? With a radically equal dignity of human life. And most of them, they've lost the lessons of the Enlightenment and how that was filtered into our government and what that means for the west and why America has been an example.
- [20:48]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [20:48]
Joe Lonsdale
If anything, I think we're taught about why America's terrible. And so. And then on top of that, I think the worst of all, so you miss all the wisdom. But then the worst of all is you're basically taught the opposite of courage. You're taught to shut up and go along. You're taught that if you speak out, there's something wrong with you, right? You're taught that. You're taught, you're taught that everyone's supposed to virtue signal. And so if you have a whole generation of our supposed elite that are all taught to be like, like beta and wimpy and scared, that's terrible for our civilization. That means. That means we're going to give up everything. And so, you know, I think even having one university that starts to teach the wisdom, but try to create people who speak up, who debate, who have the intellectual humility, not to say this is just my way of thinking of it, but to have actual debates where they listen and they learn and to go out in the world and to model that culture and model that courage for others, that's a really big deal for our civilization.
- [21:36]
Chris Williamson
What do you think other institutions are getting right at the moment?
- [21:42]
Joe Lonsdale
I think that some of these institutions are very good at teaching very narrow, advanced topics. Right. I think if you want to be really, really good at certain types of physics or chemical engineering or computer science, there are other top universities with other really smart people there, first of all. So there's a great network of smart people and there's professors who are very good at these, at these certain, certain narrow fields, and that's, that's positive. But I think there's like so much that's gone wrong with science. So much has gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology, that there's just, there's this. And you Know the other thing that's crazy, the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average. So you have more administrators at Harvard, Neil, than you have students.
- [22:26]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [22:26]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, it's crazy. It's like you think it's fake.
- [22:28]
Chris Williamson
What are they doing?
- [22:29]
Joe Lonsdale
They're doing, like, lots of policies for virtue signaling and for making sure that they can hire other bureaucrats and making sure these bureaucrats, like, put out all sorts of, like, you know, like stuff about whatever the woke topic of the day is and whatever programming they need for the students to make sure the students are, you know, feel guilty about their race or whatever. I don't know. The whole thing is crazy.
- [22:49]
Chris Williamson
Is that still going? I'm aware that it was a hot topic to be spoken about either as a virtue signal or pushed back against as, you know, sort of a flag that you plant in the ground to say no further than this. And that seems to have died at least a little bit. There's always a sense that those sorts of news stories catch fire when the rebellious outer party is the one that's pushing against it. And I think that, you know, if you're inside of the pen, the tent pissing out, as opposed to outside of the tent pissing in, it does give a different dynamic. But I kind of got the sense that how can these, after Yale scandals, after Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw over the last 18 months forget going back further? Like, is this really still continuing to ramp up? What's your perspective on this?
- [23:40]
Joe Lonsdale
I don't know if ramp up's the right word, but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions, Right. As the famous Communists discussed. And these institutions were conquered by extreme ideologues. Right. There's been multiple studies of this where the administrators are pretty much universally to the hard left of the professors, and they're activists. And so these activists have conquered these institutions. It's not like it's active. Conquer. Right. And so now are they going to be virtue signaling as much about things like DEI in today's culture? Of course they're going to be a little quieter about that because they don't want to get pissed off the donors and get fired.
- [24:11]
Chris Williamson
Wave the flag.
- [24:12]
Joe Lonsdale
So they're going to. They're going to. So they're not going to. They're not going to. But. But are they going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they going to, like, all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up someone else? No. Way. So, so, so there's a lot of naivety in our culture. Just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves were fixed. Right. And these things are still completely conquered. And I think people are. They think of it the wrong way. They're like, oh, well, it'll probably just fix itself. Like, no, these people are in charge. The layer of administrators are in charge. The professors run their departments. The lawyers at the university set the rules. And then the board of trustees has been completely stacked with people who are either terrified of being controversial in public or on the side of the administrators. And so there's. None of them are going to get fixed, which is why you got to build new ones. I mean, this is. And that's. That's fine. You know what? These are somewhat broken. It's sad. Let's build new ones. You know, that's. Let's. Let's build new great ones. That's what we're trying to do.
- [24:58]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Just because you can say the word retard on Twitter without getting banned, now that's a word. Doesn't mean. I know it is. It's gay. We're so back.
- [25:05]
Joe Lonsdale
Someone has to buy Merriam Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year, because they're not going to do it themselves.
- [25:10]
Chris Williamson
Very good. I learned about Sullivan's Law earlier today. Have you encountered Sullivan's Law?
- [25:16]
Joe Lonsdale
Remind me. I think I know which one we're going to have.
- [25:18]
Chris Williamson
I'm going to have to outsource it here. What's Sullivan's Law?
- [25:22]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, there's Conquest Law and there's Harding's Law, which is. Yeah, yeah, there's a. That's Sullivan. There's different ones. Ways of bringing it, basically. This is really interesting. And so another way of putting it for some people, they say if you don't explicitly make an institution right wing, it will get conquered by the left wing. That's what a lot of people believe, and that tends to be what happens. But I think it doesn't have to be quite so partisan as that. Like, the goal of UHX is not to be a partisan institution. And by the way, it'd be a failure if it was a right wing institution in the sense that there weren't. I mean, you want to have the smartest and best people there, and you want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with professors. Right. It's not a healthy intellectual environment if. If only one side dominates what you can do. And this, this is a little bit more controversial, I guess. But what you can do at the administrative level, you could say we don't want to be conquered by illiberal forces. What are illiberal forces? Illiberal is stuff that's against kind of the, the values of freedom in our society, against free speech. So illiberalism is communism that's specifically an illiberal force. Other authoritarian things are identity politics. And that whole culture that does seek to impose a lot of those things top down is very broken. It's a kind of a morphed new form of communism. And frankly things like Islamism, like the implied authorit framework of that is also something that's an authoritarian force. So those are the types of things you say. We're not going to let those conquer our institution, we're going to be explicit about it. But it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views.
- [26:43]
Chris Williamson
So what are the, other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you're trying to fix?
- [26:51]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, so when you have an institution like this, you want to bring in the top entrepreneurs in our country, the top innovators in our country, and you want to expose them to the students in a way where they're helping shape the courses. But you also want to have a lot of top academics on the humanities side. So we have what's called intellectual foundations on one side where we think every top college student going to a top university should be given the intellectual foundations of our civilization with history and economics and philosophy and the great books and just have that foundation. But then you also want to have courses that are shaped, not only stem, but stuff that's shaped by. I have over 100 friends who are founders of billion dollar companies who signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare.
- [27:36]
Chris Williamson
Right. So I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education.
- [27:43]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. I think having both and it. And this is a dialectic, I'm obsessed with these dialectics. But there's, there's like truth for why both of those extremes are important and you need to merge them and have them there. And by the way, when you merge them properly, it's really fun because you can get different debates about what's going on in the innovation world at a startup. And you could argue about that from a philosophical perspective and you'd apply some of the old debates from a long time ago. An old wisdom from a long time ago. Like imagine applying a Xenophone. This is a guy who was writing in 300 B.C. and he wrote about Cyrus the Great and his values and his principles and why he became so successful. And all the young European princes for like 1500 years were trained, were read Xenophon and read about Cyrus to train like, here's the values of who you should be to be a great prince and a great leader and what that meant and be able to have that and then talk about that in the context of a startup leader. We're arguing about and the principles is fun. You can mix these things together.
- [28:31]
Chris Williamson
What else is there to say on dialectics? Give me a 30,000 foot view of how you use them.
- [28:37]
Joe Lonsdale
Just in general, a lot of things are not simple truths that are either on one side or the other. Most of the time in the world when there's debates, there's actually deep truth on both sides. So if you want to apply it to the innovation world, I always love the dialectic and the product organization where on one hand you had like Steve Jobs or you have like the guy ran sodi in the 80s. Steve Jobs basically said, I don't care what the consumers, they tell me they want, I'm gonna figure out what's best, I'm gonna show them a breakthrough and then they're gonna love it. Right. And there's some really deep wisdom in that it's not what they're asking for. Like they didn't know how to ask for a car. Right. So yep, you know, they would ask for something with horses.
- [29:11]
Chris Williamson
So.
- [29:11]
Joe Lonsdale
So what's the breakthrough we're gonna give them? But then there's another thing that's actually really true even at Apple, which is that once you have a product, there's like a hundred things that consumers want that bug them. Especially in enterprise, there's like ways they're not able to use it for some reasons. They have like product needs. So you need someone like 14 hours a day, like mapping out all these needs and understanding them and prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it so it's as good as possible. So how do you, you know, if you, if you only have the Steve's job genius thing, it's going to end up being something that's like too clunky and people aren't happy with it. It won't get better if You. But then if you have these guys over here iterating, taking over then you never get the next burst of genius and it's really terrible. So how do you keep that genius? Like I'm going to tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing. And I'm, I'm slightly better. I've done a lot of products where I create them. I usually have someone else who's better than me at the 14 hours a day iterating process which is really important. They're two separate things.
- [30:00]
Chris Williamson
So you holding both of these in your mind at the same time.
- [30:02]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, you have to know they're both important and then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to make mix them together. And usually with dialectics the truth is on the extreme. It's not in the middle. It's not like some sloppy middle. It's like same more it's like you, you want, you, you want to have, you want to have like the really crisp reasoning of like just pure invention with like nothing interfering and you want to have the really crisp reasoning of iteration, you know, pushing it back. So, so, so in, you know, in, in in general, you know I'll, I'll give it like there's other one. There's the whole Nietzschean, there's a whole nichean perspective versus the geo Christian perspective. And so you know I'm. My dad's Catholic, my mom's Jewish, I grew up Jewish and yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole niche framework as a 14 year old. I thought was really cool. I don't know if you've read Frederick Nietzsche and the will to Power and all this stuff and you, if you get too into it and like one thing he talks about is how is how the most. The world's mostly driven forward by like the top 1% of like talented people in ubermens and they're the ones that kind of build the future and that they're the ones that matter in a sense of what the future is going to look like because they're creating it. And if you. And there's lots of truth that the very, very most successful people and most talented people, Thomas Jefferson called them the natural aristocracy. They do run things and drive things forward and it's really key now if you only have that side of the dialectic it's really dangerous. It turns out by the way that Hitler was very obsessed with that too. And that's dangerous. Right. And so what's the other side? Well, one of the great insights of Judaism that became a great insight of Judeo. Christianity is a radical equal dignity of all human life. Right. This is something that Rome did not have. Right. Rome celebrated like making, watching people kill each other and whatever. And they're not us and they're slaves and, and there's all sorts of kind of pretty nasty stuff. And, and one a big breakthrough with Christianity, with Judaism then Christianity was spread it all around was that actually every human life matters and every human life has equal dignity and that our whole civilization is based on that respect for everyone and for every life. And that's a dialectic, right? Because on one hand it's True the top 1% are driving forward the future, but it's also true that like every life matters and that you're not a good person under the GEO Christian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone. And so, and so does that mean that all of our money should go towards helping disabled kids and nothing should go towards like the most best gifted kids? That's what they've done in a lot of blue cities now which is, which is that they failed. They've got just only one side of the dialectic. Right. They've only helped the bottom. But it, but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either. You got to help both. It's like a you. Right. So there's things like this that I think if you understand, okay, there is a dialectic. These both matter. How are we going to keep both of these in mind as people running a society, as leaders in society. It becomes a helpful framework to understand.
- [32:37]
Chris Williamson
And is the middle way you go to die?
- [32:39]
Joe Lonsdale
That's like oh, we're not. Yeah. If you don't, if you exactly. You don't want. It's just, it's just sloppy thinking. We're going to, you know, you don't want sloppy thinking. You actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive and it's right thing to do. It's an, it's an ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and that we're investing a lot more in them. But you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years from now if you're not also accelerating the very top very aggressively which is something we've stopped doing in a lot of parts of our country because these, because these really brightest kids by be able to pick them out and then push them further ahead. They do create the future and giving them an edge. It's not that, it's, it's not that it's inequity. It's that we. I want there to be like an, like a hundred thousand extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future, they're going to cure diseases. When I'm an old man, they're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone. Right. So it's like you kind of want both.
- [33:26]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I suppose you need to be. The product needs to be as good as it can be. It needs to be perfect. You need to obsess over perfection and quality. And also you need to ship at a rate that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and start a great dialectic.
- [33:40]
Joe Lonsdale
Like how do you do perfection? And how do you do not. Not procrastinating and taking too long as these and these, These are. And it's tough. Dialectics are hard because there's no perfect answer. But you have to, you have to play with both extremes. You're right.
- [33:50]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I. You need to narrow your focus but also be open to new opportunities at the same time.
- [33:55]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. This is why it's so hard in the world is that there are these conflicting truths. It's like a, I guess they call it a cone. I guess in Japanese wisdom. Right. There's all these different, there's, there's two different sides of it.
- [34:05]
Chris Williamson
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- [35:35]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- [35:35]
Chris Williamson
And people try to collapse them down into a single position, but that's actually where stuff often goes wrong because these two things don't exist together.
- [35:42]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. Work on it. Exactly. And then there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate.
- [35:46]
Chris Williamson
What else. What are. What are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life?
- [35:50]
Joe Lonsdale
Reread my piece online before I came. This is a. This is a tough. What are some of. You know, I apologize. Nothing like right away is coming to mind. I wrote this long piece about this, like, 12 years ago.
- [36:00]
Chris Williamson
No, no. Well, there might be something that pops up in a bit anyway. AI in education. So the party that we were both at during south by Southwest, we went to that big dinner party and I was sat next to this fascinating guy and he was giving this what might as well have been a 90 minute long fucking TED talk.
- [36:17]
Joe Lonsdale
It's probably Joe Lamont.
- [36:18]
Chris Williamson
Correct. I was keeping it. I was keeping it.
- [36:22]
Joe Lonsdale
Sorry.
- [36:22]
Chris Williamson
Keeping it quite bad. I mean, you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want. He's great. I really appreciate it as well, that he wants to sort of be doing the thing behind the scenes without putting himself in front of the scenes, no matter how much I try and bring him on the podcast.
- [36:34]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. I shouldn't talk about him.
- [36:36]
Chris Williamson
No, he likes it. I mean, it was a fucking dinner party. But me and the sort of four people that were within earshot before the next. Whatever territory of conversation bubble that took over each one. Each person had a territory grab.
- [36:50]
Joe Lonsdale
This is such a key thing to push education forward this way. And the only reason it's not happening at greater scale is because there's no market mechanism right now of competition in education. Just because you have the best thing doesn't mean people are allowed to go to It. So we're trying to put market mechanisms.
- [37:01]
Chris Williamson
Can you, can you explain what it is that he's trying to do?
- [37:04]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. And, and, you know, in general, it turns out that if you personalize the app and personalize the learning, where you can map out like an ontology or a schema of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area, you can, and you can have something interacting with them. You could see where they're good and where they're not good. And a lot of times what happens, for example, is a kid will get, like, way behind in one area. They're like two grades behind, and they never get caught up because they never. No one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills. But if you have an app that's really good at measuring and teaching, then it turns out with two hours a day, you're actually able to get kids way, way ahead. And I think you can get. The majority of the kids in Alpha school, for example, I think are at 99 percentile, and some of them are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead and this with this personalized AI learning that, like, teaches, you know, to how they need to learn and it's what they need to know. And it's, it's amazing because in two hours a day, they do the academics and then they have time for projects and for life skills. And I think there's going to be schools they're doing where, like, kids get to play video games because these young men aren't studying otherwise being designed by.
- [38:01]
Chris Williamson
The guys that did Fortnite.
- [38:02]
Joe Lonsdale
I think he's doing some really cool things with that. There's, there's other schools for sports and for kids who want to get way ahead in sports. You're going to stay ahead academics for two hours, then you're going to train and you're going to be the best of the sport you want to play. So I think there's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and we could try out in education. And it's, it's awesome to see successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this, you know, for our country. It's really amazing.
- [38:22]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I, I found it very interesting. He was talking about the massively reduced prevalence of ADHD in these schools, because if you're running around for four hours a day and you're only strapped to something which is probably a bit more engaging and is at your level of, of education and is helping you to.
- [38:39]
Joe Lonsdale
100, all these kids are just being tortured. I think a lot of the way we teach at school right now is just like this torturous daycare that's terrible for kids and tax exactly two hours a day of the year level. You need to know you're going to be more focused, more interested than being able to run around, be in charge. I think. I think the Alpha school model is built on top of what's called the Acton School model. And Acton Academy is this really cool breakthrough where they just basically gave the kids a lot more control of the school and then got to build their own constitution, their own frameworks, and give them a lot more responsibility, which I think it's a very cool kind of.
- [39:08]
Chris Williamson
Libertarian model for the inmates are running the asylum. That's what you're telling me.
- [39:11]
Joe Lonsdale
It's awesome. And it creates this, like, responsibility. And it's just. It works. It works if it's done right. You still have guides and adults there, but it works. And then. And then I think on top of that, he's put, like, competitions. He's put, like, really good AI and listen, it's just like smart people getting together and building. And this is what education clearly, to me, should look like, you know, in 10, 20 years in America. And the real question at this point is, how do we roll it out to other places? And unfortunately, we have some really powerful special interests that don't exist for our kids. They exist for their own employment and the school administrations right now. And so that. That's going to be a big battle country.
- [39:41]
Chris Williamson
Is this Department of Education stuff a little bit.
- [39:45]
Joe Lonsdale
It's much more just like the. Just the teachers unions in general and the administrations locally in the school districts. Texas, for example, has something like 1200 school districts, and they're not accountable and they're overpaid. And it's just like, in terms of these administrators and stuff, and I don't even know what they're doing. It's just. It's. The whole thing is just, like, very sloppy. And there's a big war right now for school choice in Texas, but we're only fighting over putting $1 billion towards school choice, which is not big enough anyway. So it's like, hopefully we make that a lot bigger next time and just get a lot more parents able to send their kids. Like, the ideal situation is the middle class can afford to reallocate the money the government's giving them for education to go to one of Alpha schools or another school of their choice and not be stuck on something that's not as good.
- [40:24]
Chris Williamson
Is there a place for AI in higher Ed.
- [40:27]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. You know, in general. In general, I think a lot of like any kind of learning of math and science and any of that like can be driven forward with AI and you're going to start seeing a lot more of that too, you know, and there's probably lots of ways in which I think people already are learning in higher ed. Like what would Plato think of this, based on this?
- [40:45]
Chris Williamson
And why can't it interject? What, what, what will it struggle at? You know, you've thought a lot about the university experience. You guys are trying to give a more classical sort of approach, I suppose.
- [40:53]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, well, I mean a lot of the university experience is about being around other young adults who are exploring the world and learning and, and interesting professors and having intellectual environment where you're, where you're socializing with and you're exploring ideas with other people. And I think it's like it's really important to have this in person experience. I think that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing. And so I think that's not going to be something you just have with AI. You have to have people around you, you have to be learning, you have to be debating things in a classroom. And can AI make some of that better and augment it? Certainly.
- [41:28]
Chris Williamson
I mentioned university for me was kind of like Navy Seal boot camp for socialization. But it lasted five years and it is, it's the people skills for the most part.
- [41:41]
Joe Lonsdale
I was in the dorky fraternity at Stanford. I have friends who are in the cool fraternity so that sometimes they would still be my friend back then, which was nice, ended up working for me later. So it's good. But we're at dorky fraternity and I remember going to spring break and back then my friends like Joe, you can't tell the girls that you're a computer scientist. It's not cool. You have to pretend you're American studies or something. And I have some bad stories. We figured it out eventually.
- [42:03]
Chris Williamson
Have you seen what Jordan Peterson's doing with Peterson Academy?
- [42:06]
Joe Lonsdale
A little bit. Tell me about it.
- [42:08]
Chris Williamson
He's trying to give a university level education online and he's got some really, really interesting lecturers, teachers I suppose, and they're trying to get certification and they're trying to sort of assess whether or not people have gone through the course and all the rest of it. And I think it's great. But, but kind of like the realization that maybe many businesses have come to understand post Covid that there are many intangibles that are borne out from water Cooler talk and from being around other people.
- [42:41]
Joe Lonsdale
For me at least, if you're trying to do something that's like the high end Western civilization university experience, like that's Oxford, that's Cambridge, that's Harvard, it's Stanford. And these places now are more broken than they were. But there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs and whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of, you know, group or whatever. I think, I think having these, these things in your life are tough. So I think, I think what Jordan, Jordan's is really talented guy. I'm a fan of his. I think he's going to have something that's very interesting to learn online. I think, by the way, I think, I think we may do things we learn online too. I think it's a very positive part of that, but it's not the full experience.
- [43:14]
Chris Williamson
Can you explain to me what the going on with these tariffs, Joe, please?
- [43:19]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, this is always a dangerous thing to talk about for many reasons because I'm helping the administration and like, I'm like advising people on the DoD and HHS, which is the healthcare part, with all these different areas and I'm helping friends in Doge and I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on. And tariffs are very complicated topics. So that the kind of typical like libertarian framework is just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage. Right. And you have people who can specialize and there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all. For example, if you have like tribes, people making you vanilla or coffee, they're growing and they're very poor, but they're making a little more money now because they're selling it to you. And then you say, oh, we have a trade deficit with you. Like, like the guys growing the vanilla aren't going to start buying all of our products, right. So it's okay to have some trade deficits. Now the part where I think the administration frankly is like completely correct is there's a lot of like really unfair barriers everyone's put up against US companies all over the world. And it's not just tariffs, right? So tariffs is one problem, but the other problem is they just make all sorts of crazy rules that effectively mean no one other than their companies could sell in certain sectors. And every country does this.
- [44:24]
Chris Williamson
What?
- [44:24]
Joe Lonsdale
Like, like, like, just like the, the fruits have to be grown here, have to only be sold within a certain amount of time. Or a certain amount of distance from when they're for their grown. Or, or the cars have to have like all these exact specifications and it's designed specifically ahead of time where someone whispers it to all their companies and they, no one else passes the test other than them or. But there's all, there's always like different ways you can kind of of cheat and make rules to keep people out. And like all these countries do this and it kind of made sense. America was so dominant after World War II and it kind of made sense for how we were like building a global order with allies that we kind of gave them an advantage a little bit to work with us. And, and they did take away a lot of our manufacturing, you know, in certain areas. And then it, and then like we had this naive view that like if you just give China this like WTO entrance and you trade with them and make them rich, they're not going to be communists anymore. And that naive view was shown to be totally wrong. About 10 years ago. You have this crazy communist in charge. He's murdered a bunch of people. He's like, he's like completely in charge. He's not, he's not, he's not a pro market guy. He's not a freedom guy. He's, he's clearly like, he's, you know, in his youth he would sing poems about hardening your heart to destruction of America. He's clearly doing things to hurt America. And, and, and so, and so these people have taken advantage of us around the world. China's definitely not become free. It's definitely stolen away a lot of manufacturing base. And so what are the tariffs that are good? I'll give you a few examples. One tariff is definitely good. Let's say it's cheaper to manufacture something in like Indonesia or China because they're polluting and because the pollution to not pollute costs a lot of money. So that's obvious. First tariff that right away. Right. Because you don't want to just let them pollute. Right. That's. I don't think anyone disagree with that, no matter what your view is. I think another one that's good is that we need something for our defense industrial base where we need to be able to make it here in order to our defense, you know, department stuff like that. Or, or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever. Like, like obviously tariff some of that supply chain. We need it, we need it here. We need to build. Right. And subsidize it here. I think those are obvious. And then you get into more complicated things. You know, I'm generally pro free trade, but if you look at what happened, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, she was very pro free trade, and she opened it up to the EU. And in 1989, she said it was one of her biggest mistakes she ever made. Because what she didn't realize is that when she opened up UK to the EU market, they basically put Brussels as a bureaucracy in charge of everything, which was terrible. It's a total mess. And so. So you gotta be very careful what you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge effectively now of your rules. You give up sovereignty. So that's a reason it's bad. And then. And then, I mean, finally. And this is where it gets, like, everyone really argues, but, like, in general, I don't think small consumption taxes are bad. I think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes. So I think a small one probably makes sense. So, I mean, so listen, there's. And there's. And then. And then I guess the very last one, of course, is, yes, we went from 30% manufacturing to 10%, you know, over the last 30 years. Should all of that be in the U.S. probably not. Some of those jobs are just not things we want. Should more of it probably be in the US for more of what we do? Probably. So. So listen, it's not. It's not totally insane. I. There's. There's. There's dumb tariffs, which is like tariffing coffee or vanilla, and there. And there's tariffs that are too high to break things with our allies, but there are tariffs that let us take away these barriers I talked about and then put things back here. So it's not. It's not as crazy as people think. I think the way they implemented it was maybe a little too aggressive at first, but the reason they did that is to get everyone's attention. So we'll see.
- [47:34]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I can't work out. It feels like I'm in a. I don't know, Opposites day meets Groundhog Day back to back to back. I'm like, Is this a 7D chess move? Is this an error? And I. I'm unable to decipher what's going on, which maybe says everything you need to know about me in mind.
- [47:52]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, let's. Let's be honest. President Trump, I think he has very good intuition in general. I think he also, in general, loves to be the center of attention and have to have everyone come to him. So I think making that the maybe my personality would not have been to do as quite a big of a splash right away I'm like ah, freak out.
- [48:05]
Chris Williamson
Everyone printed off on a piece of pvc.
- [48:07]
Joe Lonsdale
But A, that's his personality and B, now they're all going to come make a deal. So you know what, there's different ways of doing things and, and this is, this is who this guy is and you know, if he makes some great deals over the next few months it could, it could actually end up being a great thing. So, so that I, I, I, I think you have to say that there's, there's a logic in what J.D. vance and President Trump think they're doing. And, and also, and the jury's still out up is my view.
- [48:27]
Chris Williamson
How important is this to US led global order continuing stuff like that?
- [48:33]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which, on which we're engaging. America has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world and that way we've been subsidizing it they would argue has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of capital and are able to invest here and around the world. And partner has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that have got hollowed out and I think, I think they want to change those dynamics a bit. Like I, I am concerned to have America still be a very important, powerful force of the world for good. I don't like the fact that even today thanks to the Biden administration's actions, if you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the Horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough to like enforce like, like freedom of navigation on the Red Sea. Like if you look at a graph, like a flex support graph you can get, you know, it's just a company that tracks all these containers. It's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world order is starting to break down because of how we're handling things. So there are things like that that aren't good and I think we should be stronger on them. But there is going to be a changing relationship for sure.
- [49:38]
Chris Williamson
Let's think about the intersection between two of your worlds. One being maintaining some US led global dominance and the other one being war and sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us over here, I guess just because there's two really fucking big oceans on either side. What, what concerns you and what do you think is overblown when it comes to people's worries about sort of global stability and stuff like that?
- [50:13]
Joe Lonsdale
What concerns me the most right now is the regime in Iran. This is a regime that was actively promoting lots of different terror organizations. They were, we've now find incontrovertible evidence that they funded the October 7, you know, attacks and rapes and murders. They've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about.
- [50:33]
Chris Williamson
And this is, oh, that's the, that's there.
- [50:36]
Joe Lonsdale
That's why they can't get through the Red Sea is the thing. And so for me, and it's actually really sad because I work with a lot, lot of Iranians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, just the Persian people, others, and they're the most talented people in our companies. There's some amazing people. And it's, what's really interesting is like the Iranian people themselves love America and even love Jews and Israel, but the people, it's like this country was conquered. It was communists and Islamists together and then the Islamists and then Islamists killed off the communists and they just took charge. And this is like, it's like a modern day country conquered by like crazy theocrats, right, who then like whip people and like execute 16 year old girls for being raped because it's your fault if you're rape under Islamism. And the whole thing is just like, like crazy. You can't make it up. It's like these are insane people who've conquered a country and are taking the money and sending it out to terrorists. And we're at a really interesting point now where we've basically cut off some of their most powerful like, like crazy terror people. And then there's these people in the country who desperately want to be free. So for me, and yet they're working as hard as they can to getting a nuclear bomb. And so for me this is very scary. And they walk over American flags every day at their government. They walk over, you know, and so they talk about death to America, they're trying to build a nuclear bomb. I think these people truly are crazy and I think that's, to me that's a really big danger and we could end it for a long time. So I'm hoping we do. That's, that's, that in terms of, in terms of overblown, I actually listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts in Africa. I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa by Islamists. That's a separate problem, but also one I maybe there's something to do about. I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time. Obviously, we're all very worried about China. The Russia, Ukraine thing is, is a, is a, is a mess. But, but I think overall, like, it's not like, it's not like Europe's in, like, tons of conflicts right now. I think, I think, I think overall we're a pretty good place if we can, like, take care of these few crazy people.
- [52:16]
Chris Williamson
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- [53:30]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, you know, after founding Palantir for a while, I didn't do defense because it's so annoying to have to work for the government. I built companies in other areas and then I went back into defense about 10 or 11 years ago because really what happened is we saw Xi Jinping again take over China. We saw him forcing a lot of our friends to have their best engineers in China working on, on things with the pla. And it was clear he was becoming, like, very militaristic and Then it was also clear that they were innovating and doing things that were ahead of some of, some of what we do here.
- [53:55]
Chris Williamson
What light?
- [53:56]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, they had better hypersonics in certain areas. They were starting to do swarms of drones that could attack in different ways. And it just, it was just none of our defense hardware companies, none of the big primes, you know, have. So what a prime is, is that in the 1990s, the Cold War ended and we had all the best companies in defense, but we weren't going to spend as much on defense anymore. So they all merged and they formed these like nine giant companies. These companies started to become very bureaucratic, almost like they're arms of the government. And then in the late 90s, all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating. And so these big companies just fell way behind in software, way behind and all these new possibilities. And so China had this new dynamic sector and we had this kind of old sclerotic legacy failing things. We're like, oh my God, we gotta get our best people to work on this. And so my friend Palmer Lucky, who we'd backed at Oculus before, he partnered with three Palantir guys to form Anduril, which is a very famous company now. It's raised at 30 billion plus valuation. And then shortly after that, I'm like, as we back that, we went all in and now we started Epirus. Epirus is named after the bow of Theseus, which had infinite arrows. But it's the best EMP company. So we could shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation. Right. So it's just really cool at turning off swarms of drones. And so what's happening now is you have swarms of drones in the air, you have swarms on the, on the water. Here in Austin, we're building hundreds of smaller ships and we're teaching the Navy how to use AI to weaponize autonomous vessels. And then you have things under the water that are new. You have things in space that are, that are fighting. And so you have all these new possibilities, new missiles, new ways of turning off bad guys. And it all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.
- [55:26]
Chris Williamson
Is this the quickest moving that sort of warfare technology has ever gone?
- [55:33]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, warfare's changed a lot over the years. One of my favorite books was the Shield of Achilles, which is like this thousand page book on constitutional government in Europe. And it shows how every time there's Like a new form of warfare. That's best. It changes the government's, the structure of governments as well, because the structure of government has to be able to support that form of warfare. So for example, if you need like, if like a knight who's fully armored with modern technology could take on like 50 peasants, everyone needs to make knights, which means you have this very feudal society that forms. And the feudal societies conquer Europe. And then the other. Another example of this is like, if you have all these aristocracies that came out of the feudal societies and run certain ways, and then suddenly you're able to like mass produce rifles and give everyone a rifle. The aristocracies have to sort of become republics of some sort because you can't give everyone a rifle and have them fight if they're the kind of your, you know, your slaves or your serfs or whatever. You have to kind of. So Napoleon goes after Europe and it forces the aristocrats to basically like give up a lot of their power and arm everyone to fight back. And it's such. Totally changes the form of government and, and, and, and there's, and it's. So you have had warfare change a lot over the years. And you, you have. This concept is interesting to me is defensive versus offensive warfare. So, so the question is, what's better? So it used to be defense was much easier. It's really hard to take a town, right when the Ottoman Empire at its height, you know, even, even, even, even the, Even by the 17th century, you know, September 11, 1683, the height of their empire, the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and save the town because it was taking them too long to take it before the Polish and French knights could get there. And then of course the canon becomes stronger and all of a sudden with the cannon, it's just much easier to build like, just like massive empires all over Europe. And you know, I think right now we're going through interesting change where I, I do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before, thanks to emp, thanks to the way swarms can, can cover shorter short distances and they kind of block things. And so I do think this does favor asymmetrically city, city states in small countries once again to be very, very powerful. It's, you know, for the cost of one aircraft carrier, you could have a hundred thousand missiles in space. They can land on anything effectively with these, with these rods. So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard to, to break through defenses. And I hope that's where it goes. Because in some sense it used to be at all these free city states all around Europe. That was a good thing. And then you had the kind of jerks build the empires and like take away their rights and maybe we can have like small states again. Because when you have lots of small states you can, you can kind of, if someone gets to be too annoying, just go to another one. So I hope that's where things are going, is the defense is stronger. But that's an important question. We'll see.
- [57:54]
Chris Williamson
What was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against? What happened over the last 44 decades or so? What was it that were the innovations there that we're now trying to push back against?
- [58:09]
Joe Lonsdale
Oh gosh, there's all sorts of these things in different ways. You know, it's, it's, I mean I, I mean, I mean there's all this like smart bombs I think were like the big thing for the desert storm that we hadn't had before where you're able to basically target everything and take it out really precisely and just like, just like completely like surprise and wipe out, you know, Song of Sands army in a way that was just, it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air. And, and, and you know, I think like, I think the, the new thing today that we're seeing in Ukraine of course is that, is that it's like you can all of a sudden have like 20,000 or a hundred thousand things at once in a semi coordinated way actually move and attack and in swarm and it's just, that's really, really, really hard to beat. And so, so you are seeing things just changed entirely.
- [58:56]
Chris Williamson
So the EMP solution is a way to stop using million dollar bombs to take down 500 drones.
- [59:03]
Joe Lonsdale
We have this video for Epirus where there's like these like thousand drones coming at you and then these like old fashioned people are trying to mean you can take out a few and like what are you going to do? Like it's, and it's crazy. Even people who only have like 5 drones attacking our ships were spending these super expensive missiles exactly million dollars to shoot down something that's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars. And yeah, so if you can get, it turns out that you want to have all the power hit the Gallium Nitride, the emitter at about the same time. So you have these AI chips that control power on very small time scales and you get all the power hit the gallium nitride at once, which means gallium nitride is an emissive material. It's the most efficient emissive material for sitting out a ten thousandth of a second burst of microwave radiation. And if you do it with enough power, the microwave radiation is so strong that it can even turn things off miles away, depending how you do it. And so basically, you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming in. It's like a Star Trek shield, and you turn them off.
- [59:58]
Chris Williamson
That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I've had a bunch of conversations Erik Prince was on, and he was explaining to me about what's happening in Ukraine at the moment. And. And it's so funny how we've got a sort of evolutionary mimesis happening in warfare where you have tanks. The tanks have some vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The drones are created so that they can be flown into the particular weaknesses on the tanks. The tanks weaknesses get patched up. The drones get a little bit bigger, a little bit more sophisticated. They can fly further. The tanks butt netting up. The drones have, like, sharp things on them that can cut through netting. And you.
- [60:37]
Joe Lonsdale
I'm not bullish. I'm not bullish. Tanks five years from now, because there's just too many things coming at them. And we can try to put EPS on the tanks. We could defend some of them, you know. You know, we. We have a company called Overland AI, and they've won all these DARPA challenges. We're the best in the country just driving over complex terrain, and so everyone's using them for that.
- [60:52]
Chris Williamson
But vehicle of some kind, any vehicle.
- [60:54]
Joe Lonsdale
Driving over terrain is what we're realizing. It's just similar to how Saronic here in Austin's building thousands of smaller vessels for the Navy, and we're going to start building larger ones, too, and having them swarm for the Navy that are, you know, armed and autonomous. We want to build thousands of overland vehicles. And it's really interesting doing these things because when you spec out the vehicle, the traditional defense solution is like. Like, it needs to have these 37 capabilities. It needs to have this armor. It needs to do this, needs to do that. And you're like, wait a second, you could give it all 37 of those capabilities, or you could build a thousand of them for the same cost with, like, 10 capabilities. Right. So it becomes this, like, fascinating problem where this is a really important point in warfare. Like, warfare has this engineering aspect to it. Like, if you want to build a bridge and you Want the bridge to never fall down. If you give me a billion dollars, I could build you a bridge that will never fall down. It might, might be ugly, but it'll be like so much metal, so many supports, it'll never fall down. But the point of engineering is not to build a billion dollars. It's how you build it. It for $50 million. Never fall down just as much. Right? That's. And it's a similar thing in warfare. You always have scarcity. So it's not, it's not about what are all the really cool specs on your jet or on your tank or whatever. It's okay if you're going to spend a certain amount of resources. I'm going to spend a certain amount of resources that we're gonna, we're gonna fight. Let's. Let's do something that just overwhelms. Even the tank has better in all these ways. I have, you know, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just gonna swarm you and crush you and keep going. Right. So there's things like this now where it's, it's all. And this is why advanced manufacturing, going back to the tariffs is so important to be good at. Because if we're not good at that here and the other guys are good at it, that's, that's scary.
- [62:14]
Chris Williamson
What is the likelihood that in five or 10 years there's that many troops on the ground as well a human personnel going to be that important?
- [62:22]
Joe Lonsdale
I think people are still very important a lot of different things. I think the way warfare is morphing is it. It goes towards a special forces model. So I think, I think Elon Musk has been really clear. Like obviously you don't want like tons of troops like running forward and then there's like tons of drones coming. That's a terrible. I don't want to be that guy on the front line. This is like the really sad thing in World War I where like the British, British aristocrats have been treated like crap for 30 years and they if the irritocracy. Your role was a warrior who defends society. That was like kind of how you were taught. And so they were so excited when World War I came. They get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their society and be proud. And they all jumped on their horses and they all charged and they were all mowed down by machine guns. Like the whole generation was killed.
- [62:57]
Chris Williamson
It was so terrible.
- [62:58]
Joe Lonsdale
Right? So no you don't. So Even, even like 100 years ago, you don't want people charging that way now. It's insane. But what you do have is you have a special forces model where there's like, you probably have everyone have like multiple robots around them and they're controlling them in different ways and complimenting them. You probably have them calling in airstrikes, calling in drone strikes, like figuring out what's going on using the tools. But you are going to want people on the battlefield or near the battlefield. They're just going to be like using a lot of stuff around them, but you're probably still going to want them there for quite a long time is my view.
- [63:27]
Chris Williamson
What were you saying about rods from space? What are rods?
- [63:30]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, this is one of those things that's always like not clear how much one should talk about. I don't have clearance these days, which is good because I can't and not get myself in trouble. But it's just pretty obvious that, you know, a fighter jet is a missile delivery system. And if you could have the missiles be in space and be extraordinarily accurate, what they're going to hit in, you know, for any kind of ground target or even other things. And then it's like that's probably a better way of doing it. Right? It's just much cheaper. It's much cheaper now thanks to, thanks to Starship, right? It would be very, very cheap to get. I mean right now I think it costs as much as an aircraft carrier to get a hundred thousand of these in space that could, I don't know what the ratio is, could go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier at some point. It's just like, like obvious how you want to be spending that money.
- [64:08]
Chris Williamson
It's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers. Like it's just in many cases some degree of intermediary. Whether it's the thing that the, carries the missiles takes off from, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles, whether it's the missile itself, it's a huge part of it.
- [64:23]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean when we do these Saronic ships with the Navy and they're. Saronic is a company that just raised $600 million at a 4 billion valuation that we have helped help some amazing talented guys start. Dino, Dino Marucas is a Navy Seal who started here in Austin. And so it's an Austin based company and it's building like hundreds of these weaponized vessels. And I think the current ones are mostly 24 footers and they could do certain things. And I Think if you build unmanned, all unmanned for now, and if you have 130footer, mostly unmanned, but maybe you make people go on if they want, that lets you shoot things that take 80 foot of ship to fire, otherwise you couldn't fire from 24ft. So yeah, it does become like, like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels.
- [65:00]
Chris Williamson
What's the world of autonomous submarines looking like that to me seems like the most obvious place to.
- [65:10]
Joe Lonsdale
And again, it's, it's about the scarcity. The scarcity question as well. Right, because it's like what does it cost versus having a swarm of things on top of the water. You want both? I think so, yeah. Andrew, which again I'm a big investor in with Palmer and my friends are running. They have I think a facility in Rhode island that's pumping out a couple hundred of these a year. And there's these very advanced submarines. They've also just, I think last week introduced these like new underground center, new underwater sentries that can like detect certain things and do certain things underwater too. I think you can use them as mines and stuff as well and all sorts of possibilities. So, so yeah, you definitely want complicated things underwater. And it's interesting that becomes again a game. How do you detect things underwater? It's very hard to detect things underwater, but there's a lot of new technologies where if you, for example, string fiber optics along the, along the bottom of the water, then based on the gravitational distortions, you can detect whales, you can detect all sorts of other things moving around. So, so I, I always wonder like, how advanced is China in this area? How advanced, you know, are we in these areas? You actually, it's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear triad too easily right now.
- [66:07]
Chris Williamson
Oh yeah, Well, I wonder. I kind of have this sense in my mind of people not wanting to show their hand and people, different nations understanding that if you have that you almost have this trade off. In fact this actually happened, I think In World War II, once the Enigma code had been cracked, there was a value judgment that needed to be made. We know that they are going to try and attack these three ships, but if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked, they're going to know that something's up. So you're tolerating how much of this do we decide to use? How much do we show of our knowledge? And I kind of get the sense when it, it's China does something in Taiwan at some point and you go, okay, how, how if 10 is unleash everything, how far of that can we go? Because yes, maybe it's really, really good in pushing back this particular assault or defending yourself or whatever it is, but also completely shows your hand and this is the technology and this is the capability that we've got so that, I mean you can talk as much as you want about the introduction of AI, the sort of, of retreat of physical soldiers from the battlefield. That is a value judgment that really just. It's done by committee, hopefully very smart committee, but it's done by people that go, go to town or go to 8 or go to whatever there.
- [67:27]
Joe Lonsdale
And there are certain things we work on even at some of these companies I mentioned that they aren't putting into Ukraine for example, because they don't want Russia and China to learn about them and learn how to respond to them, which is not my judgment by the way. I'm not, I'm not in charge. So why aren't you doing more defend Ukraine, whatever. I'm. Palantir and Andrew are doing a lot, but it's not up to me. We have leaders and they, these are.
- [67:44]
Chris Williamson
The technologies that are available. You choose which ones you go and.
- [67:47]
Joe Lonsdale
They'Re going to be rational about the decision. And you're right. I mean when it comes to nuclear deterrence, this is a very scary topic and you actually probably don't want perfect knowledge on either side because it makes, it makes things more likely to happen and you actually don't want anything to happen.
- [67:57]
Chris Williamson
Say more on that.
- [67:58]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, the whole point is like you have the nuclear nuclear triad and the different ways you could respond in, you know, in nuclear, nuclear war. And you want them not to know, know everything and to be unsure they know everything and to be worried because if they're get to be very, very confident they know exactly what it is and they could be potentially gonna be confident with some strategy that they've found a way to take it out and stop it and then they could strike and then they can know they could strike. And so you. It's actually good for both sides to be a little bit unsure about these things.
- [68:21]
Chris Williamson
That's so interesting. Yeah. What, what do you know about us and what do you know about what we know about you and the, the vacuum of information, the uncertainty. Is it a Terran in and of itself?
- [68:33]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. Which is probably healthy. None of us want nuclear war. Like the reason I work in defense, probably 20 of HVC, my firm is a defense. We're doing things in bio to save lives and healthcare and other areas. And I work in defense to deter the bad guys and to have the make sure that we have the best technology there so they're afraid to fight us. I don't want there to be lots of work. Like I said, I do think freeing the Iranian people is a good thing. But in general, like, I don't think what we did in Afghanistan for that so long was right. I think we've wasted a lot of money on crazy adventures. In general. I want less war is my bias. That's the goal with the better technology.
- [69:05]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it's just a very big, very smart deterrent.
- [69:08]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- [69:10]
Chris Williamson
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- [70:12]
Joe Lonsdale
And by the way, there's good people at these places. In some departments there's some great things they do, there's some things where it's I think crony and corrupt and broken.
- [70:18]
Chris Williamson
Too, that, that's, I'd never, I didn't know much about sort of the background and how they work, but that's such a fascinating situation to get yourself into where you're the preferred partner, the preferred supplier or whatever, but that if you have a vacuum of talent that gets sucked out of you to a place that's able to be more exciting, more sexy, pay you better, and then what.
- [70:40]
Joe Lonsdale
Happens is they try to lobby and block the other people and they mostly succeed at doing that because. So they become these bureaucracies whose main job is to do innovation Theater, pretend they're innovating and it keep. And then to keep new things out. And so Both Palantir and SpaceX were the first two companies to like break through and become new primes. And they, in both cases they had to sue the government because they were being treated totally unfairly and they were destroyed records. They were people ordering not to tell people that something was better because they're going in and out working at these primes. Like you work for the government, you work for the prime. And they're all friends and so they're just like, don't let any of these like obnoxious weird tech guys in. Like, I didn't know how to play golf with the right people or anything. We're like the weird outsiders. And so even now we're the outsiders. But we've broken in enough that we're.
- [71:16]
Chris Williamson
In some parts undeniable in. Well, I mean, what is it, the percentage of payloads being put into Space by SpaceX? It's 80 or 90 or so.
- [71:27]
Joe Lonsdale
It's actually just dominates that now. Palger dominates certain other areas. But if you look at the overall revenue the government spends with companies in defense, we're still tiny. We're tiny.
- [71:36]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [71:36]
Joe Lonsdale
I think Palantir is like still well under $2 billion of revenue of like, you know, a couple few hundred billion in real in the same areas. And it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus and so they're.
- [71:47]
Chris Williamson
What's that? What's cost?
- [71:48]
Joe Lonsdale
That means you get, say you, you go and you say, I spent $10 million on this, so pay me $11 million for delivering it to you. And so it becomes this really weird incentive where you purposely get all these expenses and spend way too much money on something so you can have a little profit through so that your profit's bigger from the government. And so, and so there's this weird.
- [72:05]
Chris Williamson
Model where, oh, you're incentivized to be inefficient.
- [72:07]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. This is how we've built this for 50 years. And so you have things where Palantir or Andrew as an example will come in and do something at like a tenth the cost. Better. It's just like crazy. It sounds like I'm lying. They do something like they'll have a drone versus Lockheed and their thing will be literally a tenth the cost to make. And it'll have like, you know, 60% more battery life. It'll be like twice as fast. It'll carry 50% more weight and then it'll literally be like A tiny fraction of the cost and still you'll lose it first. Because Lockheed or whoever it was, Raytheon, does this really well, is they'll write the request for proposal with like a 300 page document specifying all these requirements that no one actually needs, but that actually make it so it has to be their solution. And. And so.
- [72:44]
Chris Williamson
Oh, this is the same. This is the same as the foreign country that says the.
- [72:50]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly.
- [72:51]
Chris Williamson
The headlights need to be this height.
- [72:53]
Joe Lonsdale
The same game being played by Germany and even Israel and other countries with their internal trade barriers against outsiders. Everyone plays is a game being played by the prime. Stopping anyone from breaking in. And so these. This is what happens. What we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats and the complexity of the bureaucracy is a feature, not a bug. Because they had used that feature to control it for themselves and control access.
- [73:14]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it kind of blows my mind that there's a couple of areas that I think about this in. The first one being medicine. Anything that's. With regards to keeping people alive, there's literally no more important job than keeping people alive. And in warfare you go, it has to be bureaucracy. Because if it wasn't cutting the Gordian knot of all of the issues, if there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, okay, this has been a nice LARP for a while. The pantomime's fucking over. All right? Like, it's time for us to.
- [73:52]
Joe Lonsdale
This is what happens in wars. And one of my favorite books on this is the First World War by Winston Churchill, where he's appointed the First Lord of the Admiralty and his job is basically to go in and just like knock heads in the British Navy and get rid of all the old fuddy duddies.
- [74:04]
Chris Williamson
He was super unpopular, right? He's unpopular as hell.
- [74:07]
Joe Lonsdale
That's why they framed him at Gallipoli in World War I and then threw him out. And he was out of his career for a while because by virtue of having to fight the proxy to fix it, everyone hated him and wanted to like, make him look really bad. And then he goes through this, like, really tough part of his career for a long time and then shockingly, comes back and saves the West. But. But it was. It really is interesting if you are one of those people who's just really bold and smart and just push through and fix things. Yeah, it pisses a lot of people off. But it's necessary to win the war.
- [74:30]
Chris Williamson
Is what's your opinion around the sort of great men of history in the modern world now, is that something that can still exist or the bureaucracies and the red tape and the complexity is.
- [74:42]
Joe Lonsdale
Even more important now. Of course. Come on. It's even more important now. Here's the thing. This is a dialectic again. If I go back, you wanted another. The dialectic is there's two things that are true. We have this like inexorably powerful system that pushes history and pushes things in certain directions. It's really hard to overcome the system. You can't just be a great man and just walk up to the system and like slice it all in half. That's not how it works. You're not just like, I exist outside of history. No, the way great men work of history is you understand the system deeply. And the way, you know, Peter Thiel I was talking to earlier today, talked about it is you see, there's this big wave coming and you get in front of the wave and you surf it and you use it to cut through and fix things and you use it to build things and you use it to do things because you're working with the system in the direction of it. It. But then, but then like fundamentally breaking through the bureaucracy, breaking through this other area, inspiring people with a better solution. So, so that, so it is dialectic where it is a really hard system to change and there are certain things you can't change. But then you desperately need the great men who are bold and who do study it, who do like change things and make things possible. And thank God we have elon Musk and SpaceX. It's just one example, like America would be screwed from a defense perspective and from our perspectives. Oh yeah, Why? I mean space is just absolutely critical to everything we're doing and knowing what's going on in the world and on projecting power and, and, and just, it's just like makes certain things you can't talk about with space warfare. But you can imagine it's just critical. We now dominate that globally and there's no way we'd be way behind. We'd have nothing.
- [76:01]
Chris Williamson
Have you got any idea of China's space capability trying really hard?
- [76:05]
Joe Lonsdale
Have you seen, there's videos where they try to do the thing where they landed. They haven't figured it out yet, but they're trying.
- [76:08]
Chris Williamson
I mean they tried to do the chopstick.
- [76:10]
Joe Lonsdale
I haven't tried the chopstick that I saw, but they definitely try to land because the smaller ones are self landing without the chopstick. The chopsticks for the really heavy big one. So they're still, they're still back. They haven't got Falcon figured out yet, but they're trying. Then the biggest starship, they're not even close. But. But listen, I mean, the Chinese are really good at co stuff. It's actually extraordinary. He's that far ahead of them. There's some really smart people there. So it's just the fact that we're this far ahead, that's just an amazing fact.
- [76:30]
Chris Williamson
It's when you think about intellectual property, and this is one of the things that Trump's been bringing up with regards to tariffs, right, that it's not just the difficulty in getting products there, it's the replication and the copying of our products over there, which means it. We don't even need to ship them. Like you can just.
- [76:46]
Joe Lonsdale
Every time you do something, they're so fast at copying. It's actually amazing how good they are.
- [76:49]
Chris Williamson
Have you got any idea what that system is, what it is that they're doing? They got some team of crack.
- [76:54]
Joe Lonsdale
I think it's the culture. I think it's the culture of their education system. To take something and to learn it and regurgitate it tends to be how they teach there. So I think there's something about the smartest people being forced to do that. And it's. And then. And they take things and it's really funny because they copy and they iterate on it and they do steal. I mean, I'm not gonna say which company, but one of our companies was like training OpenAI in anthropic on a certain very specific area where they'd measure them every week and give them get feedback and get it ahead. And they got like certain scores. And it really was OpenAI they were doing it the most with. And they would score open AI and they got the. To the point where it's really good of what they needed. And then deep seat came out. This is when China had their own AI that they trained and they said, oh, it's interesting, let's measure it. And they measured it in the six different areas and it was exactly the same scores as OpenAI from four months ago. And this is something they'd like train and iterated on to get there. So it's clear they just exfiltrated it, which is what China's getting.
- [77:43]
Chris Williamson
That the difficulty that you must face at holding on to commercial patents, at not letting people get a hold of your inventions, that's one thing. But when it comes to, oh, this is kind of the technology that keeps us safe from a national security or one of the key technologies that keeps us safe from a national security perspective. The level of security that you must be talking about when it comes to stuff like SpaceX, when it comes to Raptor engines, when it comes to Falcon 9 heavy rocket stability, all of the belly flop maneuver, all of this shit that must be locked down as, as hard as you can get. People Talking about Area 51 and being able to sort of keep secret, secret and you go, I, I don't really know if the Chinese would be that bothered about using aliens against us, but they'd fucking sure as hell love one of those rotic rockets that can get stuff into spaceship.
- [78:28]
Joe Lonsdale
It's really funny at Palantir. Not funny, but serious too, obviously, because we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and tracking all these things. And I remember when I was still there a long time ago, there was a, a PhD student who was Chinese who'd been friends with some of the people at our company and they caught him with like, like in server room like, with like inserting and stealing data and he, and he broke down crying and he said, you know, I have family in China. I didn't want to have to do this, but I'm worried for them. They kind of made me. And this was quite a long time. It was fully infiltrated and, and well in that case, like, like they didn't, didn't get it out. And then he, like, he left the country right away. And so, you know, and he went back to his family and, and like, it is interesting at that point on you had to be really careful hiring people with family in China to work in any of those, the government sensitive areas of course, because they could just use the family against them. Ironically, when Peter Thiel then spoke out at the RNC for Trump in like 2016, Obama's Justice Department, a Labor Department right away sued Palantir for not hiring enough Asians. We had 25% Asians, but it wasn't enough. Which is just funny though because we couldn't hire people who were born in China. And so of course they sued us for that, but DOD agreed with us, but Labor Department disagreed with us. His government doesn't always agree with itself.
- [79:32]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, have a chat between yourselves guys, work out who's going to sue us or not and then come back back. Well, isn't the, isn't there all of these rumors? Obviously this I think will have stopped now that the southern border has been tightened up significantly by the sounds of things. But wasn't there a lot of sort of military Age Chinese men coming across the southern border.
- [79:49]
Joe Lonsdale
I think what that was. I'll tell you what I think that was, and this is speculation, but I've talked to a bunch of people. There actually were a lot of kind of Chinese mafia operating in Shenzhen, which is like a area that had a lot of this historically, and it's a very powerful group. And Xi Jinping was doing a really big crackdown in China and some of his crackdown was on stuff that was kind of messed up. Like, I've had friends caught up in it who disappeared and died in the tech world, where I don't think we're bad guys. I think they just didn't, just didn't agree with ccp, but some of it was cracked down on actual criminal elements. I think a lot of those criminals fled and are doing criminal activities now in the US and across the border because they weren't safe in China anymore. So they came here.
- [80:24]
Chris Williamson
Oh, right, okay. Imagine that. Imagine being the Chinese government and thinking, fantastic, we've actually finally got a ton of military age. Oh, God, they're, they're, they're criminal. They're selling fentanyl. What use is that? We need you to steal the secrets of Palantir.
- [80:39]
Joe Lonsdale
We don't. Well, we don't, we don't want these people in our country. And I think some of them probably came here even without China knowing it. But I'm sure they're smart enough to take advantage of it and use them too. So it's very scary.
- [80:47]
Chris Williamson
I met, I think, the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for SpaceX.
- [80:54]
Joe Lonsdale
I love it.
- [80:55]
Chris Williamson
At Bill Perkins House last year during the Eclipse party. And I was just listening. It's similar to your friend that was giving the soliloquy about artificial education. And he was just explaining, it was such a fucking inspiring story that I think he'd been at a very big space company previously and had moved to SpaceX. And he basically bet his entire career on this belly flop maneuver. The fact that if you have any vehicle coming in from space, you wanted to try and accumulate as much air friction as possible. And if you've got a tube, there's not much air friction to play with in the first place. So you try and put it parallel to the ground, you bring it down, and then at the very last minute you swing it. And yeah, he explained, he said, dude, this was like, as I'm watching this thing happening, I'm basically watching my own career and legacy sort of slowly rotate by 90 degrees to see if it's Gonna work. But I just loved it. I thought it was so cool. And it really sort of spoke to me about the. We spoke about fearlessness sort of courage earlier on. It's a very unique kind of fearlessness, you know, to sort of back yourself to be. To be innovative. But I just thought it was. It was such a cool story. I loved. I loved hearing it.
- [82:08]
Joe Lonsdale
There's something really special about having a crazy idea about something that should work, how the world should work, and then like, working with lots of other smart people, convincing them of it, and then like building and iterating towards it. It's just. I love that. It's one of my favorite things. I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things. And it's just so fun when you have these big, bold ideas. They don't always work, but, you know, with enough smart people around you to iterate on, a lot of times they do.
- [82:29]
Chris Williamson
Space. Looking at that, I'm fascinated by the world of astropolitics now. So the politics of space. Who gets to own and refine things that are going past us, areas on the moon, bits of territory, whether it's geosync above particular countries. Is this something that you've looked into much? I think it's.
- [82:47]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, you know, the ownership thing, it's fascinating. This is a lot like, I think you can kind of go back and study like the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, where there's just like infinite room and infinite space and you know, for the new world and all these places, you can get. And you can fight over some big land bodies, of course, that people did, but there's just. There's just so much out there that it's much more. Like once you can start using it in a way that's actually helpful and you're using it for something useful, it kind of becomes yours. And there's so much out there that we're not gonna. We're not gonna like, run into scarcity for a long time. So the way we think of it on Earth is probably like, today is probably the wrong model because we're, because we have this, like, bias. There's a certain amount of land and a certain amount of resources, and it's scarce. And do I own or do you own it? And there's just so much stuff up there and so much room up there that it's not. That's not really the problem for now. Like. Like, we could, we could, we could. Every country could have their own moon base and like, be like, doing whatever.
- [83:36]
Chris Williamson
We want to be doing on the moon.
- [83:37]
Joe Lonsdale
And then we're not going to like run out of room on the moon for now, right? And then same thing with like there's just. And there's millions of asteroids, right? So, so, so I'm not, I'm not too concerned about that. I think the scarier thing thing is you probably don't want wars in space, right? At all. Because A, it will screw up all the global satellite stuff we do, which is. I don't know about you, but Starlink's pretty useful for me. It's pretty bad. And B, it's just like there's lots of things where if you can get good at like doing things in space and then throwing things at the planet, that's really scary and you screw a lot of things up. So I hope I never. I hope that's not something we get.
- [84:07]
Chris Williamson
Well, there's also, there's a book called Seven Eaves by Neil Stevenson and in the first line the moon explodes. So spoiler alert. The moon explores in the first line. And they've got what it's like 500 days to get as many citizens off Earth and to the iss and they basically build out this new habitat to the iss and they say there's going to be hard rain as the moon breaks out from the seven pieces. Seven Eaves, the seven pieces that it's in. And it's going to basically shower down on Earth. Everything's going to be fucked for about 5,000 years. And then after a while, if we can survive it, we'll come back down and we'll see how all of this stuff goes.
- [84:39]
Joe Lonsdale
Yikes.
- [84:40]
Chris Williamson
And they're talking about when you're in. I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if it's even correct to call it altitude when you get to something like the ISS or distance from Earth that lots and lots of the satellites sort of sit at this particular distance away. And it only takes. There's quite a bit of junk up there, but that's kind of well positioned. It doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke which broke this thing which. And before you know it, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And entire sort of swaths of real estate and of useful technology that's up there can all be damaged. So yeah, I think anything that involves around in those areas, we don't want that.
- [85:20]
Joe Lonsdale
There's a funny technology I saw the other day there was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on. Of course There's a Japanese, which I love. This is like expect them to do. Of course, there's the cleanest country.
- [85:29]
Chris Williamson
And so it's a dog. It's a miniature dog as well. Shaped like a miniature dog.
- [85:32]
Joe Lonsdale
No, it's great, but it's. I mean, in theory there's things like that hopefully we could do, but it's. It's. Yeah, it's. It's. You don't want to war up there.
- [85:38]
Chris Williamson
You know, you're talking about our map of how land works. Kind of not working. When we think about space, three dimensions, or whether you're looking at sort of the way that orbits occur. I promise this is gonna. I think this is gonna work. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, right? Hold on. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, I think about the way that their map of terrain must work. Because what they see is being able to run forward, to move themselves away from something that's on the other side of the tree. So they're moving around this cylinder. And if you walk, you'll see it and it'll have its head out like that. And as you come round, it'll scoot this way. I always been fascinated about what it must be like to have the map of terrain that a squirrel has because it's permanently thinking in spirals, right? It's thinking I can go up and down. So it kind of is a 2D plane, but this 2D plane is wrapped in a 3D way. And when I read 7eves and I think about that and they're talking about fucking orbital dynamics, dude. Holy shit. Like trying to think about the. The zenith and the apogee and the way that. Oh, well, we've got to do this two more loops in order for us to come back around at the right angle. Because it's not only the distance, the angle, the height, the altitude, the speed, all this shit. Like. Oh, yeah. I just walk forward and back like you think, you know, you first drive a car and you go, oh my God, this is so complex. I'm never going to be able to do this. This, you realize. No, dude, this is like the simplest thing you can do. Look at the squirrel.
- [87:02]
Joe Lonsdale
If you play the 3D video games, you kind of get it. Get build intuition. But it's pretty fun. It is weird up there. Yeah.
- [87:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it's interesting. What is the future for you? What are you. What are you most interested, most excited about at the moment?
- [87:15]
Joe Lonsdale
We just had our sixth child, so that's a lot of kids.
- [87:18]
Chris Williamson
You are single Handedly. Oh, maybe in collaboration with Elon, reversing population decline.
- [87:22]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, well, my wife Taylor and I are very, very traditional, but we love having six kids. We're probably done. That's probably enough. But that's really, that's the most important thing in my life. We're running our firm, we're doing all sorts of new things in AI, backing great entrepreneurs there. There's amazing companies in construction, you know, trying doing things in bio. I think there's a lot of ways we could save a lot of lives with the breakthroughs in bio, especially applying it to things that save the cure rare diseases and help help young kids there. I think there's a lot of new ways of, you know, doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases that right now kill kids very young. That. And so I think there's tens of thousands of children we could say with stuff there. So there's, there's a lot of promising things there. And then, you know, on the nonprofit side, I have the university, which I'm really passionate about. We have getting so many amazing young students there and partnering with them on things. And then I have my policy work. We have teams in 20 states at Cicero and we just try to make government smarter and dynamic and less stupid. And part.
- [88:15]
Chris Williamson
I was waiting for you to say less. Something I was waiting for you to say less.
- [88:18]
Joe Lonsdale
I can't help it. I can't help it. There are good people, but it's just like, like, just. I'll give you just one example. Like, let's say we all agree we want middle class workingclass people who maybe they're not going to be like the top investor entrepreneur, but they want to have a good job. They have a good vocational job with skills like, like anyone with the right teaching could get like a high end vocational job if they're willing to work. Right. And some of these jobs pay 100k, 120k. Great stuff. And so all these states all have vocational schools. And the problem is a lot of these vocational schools are terrible. And so what do you do? Well, here's, you know, average politician's like, let's give them more money. If there's an idiot guy running it, it's still looking to not do it well. So how do you help the 100,000 people going, coming out of these schools? Well, here's one. I'll tell you how you do it. You say, okay, there's 27 high end technical vocational schools in Texas. We're going to only give them Money in proportion to the salaries of the students coming out. Because that's not something they can game take the average salary coming out for three years.
- [89:08]
Chris Williamson
That's interesting.
- [89:08]
Joe Lonsdale
Average salary for three years coming out. And we're going to rate the schools based on that. And you know what happens when you start giving all their money tied to that, that the school starts saying, wait a second, what skills do we need to teach to get our kids better?
- [89:17]
Chris Williamson
Incentives. Incentives. Look at the incentives.
- [89:19]
Joe Lonsdale
What businesses do we partner with? And I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas, over the last decade, the salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools.
- [89:26]
Chris Williamson
It's a much more direct route to getting universities to do the thing that the customers students of the universities want. I would wager that 99.9% of students are not going to university to get a degree that sounds interesting and dysfunctionally useless, that even if the degree is functionally useless, they want that functionally useless degree to function usefully.
- [89:48]
Joe Lonsdale
And this is the thing like. So I think vocational schools are a little different from universities. Vocational schools is 100% the profession. There is a theoretical role for moral action and courage and other frameworks of a university. But you're right, one of the things we should be doing with our government, by the way, the part of education and our policy thing is only give loans to students for majors where the, the major is going to on average repay, let them repay the loan. So stop putting people in the debt to get like terrible degrees, right? That's something we could do right away. So there's things like this we're working on, we're making huge impacts on prisons. Fixing, fixing, technical.
- [90:20]
Chris Williamson
What are you fixing in prisons?
- [90:21]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, think about it. If, what, how should, how should probation and parole in prisons work? You need to have some incentives, right? You need to have some framework right now. Right now. If you're running a prison, a lot of the guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards. Everyone's miserable. People come out, they're just let go into society. A lot of them commit crimes again and come right back and it's a mess and there's nothing, there's no incentive to fix it, right? What if you say to the people running probation and parole in prisons that part of your job is rehabilitation, that part of what you're being measured on is can you run this in a way where you're all working to have a culture that teaches skills, gives them exposure the year before they come out, figures out how to help them as they're coming out and figures out how to make them less likely to come back. Isn't that better than what we have right now? I don't care if you're on the left or the right. Like, if you're on the left, maybe you want to let all the criminals out. If you're on the right, you might want to lock them up too much because whatever. Those are both extremes that I don't think you know. They're both extremes, like, whether you're left on the right or right. If they are coming out, let's make sure they succeed as best we can. Let's have incentives around that. Right. There's things like this we could be doing for our society. And we fixed a lot of probation and parole programs to, like, start having the right incentives. And it usually impacts these communities because you all of a sudden care about people.
- [91:26]
Chris Williamson
What? So I saw. Do you know Dwarkesh Patel? Do you know who he is? Yeah, yeah. Clever kid. Really lovely guy. He had this really interesting tweet with regards to AI that I'd love to get your take on. And he said, if you gave any human 1 millionth, 1/10,000th of the corpus of information that any AI has ingested, you would have received thousands of new ideas, lots of new novel insights about ways to do things. I don't know if this is true, but the criticism that he was repurposing was we haven't seen much new innovation that's necessarily come from AI at the moment. Have you got any insight about whether this is a limitation of LLMs at large? Whether it's a processing problem, whether it's a sophistication problem?
- [92:17]
Joe Lonsdale
It doesn't seem to me like it has the conceptual structures for, like, solving these types of interesting, like, problems around the things I was just talking about. Like, these are types of things that if I really had the right intelligence, it would be. It'd be analyzing them and pushing them forward and taking my ideas. Maybe it's like the Chinese and make them even better. You know, it's like. But like. No, it's not. You're right. It's not doing that. Yeah. I guess you could say in certain mathematical situations, it is doing that. I think. I think. I think when you see some of the contests where it's actually solving math problems.
- [92:46]
Chris Williamson
Oh, like unsolved theorems and, like, there's.
- [92:48]
Joe Lonsdale
Stuff like that where I think there's some things that it's doing new methods and, like, you know, the great example was the very famous Go game. Right where it like played that new type of move that was like move 37. And it was like everyone studied and like, wow, I never thought of that before. And it was like, really, really cool that it figured it out. So there are some constrained areas worth doing that, but I think reality is too unconstrained. It's not, it's not good enough yet to, to, to, to build the conceptual structures to do that. Can it do that the next five or ten years? Very possibly, but. But you're right, it's not yet.
- [93:16]
Chris Williamson
What would you, for a Muggle like me, everybody else that's listening, what should we expect, do you think, from AI over the next half decade?
- [93:26]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, it's really interesting, I have to admit, is that, you know, some of my friends were involved in building OpenAI, some guys worked at Palantir, were key there, and I was watching them a little bit. I wasn't that focused on it, and I thought it was pretty interesting, but I just, I didn't realize the breakthrough they're going to have. So, So I have to admit if I would have loved to say I'm so smart that I knew this was coming and I didn realize the emergent properties that would come out of GPT3, you know, at that point, once it, once that happened, you can kind of predict GPT 4 and 5. You know, it, it seems like it keeps getting better, which is scary. It's. It's good for the world in some ways, for productivity and other things, but it's. I don't know where, you know, I don't know where it asymptotes. I don't know where it starts to stop getting better. My intuition is that it's going to asymptote and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion. Why, I don't think, for the things we were just talking about, that it's like, like fully understood all the properties of intelligence necessary to, to do what we do. And I think it's fundamentally a different type of intelligence.
- [94:20]
Chris Williamson
It's a difference of kind, not a difference of degree.
- [94:22]
Joe Lonsdale
That's my intuition. But listen, I have people who are, I know, who are geniuses who disagree with me. So, so this is. And because I didn't predict this in the first, I was going to say.
- [94:31]
Chris Williamson
You'Ve been wrong and ignorant before around AI, so maybe.
- [94:33]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. So it's hard, it's hard for me to really know. I. What, what I do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars of industries already today. We can make twice or three times as productive. And so that's where kind of I'm working. So I'm like, I'm like if you're a Muggle, I'm like maybe like maybe like a mid level wizard and there is a top level wizards who are actually pushing forward AI and I'm taking it and understand it quite well and understand how to build quite well and I'm deploying it to add productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it. But I'm not the guy who's, who's like, who's like pushing for the LLM itself. Sadly, it's not who I am.
- [95:04]
Chris Williamson
Damn right. Joe Longsdale, ladies and gentlemen. Joe, you're awesome. I really appreciate you man. This is fascinating. So much cool stuff to go through. Where should people check out whatever it is that you've got going on?
- [95:12]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, thanks for having me on. You know we have a American Optimist podcast myself and you joined us and yeah, I'm just trying to, trying to learn to follow in your footsteps here and you know we got uatx, we got a lot of amazing students still, still applying and going there. This is the second class and, and you know, would love to hear from people.
- [95:27]
Chris Williamson
Heck yeah. Joe, I appreciate you. Thank you man.
- [95:29]
Joe Lonsdale
Thank you.
- [95:32]
Chris Williamson
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