“China’s Cognitive Warfare” - Palantir Co-Founder On Iran Threats, AI PSYOPs & CIA Funding | PBD #751

Summary

PBD Podcast #751: “China’s Cognitive Warfare” – Palantir Co-Founder On Iran Threats, AI PSYOPs & CIA Funding

Date: March 3, 2026
Host: Patrick Bet-David
Guest: Joe Lonsdale (Co-founder of Palantir, Venture Capitalist)
Main Theme:
An insider conversation with Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale about the origins of Palantir, US national security, cognitive warfare from China and Iran, the ethical risks of AI in government, venture capital’s role in progress, and the cultural/political battles defining the West in 2026.

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves deeply into the founding and mission of Palantir, cognitive and AI-driven warfare threats from foreign adversaries (notably China and Iran), and the intersection of advanced technology, ethics, and US national security. Lonsdale reflects on building powerful tools and the responsibilities and risks they entail, shares candid recruiting and funding lessons from Silicon Valley, and gives a venture capitalist’s take on current global technological and political disruption.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Origins, Recruiting, and Mission of Palantir

• Why was Palantir started?
  Lonsdale explains Palantir was founded to "protect the West against Islamist terrorists, save the government money, and protect civil liberties." Inspired by their work fighting fraud at PayPal, the founders realized their expertise could help the US government post-9/11, which was "gathering data, failing to stop terrorists, and abusing civil liberties" (12:03, 13:40).

• Recruitment strategy:
  Palantir used aggressive talent mapping—leveraging networks among top universities, friends, competitions, and even “raiding” other companies. “It’s a network, it’s purely word of mouth. You’re recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys… just like if you’re a football coach for talent.” (7:36–8:49).

• Origins of Palantir’s Lord of the Rings name:
  “We wrote about this at the time. This is a dangerous thing to create, but we believe it’s a worthy thing...” – Joe Lonsdale (16:08). The foundational recognition: powerful tools can be used for both good and evil.

• Initial funding struggles:
  Major Silicon Valley funds laughed them out of the room for wanting to work in defense, calling it crazy and “not possible.” CIA’s venture arm (In-Q-Tel) came in for “a couple million,” which they later bought back (14:03–15:33).

  “We got turned down by everyone… The guy at Kleiner Perkins started laughing at us. Alex didn’t have a technical degree… it’s a doctorate, but not a relevant one.” – Joe Lonsdale (14:38)

---

AI, Ethics, and Risks

• Why do people distrust Palantir?
  Lonsdale suggests it’s a combination of success, fear of government use of powerful tools, and not wanting “Silicon Valley to decide policy."

  “Should a tech company stop helping the government when it disagrees? …The government should decide policy… our republic has mechanisms for deciding.” (30:41–31:48)

• What if these tools fall into the wrong hands?
  “What’s scary to me is if the public elects a really bad person and they deploy technology and power in ways they shouldn’t.” – Joe Lonsdale (31:55)
  Palantir is a tool used within "strict rules and policy” – not itself holding all the data.

• AI judges and governance:
  Inspired by a scenario from the movie “Mercy,” they discuss the risks of AI in judicial or political power (“That’s not the world I want to live in”—Lonsdale, 42:36). Both stress adhering to the Constitution and checks on power.

---

Cognitive Warfare, China, and Iran

• China’s aggressive cognitive warfare:
  “There’s land, sea, air, cyber, and cognitive… [The Chinese military] just does cognitive warfare using all this stuff, especially TikTok, but others as well.” (47:45)

  • China models US citizens, seeds divisive narratives (including anti-Semitism), and amplifies polarization.
  • China and Russia have both historically funded movements in the West to destabilize rivals.

• AI PSYOPs & Bot Farms:
  Discussion of how foreign actors, especially China, use bot farms and social media manipulation to polarize US society.

  “The Chinese love making socialists more popular in the US, they know it weakens us.” (47:45)

• Iran as an adversary:
  Lonsdale draws a sharp line between the Persian people and their ruling theocracy, arguing for strong action:

  “I really hope we take them out. They’re evil, evil people who’ve spread murder and terror to their own people and across the region.” (51:35)

  Claims Iran plotted to assassinate Trump and will continue targeting adversaries (57:05).

---

US Defense Industrial Complex & Innovation

• Breaking through the “Primes”:
  Palantir and SpaceX were the only tech companies to break through the legacy “primes” (top US defense contractors), facing “corrupt” pushback and a system locked against external innovation (36:05–37:12).

  “We’d already saved huge numbers of lives with Special Forces, but the government just no-bid gave contracts to a Prime… It’s totally corrupt.” (37:31)

• Role of US allies and customers:
  Palantir works with the Five Eyes (US, UK, Australia, NZ, Canada), Israel, and over 40 countries, but has never and would never work with adversary states (59:19–60:06).

---

Recruitment, Venture Capital, & Building the Future

• Evolution of recruiting in tech:
  Intense competition for AI talent, multimillion-dollar signing bonuses for top math/programming talent—“like a basketball team chasing the MVP” (20:27–21:30).

• Key attributes for startup hires:
  Willingness to choose low salary for high equity (“the very best guys chose the low salary with more upside,” 20:07), mission-driven mindset, working “all in”.

• Red and green flags in founders:

  • Red flags: obsession with patents, part-timers, not sharing equity with early team, lack of full commitment (“work-life balance” at the gold medal level).
  • Green flags: superstar talent, compelling mission, strong early industry pull, recommendations from network.

• Venture Capital’s Role:
  “VC is the evolutionary engine of our economy... You empower smart people to run hard at creating value with new possibilities.” (74:12)

  • Top VCs succeed by being plugged deeply into networks, picking teams and missions with transformative potential, and focusing on industries and real industry leaders.

---

AI & Technology Bets

• Most bullish sectors:
  US services sector (healthcare billing, legal, logistics) can be doubled/tripled in productivity by AI—creating “massive disinflation, making economy more efficient” (84:47–85:50).

• Investments:

  • Major investor in Anthropic, SpaceX/X; bullish on technological acceleration.
  • $11.8M investment in a Nigerian drone company to address Africa’s insecurity, pairing local excellence with US defense know-how (85:54–87:04).

---

Culture, Social Critique & Personal Reflections

• Jewish experience, anti-Semitism:
  Lonsdale sees current social media-driven divisiveness as the worst in his lifetime:

  “In our lifetimes, this is the highest it’s been [anti-Jewish sentiment and division].” (50:20)

• Dating, reputation, and the price of success:
  Lonsdale describes the real-world consequences of wealth, reputation, and legal vulnerability in relationships:

  “It’s really important to be with someone you really respect and have a base of values. Sometimes, you just gotta get lucky.” (72:39, 72:47)

• Philanthropy as fun:
  Puts major resources into reform projects, policy/education philanthropy (e.g., vocational education results-based funding); runs teams in 23 states for social good policy (90:59–92:14).

• Advice for building families and companies:
  Recruit through networks, focus on values, respect, and mission – whether in marriage or teams.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On mission-driven technology:

  “We have to eliminate probably about up to 10,000 terrorists that might not get eliminated. We help protect civil liberties, and make sure the government watchers are being watched now. ... Of course, you create this technology—if it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the audit trails, who knows what bad could be done with it.” – Joe Lonsdale (16:08–16:50)

• On cognitive warfare:

  “Chinese do cognitive warfare... There’s land, sea, air, cyber and cognitive. And they have a whole branch of their military just doing cognitive warfare using all this stuff, especially TikTok.” – Joe Lonsdale (47:45)

• On the responsibility of tech companies:

  “Should Silicon Valley get to decide policy, or should the government get to decide? And our view is—we want to watch the watchers, but the government should get to decide policy.” – Joe Lonsdale (31:41)

• On risk of AI power:

  “That’s not the world I want to live in.” – Joe Lonsdale, on AIs as judges/politicians (42:36)

• On Iran’s threat:

  “I think these guys sent someone to assassinate Donald Trump. ... If I was president, there’s no chance they’d be around after I was president.” – Joe Lonsdale (57:05)

• On the US defense contracting ecosystem:

  “There’s only two companies that broke through these primes: Palantir and SpaceX... It was really unfair. They beat the crap out of us... It’s totally corrupt.” (36:35–37:31)

• On venture capital’s innovation engine:

  “What VC really is, is taking a bunch of smart builders who have new ideas, and it’s figuring out how you empower these smart people to run really hard at creating value from the new possibilities.” (74:12)

---

Timestamps of Key Segments

| Time (MM:SS) | Segment / Quote / Topic | |--------------|-------------------------| | 00:12–00:50 | Palantir’s origins & terrorism mission | | 06:26–09:41 | Recruiting at PayPal, Palantir’s talent playbook | | 13:00–15:33 | Post-9/11, government dysfunction – CIA funding | | 16:08–16:50 | Risks of creating powerful tech – “audit trails” | | 20:07–21:59 | Signing bonus/equity philosophy, evolution of recruiting | | 30:41–31:48 | Why people distrust Palantir and policy authority | | 42:36 | Movie Mercy, AI judges—constitutional risks | | 44:12–49:32 | China/Iran: cognitive warfare, TikTok, bot farms | | 50:20–51:35 | Anti-Jewish divisions, impact of social media | | 57:05 | Iran targeting Trump, risk assessment | | 36:35–37:31 | Breaking through defense industry “primes” | | 74:12 | Venture capital as innovation engine | | 84:47–85:50 | AI-driven productivity/disinflation, billing example | | 85:54–87:04 | Nigerian drone venture, security in Africa | | 90:59–92:14 | Philanthropy: education, vocational reforms |

---

Conclusion

This episode offers an authoritative look at Palantir’s founding ideals, the evolution of US tech/defense recruiting, and an unfiltered discussion on security, ethics, and influence in the AI era. Lonsdale’s perspective spans fierce patriotism, concern about unchecked power, and a venture capitalist’s drive to fix broken systems. Cultural change, the challenge of cognitive warfare, and the vital need to safeguard civilization’s checks and balances form the episode’s backbone.

For listeners seeking inside-out clarity on tech, national security, and the great struggles of 2020s America, this is essential listening.

---

Related Quote:

“If nobody is angry, you might not be doing much.” — Attributed to Don Rumsfeld, cited by Joe Lonsdale (04:25, 24:25)

Transcript

[Patrick Bet-David]

When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Nobody is angry at you. You might not be doing much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do so many people not trust you? Why do so many people not trust Palantir?

[Joe Lonsdale]

We have to eliminate probably about up to 10,000 terrorists.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex? Then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building? Then what?

[Joe Lonsdale]

What's scary to me is if the safari public elects a really, really bad person.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who today is your biggest enemy or like the extreme?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Both political sides.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mencho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved?

[Joe Lonsdale]

If you guys were trying to kill Trump, it means that if they're still around after Trump's president, they're probably trying to get him and his and his kids again.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why was Palantir started?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Protect the west against Islamist terrorists.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's truly the mission.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That was truly the mission. But is Iran really Iraq?

[Patrick Bet-David]

But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And I don't know, maybe this is not appropriate, but it'd be very Roman. So you know, the Romans would do, you'd go and you wipe out the leadership class. You're all dead. And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge. We're going to make a deal or we're going to kill all of you too.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, this whole thing with Valley, Tim and PBD podcast started with a phone. Me and Mario, that's it. And it grew today to, you know, 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full time employees and that relationship. Are you watching us and supporting us? Wouldn't happen without you. But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel and it would mean the world to us. If you could press that subscribe button and notification. Why? It allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you. So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button. It would mean the world to us. Thank you so much.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Did you ever think you were made. For me, Adam?

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever saw.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's right here.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You are a one of one.

[Joe Lonsdale]

My son's right. About. I don't think I said this.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Great to have you on the podcast.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Thanks for having me, Patrick. Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And I know you like these mics, credit, they're awesome. Yes. Jake and the crew. Who. Jake, who picked these blue mics, by the way? You did. Okay, so credit goes to him.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But co founder Palantir, we started that 23 years ago.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes. The story you have from co founding a Palantir to Dan, I think you were an investor in Free Press with Barry Weiss. If I'm not mistaken, you were somewhat involved companies.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yes, I gave Barry some money when she started because, you know, we need to rebuild our institutions in this country and make it better.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you moved to Austin, you're building a university. University Austin. You're doing another thing with Cicero, which we'll talk about. I want to get your opinion on Cicero and Cato, because those are two different mindset. And then statesman. Yes. Two different statesmen. One had a temper his way or the highway. The other one was compromise open to, which is kind of the route you guys went. And then recently you put, I think, some $11.8 million into a drone company in Nigeria.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, that's random. I run a big venture capital. We're doing a lot in AI. Yeah. Hvc. It's called hvc. And listen, most of the best defense stuff, we focus on America, of course. I do think in Africa, working with the very, very best group that we could find there. It's important because there's a lot of bad guys there, too.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, I agree. So that's interesting. We'll get into that. Because I'm curious. The drone business is very important. We're seeing with these wars with Ukraine and Russia, if you would ask the average person five years ago, if Ukraine and Russia go to war, what will be the most important tool to use? Nobody would have guessed. Drones. Millions. Millions of drones and blowing up all these other things. But. Okay, got a lot of questions. And the timing of this interview is phenomenal because we got the Iran stuff going on. We got El Mencho that was just killed. And, you know, with what's going on with Mexico, we have.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yes. I wouldn't want to be in Puerto Vallarta right now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No. And we, we, you know, it's a place where we used to go to a lot because for vacation spot, Americans go to Cancun. They go to part of Puerto Vallarta,

[Joe Lonsdale]

the Costco man, they hit the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Out of all the places.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I know the airport, too. It's scary.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I want to start off with your background. Palantir. When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is Neutral. Some are scared.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, it gets good if they know who you are. One of my favorite signs on the. The old Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. He had a sign on his desk and it said, if nobody is angry, you might not be doing much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, You. Do you subscribe to that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, totally. Okay. Totally.

[Patrick Bet-David]

At what age did you subscribe to that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Pretty young, actually. I was a pretty obnoxious kid.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Were you?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, yeah. I had all sorts of opinions. I always have. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Tell me about your parents.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Who were your parents? My parents. My parents were awesome. My. My mom passed away a long time ago. My dad's not doing well, which is sad, but they're. They're amazing people. My father was very competitive. He was one of eight kids. He brought them all out to California. He was our chess coach when we were little for fun. He does a chemical engineer, but. And we won the state championship when I was a kid and my brothers did, too. We thought we must be really smart. And then he kept winning 20 years in a row. So he's just a very competitive guy. Everything, every game, every sport. And a really optimistic, positive, competitive guy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Chess. So you guys play chess? How old were you when you won the championship?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I was the K to 6 champion twice in a row in fifth and sixth grade, and we won the nationals in junior high school. So. But it's like. It's because we worked really hard at it because he was a good coach. You got to spend. You had to spend, you know, 30, 40 hours a week to be the best.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And this is in Fairmont.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We grew up in Fremont, California, and Silicon Valley. And these were tournaments in California and around the country.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who were you in high school?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I was a public high school. I was a nerdy guy who was a valedictorian. And I had a bunch of really smart friends who taught me a bunch of stuff about, you know, we went. Went way ahead in math and science and stuff.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So at what point did you and Peter Thiel link up? Because I think when I. I heard a story about you were still in college and you were doing something with them. How did that relationship start?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, a lot of the smartest kids in Stanford Computer science were going to PayPal at the time. It was something where I really admired the talent that was there. You have to realize that company. There was one company started by Peter Thiel and a bunch of his smartest friends. Max Levchin started it and David Sachs. All these guys were there. Greed, Hoffman. And there's one company that Elon Musk Started with Roloff and a bunch of other really smart people. It was called X at the time. And X and Confinity merged to make PayPal. They were. They're fighting each other and they merged. So it's all the smartest friends around. Both Elon and Peter. No surprise it was a place you wanted to be. They actually rejected me my freshman year, but they let me in my sophomore year to go help them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Was that, like, the place everybody wanted to work?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Not everyone, but I think it was for. For me, it was where I noticed a lot of the smartest, most interesting people go in there. So it was when I was trying to find.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How was story coming to you guys? Because, you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, at that time, when you look at the numbers, it's not like Elon is today's Elon.

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't. They weren't.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But how did you know that these was there? Would they talk about it in the small circles, like.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, but, I mean, I was a computer scientist. I was already ahead. I'd already done most of the undergrad work before I got there, which is normal nowadays. And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists and they were all trying to go work there and so in there for smartest friends were working there. And. And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review, which Peter had started. So I met people that way too, through it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Got it. So Peter's way. How proactive was Peter of trying to get it in front of all the smartest kids coming out?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, this is. This is like, this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses. So Peter was very good at that. What we spent a lot of our time on now flying up to see all the kids at Harvard, MIT this week. It's like we spent a lot of time on this.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So. So walk me through it. So what does that look like? Is it, you know, do you. Do you go straight to the top? Do you establish relationships? Are there programs to go meet the kids? How does that. How does.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Actually, it's a good question. People don't ask. So pal, here, we had a whole playbook when we started that, you know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent. And so you'd have. You'd have your. Your fellows, you'd have your spies, you have your advisors. You have all these, like, spies, these young men and women on your team, and they're like talented computer scientists, and they help you map out who the other best people are and they help you throw parties and they help you get to know them, you know, professors there as well. And you're just, you just have people who are young, smart, technical people who are social and they're there and they're mapping it out and they're helping you meet the right people. So when I come in, there's different groups. We've met people who want to work with us, we want to learn from them. So it's mutually beneficial thing where you're getting to know all the top talent and you're, and you're helping connect them to your top companies and it becomes a way to work with them all.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But how do you filter them out? Like, how do you know, you know,

[Joe Lonsdale]

it's like a chicken and egg. You start with like you say, I'll have a superstar from my portfolio who's like one of our best engineers who just came from MIT and they had like five or six of their smartest friends in the younger year. And you'll go meet those kids who are the smartest guys, you know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So it's a network, it's purely word of mouth. So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys. And they would say, you have to meet John, he's the smartest guy I know. So you're asking him.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Then you might talk to him and you might work on projects with them so you get to know a little bit. But, but yeah, you're just purely through the network. I mean it's a lot of things the same way if you're a football coach or you're a baseball coach, you got to do this for talent in tech.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But what do you look for? So, so in football you may look for speed, you know, like right now I met with one of the law firms that represents a lot of young talent nowadays. They're recruiting kids at 10, 11, 12 years old. I said, so what do you look for? They said, coachability and personality. I said, why personality? Personality equals sponsorship. You got personality? I can get some sponsorship money. You're coachable, we can put you. Of course, you got to have the physical abilities. What did you guys look for?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, it depends if you're hiring an entrepreneur or hiring an engineer, an engineering leader, since because they're different.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Give me both.

[Joe Lonsdale]

An entrepreneur needs to have opinions and my entrepreneur needs to, needs to be able to say, here's my hypothesis about the world, here's why I'm right. Usually they want to have some chip on their shoulder, some something they're trying to prove. Yeah, they want to be someone. You can tell they're ambitious, they believe in things you don't necessarily. You need smart, interesting, curious people to build things, but you need to have like, a certain level of leadership and opinions about the world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I think to build things is the mindset of recourse. That's all for. Right. You were at Palantir 04209. We were also at PayPal. And they, they categorized you as being part of the PayPal mafia.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Second, you know, I'm 15 years younger than Peter. I'm 12 years younger than Elon. I was a junior kid. I don't get any credit for PayPal.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But you were still there. You were still there.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I was learning from these guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And were you in meetings? Were you watching them? Were you there? And what was that like? What was Elon like in meetings? What was Peter like in meetings? What was that like? Give us some of the insights.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon, be honest. But I mean, these, these guys were, were just very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast. No tolerance for things that are broken. You fix it right away. You know, you work through the problems. You get, you get everything done today. You don't talk about what you're going to do next week. You just use move. You know, people would be there late at night fixing problems, you know, passionate about their work.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What, what was the demo of the age? What, what would you say the average is? Would you say 25?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Zero budget guys in their 20s, mostly

[Patrick Bet-David]

in their 20s, where you can, as you can be demanding of getting them to now. At the same time, was Elon and Peter also there, driving, Working with them?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, in different, different contexts. Right. Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the, the thinker. He's not the one. He's not the technical guy himself. I think, I think Elon is more of the operator. He's more there in the room. I mean, I was, I was in Palo Alto a couple weeks ago, right. And I was meeting a friend and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at xai. He's just there working. Working where? He's kind of the more the workhorse just pushed through, solve the details of the technical problems.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Was the level of intent. Like, who was the most intense guy at Apple? The most intense.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working. But there's other engineers who are just There all the time, pushing hard. Right. I think, I think when, when you're in operation mode, guys like Max L and others were just, as far as I could tell, just always working.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who were some of the guys that you, you worked with that were maybe junior guys like you that came out and became big stars as well?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, so, so, I mean a lot of the guys who were There, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal that quickly became billion dollar companies. Right. So, and a lot of these guys were older than me, but it was the guys that, you know, Chad and Steve who built YouTube, it was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn. It was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX. I mean, you know, there's guys who built Ironport, there's just, there's just so many things that came out of there. Got it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so from there, how did the opportunity to be a co founder of a Palantir come up?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund and I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized and I, I started bringing in my smartest friends to help and there weren't really other managers there, so I'd helped start, start building things. And a bunch of my smartest friends I brought in one summer to help us. They, they weren't interested in finance, they thought it was boring. And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about, at, you know, at PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money. And so we got to know the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys. There was Secret Service and the FBI. And right after this happened, it was 9, 11. And so these guys were spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought didn't make any sense. And they were really, they kept asking us for advice. They're confused about how to do things. It was, it was, I mean, President Bush created what was called the Department of Homeland Security at the time. I shouldn't be too mean about it, but you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department, people can't really fire people in government easily. So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire. And then they said they just pushed him into the new department. So it was a bit of a mess.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Push them into new departments.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So there's. So therefore the whole department didn't really know very well what it was doing at first is my impression. And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff. And it became really obvious to us, that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things that were going on out there were just way ahead technically of where the government was at that point. And this was a problem because. Because the government was using all. The government was spending $38 billion a year gathering data, looking at the data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also abusing our civil liberties. So it was a mess. So we said, you know what? There's actually a really important problem here to solve. A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and go get them instead. B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any controls. That's crazy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So that's when you said, why don't we go do it? You guys said, let's go do it ourselves.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And I started having my friends I brought that summer to help build a prototype. And which. Which it sounds even crazier than finance, but at least it was interesting. They enjoyed helping me build it. And. And my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later, he moved down here to Miami. He and I controlled the team. And Stefan Cohen, my co founder, and we started building it up.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And CIA was apparently one of the first investors in the company.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They eventually gave us money. I think it was the second, second or third round, but it was. There was only $2 million. And we actually bought them back. The reason we needed them is that Peter, basically, no one would give us money. First of all, Alex Karp and I went all over Sandhill Road, like, you guys have all this talent. Because they can measure talent even back then. Like, why aren't you doing social media? Why aren't you doing something new and exciting? Working with the government's crazy. What's wrong with you guys? It's not possible.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So he didn't think it was a good idea to know.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And this is Alex and I talking to the investors. So all the investors were.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They were telling you guys.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They're telling us. You guys are crazy, right? No one does this. Why are you doing this? It's not possible. It doesn't make any sense.

[Patrick Bet-David]

These are some big names. Credible.

[Joe Lonsdale]

These are the big names. These are. We got turned down by everyone. Are turned down by Excel, by Sequoia, the guy at Kleiner Perkins at the time. And they're a great firm. I admire them very much. But the guy at the time was no longer there. He started laughing at us on the phone because Alex didn't have a technical degree. He's like, you guys don't even know what you're doing. And he's a. It's a doctorate, but it's not even a relevant doctorate, like, like, laughing us out of the room, basically.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And what. What is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of the room? What's he telling you?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, we were.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because Alex is a very. He's a very unique type of guy himself. We were.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We were not happy with these people. Peter. Peter Thiel told me it was probably really good for me because it gave me, like, an even bigger chip of my shoulder to make sure we succeeded after being, like, mocked and turned now by, like, 30 of these guys. And Peter couldn't just only fund it himself. He needed other people to fund these things. So when we got in Q Tel, which is the CIA's venture capital arm at the time, to give us a little bit of money, and Peter gave us even more, that was really critical.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And then how long later did you guys pay the 2 million back?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think we bought it for a much higher amount. We had some option. I forget. It must have been five or six years later.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so they still made some money on it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, they made plenty of money on it. And, you know, more importantly, we saved the government billions of dollars versus what they were doing. I mean, you literally had things going on. The DHS guys, I remember there was some UNISYS thing where it was, like, $3 billion to integrate all the data. And we came and we showed them we could have done the same thing for them out of the box in a month. Like, don't waste billions of dollars. So it turns out competence saves the government lots of money and protects civil liberties. People don't realize it's both of those things.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What is the desire to constantly use names that are from, I believe, Lord of the Rings. Right. Where does that come from?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Peter gets credit for naming.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Peter gets credit, you know, But I'm

[Joe Lonsdale]

a fan of it. I think. Listen, and we wrote about this at that time, so at the time when we're creating this, we say this is a dangerous thing to create, you know, but we believe it's a. It's. We believe it's a worthy thing to create. And it took. It took a lot of courage. Like, you know, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on. It could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things. But it was really important to both help. You know, we have to eliminate probably about to 10, up to 10,000 terrorists that might not get eliminated. We worked with the. We work with all sorts of amazing groups in the government alongside them with the technology and with the ability and we help protect civil liberties and make sure the government watchers are being watched now. Of, you know, of course, you create this technology. It's. If it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the audit trails, who knows what bad could be done with it. So there's good and bad here.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And we'll get in. I want to get into that as well. But going back to the meetings of going meeting with investors and them saying, you know what, you know, you guys don't know what you're doing. You don't even have the real degree. Alex said in one of the interviews, I think he may have said it to you. He said, I wish we would have told them to f off and just left.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We were so polite. They would have probably respected us more if we. If we had just like, were you

[Patrick Bet-David]

naturally polite or were you intentionally becoming polite because you needed the money, like

[Joe Lonsdale]

what you're supposed to do? We needed the money, man. I didn't know what you're supposed to do. Got it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So. But. But it's. It wasn't naturally because you're a disagreeable personality.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, yeah. At the same time, I think both of us are not the kind of people. We're probably a little more arrogant now that now we've done more arrogant. You know, we didn't know that. We didn't know for sure. We knew what we were doing. We felt we were doing something smart. But it was our first time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He said. He said, I think it was. I wish we were more arrogant in certain areas and less arrogant in certain areas.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's. That. That's well said. You know, it was interesting. When you're creating our company, we kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch. And in some cases, it was probably frankly genius in other cases, because I just hired someone and knew what they were doing. And it's like when you're building a company, I talk about having adults in the room. There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring into a startup because you don't want people running a machine in a standard way. You want to be creative, but there's certain parts that once you get there, you probably do want the adults to show you how it's done. So there's. There's some things we maybe could have learned from others.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What was your strength in the partnership as a founder? What was his.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I was really good at recruiting the first few hundred people and kind of pushing forward on the kind of like the product strategy and whatnot. Alex was really intuitive about institutions, about how the world works, about how we come across, about how to get into certain places, about how to make deals happen, but how to communicate with the in the right way that you're coming across to create value for the other person in a way they understand the way you can get it done. Alex is, he's a philosopher and he understands how people and organizations work and how to navigate the world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Got it, got it. So his. Was he more the one selling the vision? You were more recruiting the people?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I think, I think recruiting is a lot about selling vision as well. When we, when we gave people their offers initially, this is really early on, at the beginning, and we give them three options of like, higher salary, middle or lower salary, and higher upside. Middle, lower upside. And I put on the sheet of paper, the lawyers hated this, but I put an asterisk that it might not be exactly right. I'd say, okay, if the company's worth $5 billion and this much solution, here's what your shares might be worth. And it'd be like. Or, you know, here, here, the company's worth a billion dollars. Here's what might be worth. And people would say, joe, you can't show people if it's worth $5 billion. That's totally unrealistic. But you had to say, no, here's why it could be worth.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And now it's worth what, 335 or. Yeah, now it's worth a billion dollars.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, it was a lot bigger.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you couldn't say it's worth 5 billion.

[Joe Lonsdale]

People thought I was ridiculous.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So let me get this straight. So. So you're sitting in front of me and you're telling me 200k salary. 350. Sal, I'm just making up numbers. 500k salary. Okay, 500k salary. If it's 5 billion, you're going to get $10 million. Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But up here, $20 million, it's going

[Patrick Bet-David]

to be 50 million. That's literally what you guys.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Nothing like that. Lower salaries, of course, but. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow. And so based on what I would choose, would you judge me and put me in the.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Totally. I totally. If you, if you choose the high salary and low upside, then. Then I have to go be very skeptical of you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Would you still hire me or no?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Sometimes, but usually, you know, it works out. We. Because we measure everything. Sure. After the fact. All the very best guys chose the low salary.

[Patrick Bet-David]

All the very best guys choose A

[Joe Lonsdale]

low salary outside there because they want to, they want, they want to skid in the game. They want to be part of the mission. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And by the way, how much, especially since you're, you said you recruit the first few hundred people at Palantir and you were at PayPal and you watch how they recruited you, how much have you noticed recruiting change from then till today due to AI, so.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh no, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not just AI, it's that people recognize talent so much better. So Palantir was getting the best of the best. We get the top people out of the top schools. Facebook and Google kind of caught on to some of this. They started giving big signing bonuses and so what I in like 2009 or 2008, 2009, they started giving 150k signing bonuses which at the time that sounded like a lot of money for a 20 year old. It's ridiculous. Now the top AI companies, it's like multimillion dollar signing bonuses.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I saw this one guy got a billion dollar offer, he turned it down. This was like nine months ago, ten months ago.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, that's like the very best guy. He's probably taking some knowledge from one place to another. So it's a little sketchy kind of what they're paying for there. But for this, the raw talent, you're still getting millions of dollars for, for coming into companies, just being the most talented kind of math Olympia as a

[Patrick Bet-David]

young guy coming in.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, but it's like, think about it, it's like, it's like, it's like, you know, you hire a young guy for a basketball team, who's the best basketball player, similarly the gold medal programmer in the world who's going to add this unique ability. What's that worth? So, so it's worth a lot.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So. So today it's not uncommon for a young guy to get a $5 million signing bonus for the very.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's like being a top athlete.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you protect yourself if the guy walks in six months? Well, is there a clawback?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, you start, you structured in some way that like it's built in. I mean if he walks in here, he might be able to keep it, but he hopefully contribute a lot in a year. But he's getting, he's getting equity and he's vesting into his upside. So you don't want to leave too soon. If the company's doing well, he's going to stick, he's going to earn that

[Patrick Bet-David]

got the equity in it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

He's going to get the equity for next four years. He's going to want to stay and earn that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you got the signing bonus, you got the salary and you got the equity.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And sometimes the sign bonus. He might ask to take his equity if he's bullish, which, which by the way the best people often do, they want to own a bigger piece of the game.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So I didn't give you $5 million. I give you $5 million worth of share today that could be worth 100 million.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Maybe he takes a million of it in cash and he gets, he's comfortable and he has 4 million of it in shares because he's smart and he wants to make the big money, you know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. So that's one thing that's changed with recruiting. The cost, how much cost to get the cost.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And, and what else?

[Patrick Bet-David]

What else has changed?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean so at a part. My second company after Palantir, it's a very successful. It's like $10 trillion in this platform for wealth managers. And you know a guy used to work for me, Scott Wu, he had won the gold medal in programming three years in a row. So like it's like king of the nerves basically. Right. Everyone knew who he was in these competitions and he worked for me and then he went on. Now he's running one of the top AI companies. But the fact that I was able to hire him and people like him just by like showing up at these contests and hanging out. Now there's like hundreds of other firms going after these contests, sponsoring these contests. They all know who these kids are. The game's gotten harder. You have to look, look harder for these top people now and it's harder

[Patrick Bet-David]

to recruit them and, and you better, you better.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I have an advantage because of everything I've built. But you better have a reason why they should be coming to work with you. If you're just a random new person, it's really tough.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the differentiator?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean I've built multiple different multi billion dollar companies and the next. And this is my main thing I'm doing. Come work with me on it. That's a pretty good pitch. Versus you never heard of me before. Right. So it's just, it's a lot harder.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Got it. So the differentiator is moral authority. Previous track record. I've won before. We're building something big again. Come join us.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Tell you the best thing is this is this other guy, you know, is there who's a genius. You want to work with him and learn from him. So it's all about chicken and egg. I gotta start with the best people than the other best people. That's how Palantir really did it. We started with a bunch of the best guys. The other ones want to be with them, want to learn from them. So it's. You got to have a nucleus. You start with.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What else did you do at the beginning? The first few hundred of Palantir? You recruit. I mean, that's a big thing to say. That's the foundation. Yeah. What other methods did you look at certain schools to recruit from teams of

[Joe Lonsdale]

about 20 of the top universities? We'd have playbooks for flying there. We would rate. We could raid other companies. It sounds really bad when you talk about it. The Most ridiculous version 1 of this guy Nathan, who was helping us build a company. Early on, he had worked at ebay because eBay bought PayPal. He didn't have PayPal. And we quit and got a conference room at ebay. And I was like, 2021 at the time, and we were interviewing people at ebay to come join our company. And I felt a little bit awkward about it, but I'm like, I guess this is what people do. Turns out you weren't supposed to do that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But anyway, did it work?

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was such a badly run company that they didn't even have any idea that it was going on, which is, you do that. My company, I'll mess you up, man.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's not cool. I'll be like one of your mobster friends.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, you almost have to have that mindset, like, fight people.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's like. But ebay was like a sclerotic group of, like, MBAs who didn't really have strong opinions about the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

At what point did you know Palantir was special? Like, it really had legs, you know, it was.

[Joe Lonsdale]

For me, it was like when I had some of these people joining Bob McGrew when he came in from. From, you know, he had been Stanford PhD and had been at PayPal and was a superstar. That's part of the reason Peter gave us money for one round, is when he joined. And he ended up running a bunch of stuff at open AI after being a pal for 10 years. But when he came, these other guys came. When we started to get into the FBI and. And. And the. You know, it's just like three or four years in, it was. It started to really work, and all this top talent started coming. It was very special.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And. And what happened so when you're saying FBI, what, what does that mean? Like they're approaching you guys, you're solving their problems. They're seeing, you know, you know, it's,

[Joe Lonsdale]

it's so hard to sell the government. And I use. So it's a CIA. I used to think it was like a CIA. It's actually like 200 competing orgs that don't like each other. And the FBI like that a little bit too. There's lots of parts of it. And so we are working, doing pilots with both sides, but we couldn't get a breakthrough. And at one point we finally. It's kind of funny, they were jealous of each other. They wanted to be first, but they

[Patrick Bet-David]

didn't want to be icia.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Government's very funny. I've done other things. We saw the government, they both want to be able to tell everyone how innovative they are, but they don't want to take any risk in being the first one to do something because they can get fired. And they're very risk averse. People tend to be bureaucrats. And so we were doing all these things they needed, but they were afraid to do the big contract. And I think both of them thought the other contract was going ahead. And then they both signed at once. And then we got in and we started out real value. And listen, this company took a long time to iterate and figure out how to, how to, how to help. But, but it was, once you started breaking in and iterating with them, it was clear we're going to get there.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And what role was Thiel playing?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Teal was like the chairman of the board, co founder, strategist. He stopped us from making some really key mistakes in years 2, 3, 4. There would have been some bad partnerships we were going to sign. He, he made sure it was funded. He made sure the vision was the right direction.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you comfortable sharing one of them?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, sure. I mean, there is a company that was going to get us our first few million dollars of revenue if we partner with them in D.C. but they would have kind of locked us into something where they owned a big piece of the whole thing long term, the way they structured it and that would have capped the value. We might probably would have been a better chance of being worth 100 million and no chance of being worth it

[Patrick Bet-David]

that big of a difference.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, because they would have owned a piece of the market the way they wanted to structure it and have some rights. And for me, I'm just trying to make this thing work. So you're like, oh, it's going to give us millions of revenue we'll be able to get over here. But it would have really, like, taken away a lot of the upside. And he's, he's, he's very smart about how to structure these things, how to protect yourself. And, and you know, he's, he's always been the thinker behind the scenes, who you check everything with. And here you make sure you're going the right direction.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why was Palantir started?

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was started to protect the west against Islamist terrorists and to make sure we save the government money and protect the civil liberties.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That was, that's the mission.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That was the mission.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's truly the mission.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That was truly the mission.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you're saying that to me in the interview when you're recruiting me.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, I don't know if we used. Yeah, yeah, we used a lot of words like that when we were first starting out. We were helping.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you literally telling me we're going to save the free world? Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We say, listen, the technology cultures that exist in the west coast, which if I'm interviewing you, you know, you're one of the great technologists and you know, your friends are amongst the very top. The things we know how to do here. They do not know how to do that in this part of the world. In D.C. they just don't. They're way behind and they're broken and they're wasting tens of billions of dollars and we're getting attacked and they're abusing our data and they're incompetent and we're going to have to do this for them to come in. And it's important that at least some of the best people in the world go and help the government be less stupid. I mean, that is, that is, that is my view on the matter. You know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Got it. But that mission was full on bought. And you, Alex, Peter, you guys are on the same page with the mission.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. Save the Shire, we used to put it, because this comes from the Lord of the Rings. But you say the Shire is this Western civilization is protecting the innocent. It's going off and doing the mission.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Let me ask you the process. It's. Is it okay pre the idea of Palantir, you're sitting in, guys, this is a problem. We have to save, you know, the free world. We have to say save the, you know, Western ideology. Here's the enemy. You know, what they're trying to do. How can we solve that problem? And then do you think about what company can we develop that can Solve this problem. Does it go mission first, solution second. What is the process?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, the tools that were built at PayPal to. To stop the fraudster, this is the Russia one. You were talking the Russian Chinese mafia. You had to be able to stop those guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So the.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We built those tools.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How nasty was it that made all

[Joe Lonsdale]

of our competitors go bankrupt. Everyone else was going bankrupt. Basically that. This is. This was. This was existential for PayPal to solve.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What kind of money did they get? I mean, it was like billions.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was like 7 or 8 million a month. But that was back when that was a lot of money that you have to remember early stages of paper. This is like. I mean, it's like 7 or 8 million a month at a time when it's scaling a lot of money. It's enough to make it unprofitable. Got it. I don't have the exact numbers, but it was enough to make it unprofitable versus profitable. It was really key. And. And it was annoying because you could. Because you had to not accept certain things if you couldn't stop these guys. Right. So it'd break a lot of stuff. They'd run money through the system. They take it out. You might go to 7 11, buy something. They're gonna get your credit card, sell to a group of Russians. The Russians are going to open accounts, transfer a bunch of money. You're going to then skip PayPal 300. You say no, you'll charge it back. And then. And then. And then we have to pay the. We have the companies to pay it. And so there's all this fraud you had to deal with. And then it turned out that, like, the types of problems we realized we were doing for investigating, that you could extend those to a lot more types of problems and build investigative software that didn't exist and be able to, like, look into all the data, bring the data together. Basically, how the human mind extended into the $38 billion of data and make sure you only access what you're allowed to access and make sure you have audit trails to do it right in order to get the bad guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so that created so much pain and annoyance that led to the mission. And it inspired from there to start a company called Palantir that prevents what Russia and China did to you guys.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, 911 happened after that, and we saw. And we got to know these guys, and we saw them reacting to it badly. We said, wait a second.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We got to help things at the same time.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, those two things. Got it. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do so many People not trust you. Why do so many people not trust Palantir? Every. Everybody. Like, you know how when you think about every decade, there's a company that people look at as evil. You got Monsanto, you got Enron, you got all these guys. You know, 20 years ago, they hated these companies, they hated AIG. But man, when you think about Palantir, a lot of people say, what is your motive? What is the vision? What are you guys trying to do?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, not running it anymore, first of all. So I was, I was there the first decade. But I'll tell you, you know, first of all, when you're really successful, people attack you. That's always going to happen. And second of all, this is a, this is unusual era. You have a company that is, that is helping, helping the government, you know, eliminate bad guys. It's helping the government do things it wants to do more effectively, more efficiently. And some of the things government's doing right now, people are not happy with. And so I think it's an interesting question, like, should a tech company stop helping the government when it disagrees with it? And I think Alex Karp's spoken really well on this. And I know, listen, Alex Karp comes from, you know, he had an African American mother who's had a kind of Jewish professoral father. He comes from the left, obviously. Peter Till obviously is more on the right. And you know, so we come from different political sides here, but they both agree that it's better for the world to make American government and America more efficient and work better and not throw sand in the gears, not break things. And so the question is like, should Silicon Valley get to decide policy or should the government get the decide policy? And our view is we want to watch the watchers, but the government should get the decide policy. Our republic has a mechanism for deciding and we should follow that mechanism versus being in charge ourselves.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex, Then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building, Then what?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, it's. See that, that, that's not what's scary. What's scary to me is if Safari public elects a really, really bad person and they try to get around things and use technology and power in ways they shouldn't. Pounds very possible that it's very possible. That's, that is scary to me. That's why we all have to fight to be part of the political process for our views there and, and to make sure we have checks on power, which is court of the US Constitution. What Alex is doing. He. He doesn't get the data himself. Alex is running a company that builds technology for our clients. Right. I should say our clients. I'm an advisor still. I'm proud founder. I'm not running Palantir these days. But, but, but Palantir is helping them use their data. We're not. We're not data ourselves. You see what I'm saying? Like you're helping them see things and do things they couldn't do otherwise with their information. Where it's not like Palantir itself has all the information.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How many of the. How many of the events that happens in the world where we're watching, like, you know, is Palantir involved in, for instance, and I know you're not involved today, like Maduro, was Palantir involved in capturing him? El Mencho, the Mexico, you know, the, the cartel guy we just killed in Mexico. Were you involved in gathering that intel? Because if you're thinking all these intel. And by the way, a lot of agencies use you, right? It's not just CIA that uses you. So you know what everybody is doing.

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, no, but we don't actually, because. Because the people who know are the people who have the clearance to see what's going on there. So there may be things that happen that Alex, even if he's running the company, may not have the top secret clearance for that particular operation to be involved in that thing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is there anybody in the company that has the clearance to know what everything's going on?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I actually don't know the answer to that question. That's an interesting question. I doubt. I doubt they do because a lot of pals work is with allies all over the world, and different allies have different clearances and different things they do. So it'd be very unlikely for someone to see everything. Now, the real question, though, is do you want this operation to be done efficiently and effectively as possible, or do you want to be done slightly stupider? I mean, that's really the question we're asking here. Should this be done in a slightly stupider way or a slightly better way? Because that's all Palantir is doing is it's on site with them, helping them do it in a better way, given the information they're allowed to use.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mencho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved?

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's very. It's very likely to me that. That the technology and that was involved and its capabilities were involved, and that helped them do it in a Better way than they would have done it before, especially with the US Operation. I don't know about the Mexican operation or not. I'm not, I'm not dispute on what they're doing there.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Meaning the Venezuela operation.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Venezuela one. I'd be surprised if it wasn't involved in some way. But again, Palantir is a tool being used by others in our government who are in charge, who are making the strategy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Explain that. So how is that tool used? What does that tool help you do? If I explain different technology, I can say here's what HubSpot helps you, here's what Salesforce helps you, here's what this technology helps you. How does Palantir help in that process?

[Joe Lonsdale]

So what Palantir, I mean it's a lot of things at this point, but Palantir is bringing together data from a lot of different sources in the government. Like I said when I started Palantir government spent 30 something billion a year gathered data. I bet you it's a lot more than that now. So there's, there's literally hundreds of thousands of databases. There's literally signal intelligence, human intelligence and there's all sorts of rules about who could see what, what they could do. So they're, they're not, for example, people are not allowed to spy on us as, and use that data. That'd be illegal. Palantir would flag that and say this is against the rules. You can't be doing this. Right. So the whole thing is a rules engine that has very strict rules. And then so there's someone who's using it. They're getting all the stuff they're legally allowed to be doing based on the policy of our republic. And they're, and they're bringing it all together and they're, and they're putting it together because it's very complicated. If you lost a basis. Is this the same person over here? Is this person over here? Is this Muhammad? The same as this Muhammad, you know, is this, is this guy, is this guy with this last common Hispanic last name Sarah. This name is this Becerra. And they're mapping it all out and they're taking, and they're taking all the information they can and they're using that with AI along with, along with their judgment to ask questions and right. And make plans and figure things out, connect the dots and then get things

[Patrick Bet-David]

done better at the beginning stages who didn't want to see Palantir succeed.

[Joe Lonsdale]

The primes. All the primes. So, so in America, the primes are the big defense Companies in America, we had for a long time the most competitive, best defense companies. In the 20th century, there were maybe 80 or 90 of these. They just were dominant. Best in the world. After the Cold War ended, we had to lower the budget. Probably good thing. I'd rather more money goes towards other things than war. The primes all emerged. They emerged in these eight or nine.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Six of them.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, exactly. Maybe even eight or something. But they're much smaller. Much, much, much fewer number much bigger companies. And they became so dominant, but they became more like the government themselves because they interact with it so much. They became big bureaucracies and these big bureaucracies. A lot of the best tech guys, they all fled. They all fled to the. To the tech world, to the best places in Silicon Valley, to other places. And these places got really good at what we call innovation theater. They're good at convincing Congress they're innovating, but they're not really innovating anymore. And they stopped innovating. And there's only two companies that broke through these primes. It was Palantir and SpaceX.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Both.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Palantir, SpaceX. And it was really hard. It was really unfair. They beat the crap out of us. We'd do things that would save huge numbers of lives. I'll tell you, there's there. So we work with the Special Forces at first because Special Forces are like the most elite. Like soldiers doing really important missions and their lives are on the line a lot. So they wanted the best tools. So when Palantir went somewhere at first, it was very often Special Forces guys using it for key missions to save their lives. Now at the time, they were. We were in Iraq and there were army brigades in Iraq and they saw us saving lives and Special Forces, they said, can we use it too? And the government wouldn't pay for it. So we said, of course you can use it for free because we're patriots. That's the whole point. So go use it for free. Just give us the data back legally.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Makes you reaching out to you.

[Joe Lonsdale]

This is like all sorts of people in the military working with our guys in the military embedded, working with these guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not pmc.

[Joe Lonsdale]

These are actual guys like lieutenant colonels in the military.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So lieutenant colonels are reaching out. The government doesn't want to fund it. Can you help us?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Getting a general's permission, pushing it in. Wow. These are guys in the ground because, listen, their buddies. Lives are on the line, right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure is.

[Joe Lonsdale]

These are. We have a lot of great soldiers.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Without the approval of the US Government,

[Joe Lonsdale]

no no, they people that approve that we use it for, we don't because

[Patrick Bet-David]

they're not going to pay the pay

[Joe Lonsdale]

for it because we don't want to get in trouble stopping you using something that's going to work better. And so in. We stopped tons of deaths from IEDs because we're able to track where the IEDS most likely were. We able to track all sorts of things going on. They reported back all these deaths that we stopped. And then there was like a 5, whatever 3 or $5 billion bid for the defense ground control system again. And we'd already been used better than anything they were doing before the way ahead everything they wanted and they just like no bid, gave it to a Prime. And we actually sued him at this point because it's not, not allowed. You have to consider others. We actually won the lawsuit. The generals in charge of getting into the prime were ordering people behind the scenes to destroy the records of live loss. But some guys, that, some guys had saved the lives that we'd saved. So the general couldn't, couldn't hide it. It's like, it's like totally corrupt. It's totally corrupt. So we had to break through. And then a lot of others saw this and this has really shifted the culture of the military now. And SpaceX broke through and Palantir broke through and now Yanderel, of course they're starting to say, wait a second, we gotta be open to the outside stuff. We can't just only do the Primes. But that was a big fight for us for years.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who's. Which of the Primes are bigger than you guys right now?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Everyone's still, everyone's still bigger on revenue because Palantir is still a smaller company. Palantir is about half government, a little bit less than half government revenue. So it's like, you know, it's in the single digit billions for revenue and there's Primes making tens of billions of revenue that are much bigger than us. Been around forever, but we're growing much faster. That's why we're valued highly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But market cap wise, you're higher than the Prime.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Market cap wise we're higher, but revenue wise we're still much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Do you, I mean you're not a part of it since. So now you're an advisor. Is there any situations where Palantir has to deal with the Prime?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh yeah, all the time. The Primes still run a lot of stuff. And by the way, there are still parts of things the Primes do. They're the best in the world and you have to work with them. The problem was is early on we've powder tried to do anything. The problem is they say like, oh, we'll take 99% of the value, we'll give you 1% of the value, we'll take credit for your work. It was like, it's like they just beat you because they're in charge.

[Patrick Bet-David]

When you say 99, it's $100 million project, literally pay you a million bucks,

[Joe Lonsdale]

they'll give you a million bucks for something. And then we'd actually do most of the work and it would drive us crazy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So in 09, which is 17 years ago, what's top line revenue that year?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, I don't remember but it was.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is it in the millions or billions?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Probably in the 10 millions that we didn't cross a billion for 15 years. Took a long time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So in 09 companies been around for 5 years and the revenue is in the millions.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Tens of tens of millions.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Tens of millions.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, got it. It might have just been crossing 100. I don't, I don't know the exact numbers. Tens of millions.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So if that's who didn't want you to exist at that time, who today is your biggest enemy?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, and I, I really can't speak for the companies. This is just me now, founder looking on from the outside. I, I, I would think the biggest threat to Palantir are like the extreme populists on both political sides who don't want our country using better technology to, to succeed basically. And you know there's a lot of, there's 1200 laws right now in 50 states trying to ban different types of AI for things that I think are just ridiculous. I think most of the, by the way, some of it's good. You gotta protect children, you gotta like protect content creators. There's like, there's legitimate things to push back on, but a lot of this stuff is nonsense. And if those nonsense passes, it's not just an enemy to Palantir, to enemy to like thousands of our best innovative companies right now. So, so I think that's actually the biggest threat at this point because Palantir is so dominant and adding value to so many thousands of companies.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can we like specify who would be far. Are you, so are you saying things like a non interventionalist politician? Is that.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh no, no, no.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What are you saying far?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I'm talking about laws that are, I'm talking about laws that are like, like Bernie Sanders trying to stop all new data centers or something crazy like that. Or people who are saying, we want to throw developers in jail if things don't go right with AI or something. Which there's laws like that. They're browsing in Maryland, Virginia, or there's people saying, you know, it's a lot of people who are technically illiterate writing state law to block things to create new regulators to stop you from deploying, like, stuff like that would be a disaster.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And I see the president's working to deregulate and kind of still keep an open source and allow you to compete without making it too regulated.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. David Sachs is working hard on this for. Because he's the head of AI for the president. And. And, you know, my. My view is that we should have certain regulatory frameworks to protect kids and protect cotton craters and have reasonable law. But we. But we shouldn't be having each state have its own regulatory code. That'd be crazy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did you see this recent movie that came out called Mercy? Have you seen Mercy? You haven't seen Mercy? Oh, my God. You gotta watch Mercy. So it's a movie with Chris Pratt. I've been telling everybody, go watch this movie. Specifically, you like in. Every employee at Palantir needs to go watch this. So Mercy is a story of this actor, Chris Pratt, who wakes up, he's locked into this chair, handcuff shackles. And the judge is that face on the top. If you see the face on the top, that's the judge. It's an AI judge. You have 90 minutes to prove to her why you didn't kill your wife. In this case, in a movie. He killed his wife. He's a quit.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What are you talking about? And she has access to every video to pull up. Can you go to this state? What happened that morning when I walked

[Joe Lonsdale]

into scary stuff, man.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, do you see a day in the next 20 years where we could be living in a world where judges could be AI, politicians could be AI it could be based on models.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's not the world I want to live in.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do we prevent that from happening?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, you know, the Constitution is pretty clear about the rules, and so I think we should make sure we stick to the Constitution. And we, you know, if we're gonna. If we're gonna amend it, we should be really damn careful not to. Not to give AI random power like that. That'd be my view. But the whole point of how America was designed is checks on power. The reason America is. Is a truly great country that's, like, lasted as long as it has. It's our 250th anniversary this year is because our founders were philosophers from the Enlightenment and they thought a lot about this and they realized you have to check government power. You have to set it up with lots of different checks on itself. And the whole point is for the government itself not to be allowed to ever be evil. And, and by the way, that was, that was how we built Palantir is to have audit trails and to watch the watchers and, and to have checks, you have to have checks on power. Otherwise government is dangerous.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, but if we're going into the robot era of developing robots, and if all of a sudden you have 400,000 robots that you program from your headquarters and your competitors got 200,000 robots and third place has got 17,000 robots, and but all of a sudden somebody becomes evil, then what happens?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, this is why, this is why it's important for the military to have the most powerful robots and not, not some kind of corporation. That obviously is very important. And by the way, China is trying to build those faster than us. And that's why right now we're trying to make sure we stay ahead of China. And it's. Listen, our military, how it's controlled by our government, that's a very important thing our public has to get right. But obviously our military has to stay ahead of our, of our, of anyone else. That's. That'd be, that'd be very bad not to have a monopoly on power.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You said it eloquently of who you think Palantir's enemy is. Who do you think is the enemy of the state? Top three enemies.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think our top three enemies are probably our, are probably our adversaries. Right. I think, I think, I think our country right now is very polarized. Is very polarized. And I think social media unfortunately does that, but our adversaries take advantage of that. I think China, using TikTok, finds ways to polarize us more. I think Iran very clearly. The guys running Iran, I'm a very big fan of the Persian people, but the guys running Iran are a bad guy theocracy. And you saw when we hit Iran with Israel last time and, and the Internet went down, you saw 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. And you saw a bunch of bots that are guys who pretend to be Christians who hate Jews in Alabama also got turned off for a while. Right? So there's like, they're trying to find ways to divide us, man. They're trying to find ways to pull us apart.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What a powerful Thing right there. The 15% of Christians who hate Jews in Alabama.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. Sorry, that was another point. Iran was mining 15% of all Bitcoin in the world. We found that out because it went away as soon as we hit him. But then, then there's literally hundreds of thousands of bots that were, like, just angry at. They're angry Americans. They're pretending to be Christian guys who hate Jews. They're pretending to be, you know, crazy people in America who are different on different extremes who are arguing. So there's a lot of stuff that's planted, that's planted to make us fight.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, Let me ask you, if Elon was able to. Who actually knows? This is an interesting thought. I'm curious what your answer will be. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscan Italy. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail. And we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the future. Looks bright collection. Not rushed. Not disposable. Not ordinary, rather intentional. Luxurious, Timeless. This doesn't Elon. If he wanted to really run a report with the data that he has, is he able to see who was behind the fake bots that are causing retweets to happen? For a certain message that's going to undermine a certain way of thinking and pin people against each other, somebody should know.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. Elon did something very courageous with his team a couple months ago. And I don't know where it is now, but they put all the country of origin, remember that, up on all these things. And you saw all these, like, very divisive stuff. Like, you have this, you had this, like, APAC is evil report. APAC thing. And it was like a European account tied to Iranian account, tied to a Pakistan account. You're like, wait a second, you guys have been saying you're from the South. Like, what are you. You're obviously, you're obviously a foreign lobby. Who's. Who's doing this now, right? And. And you got a lot of versions of this where all of a sudden all these accounts that were, they were stirring up trouble on both sides were actually foreigners.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think it'd be interesting to see, to see numbers. I haven't, I haven't looked at that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, I mean, if, if, if, if you're a data Company Palantir or X, also data company. Any of these guys, I would assume they know exactly who's behind it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, the problem is it's very easy to create accounts and be a real person or not be a real person. So I don't know if they know everything. I think there's a lot of bot farms.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You can see the, the words coming from where.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But if you're really good at this and you're a state actor, you can use different IP addresses, you can use different spoofs, you can do things to make it a little bit harder for them to tell. And so you might be able to create a lot of fake accounts. Who.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who is using bot farms? Who are the Chinese customers of bot farm?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Chinese are using probably the most to create so division into, into, into push things and to make the crazy politicians more popular. The Chinese love making socialists more popular in the U.S. they know it weakens us. They have a word for like crazy white person, which is like this kind of woke white crazy person on the left. And they love to. They know it's a problem there. They want to ban it there, but they want to push it in America. Then they think it weakens us culturally. That's one of their models. They have, you know, Chinese do cognitive warfare. You know this, right. So there's like land, sea, air, cyber and cognitive. And they have a whole branch of their military, they're just doing cognitive warfare using all this stuff, whether it's especially TikTok, but all these other ones as well. And they're very good at it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What other tools outside of TikTok?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, all the social media stuff, all the protests, like they are big funders of. They'll figure out something like a Black Lives Matter thing, or they'll figure out something going on with some environmental thing. And both Russia's done this too. Historically, they funded a lot of green movements in Europe. They knew it was good for them to do that. And they'll figure out. And, you know, China nowadays, they take all the data they can. So there's companies like, you know, I'm told airwallox does this. I don't know myself. I'm told Airwalks has all their data that goes through China and the Chinese government has access to any data in China at all. And then we'll use it to model. They have models of you, they have models of me, they have models of everyone. And they try to figure out how to use those models to influence us and influence people about us for their ends. And for our divisiveness. I mean they're very good at it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I mean we saw they did that with TikTok, right. And to the point where we saw what happened with Gen Z and LGBTQ and the tie between it. The percentage is going to. It got to a point that Bill Maher had to talk about.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They Chinese very clearly saw a few issues were very helpful to attack us with. One of those issues is Jewish people. Chinese have decided that it's very helpful to create divisiveness around Jews in America and because they see attacking Jews as something is very, very useful to do to rip us apart. And it is, it is. It's actually caused a lot of problems.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Unpack that. Go a little bit deeper.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So I think the Asian people maybe are a little more racist in some ways than we are. They think of things more of those terms. They just are. That's my experience. And so if you stop and think about this, there's a lot of Jews that are very successful and there's successful Jews in America they see as an edge for America and they see that it's. But they also see there's a lot of resentment. So that's a really easy way to create divisiveness against something that's helping us. And so that's like they go right at it and they're very smart about how to do it. You go all over TikTok, you go all over any. Everything they do and it's like, boom, let's, let's just stir that up. Let's stir up the Black Lives Matter stuff. Let's stir up this other thing over here. They're very good at it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But have you ever seen. How old are you by the way? I think you're four. 43.

[Joe Lonsdale]

43 now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

43, yeah. I'm 47. I just turned 47 a few months ago. Have you ever seen the, the Jewish story and the division being this high temperature wise in your lifetime?

[Joe Lonsdale]

In our lifetimes, this is the highest it's been. And, and, and, and, and it's not just China. Partly what's happening here is this is the first war that Israel's been involved in in our lifetime with social media. And if you go on social media, just the ratio of people who are passionate against Israel versus for Israel, it's 100 to 1. Probably just based on the number of Muslims in the world. There's a lot of good Muslims in the world. There's going to be a lot of extreme ones who are issue doesn't mean they're not good people. They can disagree with me. And so that itself is going to create a lot of passion against Israel and Jews. Right? We should. And so this, there's already, that already exists. And then you can exploit that to, to push it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you address that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

How do we address it? I mean man, this is, this is a, it's a very, very tough issue.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I mean you got, you're, you're the brains. How do you address that? How do you fix them like that? Because it doesn't seem like it, it's, the temperature is getting any lower.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, you know, I, I would like there to be peace in the Middle east. And I think for me the only way to have peace of the Middle east is to free the Iranian people and no longer have sponsors of terror around the Middle East. And I think that leads to a very positive outcome and hopefully Israel and Saudi and UAE can all sponsor and create peace in the, you know, in Gaza together once the theocrats are gone. And hopefully that's a much more positive outcome as long as the Iranian theory cross are there, which is going to be a recurrent, recurrent issue for us. So I really hope, I really hope we take them out. I'll be honest about that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You really hope we take them out?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I think they're evil, evil people who've spread murder and terror and more terror to their own people than anyone else.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's a horrible place.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and one of the most wonderful places in the world if we could get rid of the bad guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, if you do. I mean, there's a song by a singer named Moin and he says my heart wants me to return to Esfahan. Esfahan is one of the richest cities in Iran with history. When my mom and dad were still married to each other for those 10 or 11 years, the only vacation we ever went on was Esfaan. And I have pictures till today as a kid going there with my sister and my mom and my dad. Great memories. But yeah, that's Isfan right there. And Moin says I'd like to one day return. My heart wants me to one day return to this city as found.

[Joe Lonsdale]

One of my favorite books is Cyropedia which was written about Cyrus the Great, the great, the great leader. And this was used actually to train European aristocracy princes for like 2,000 years. And there's all the wisdom of Cyrus and you just, you kind of get this like really sense of like the greatness of the Persian people. From that, it's like, it's very optimistic. It's about virtue. It's about, it's, you know, Machiavelli ended up becoming like the thing people used after him, which is the opposite. Machiavelli is like this very cynical take, which is a dialectic. It's also true, but I really like the, The Persian side. And, and you. You grew up. My mom's side's Jewish. And the. Just like the. What the Persians did for the Jews. And the natural alliance has been there for thousands of years. We, that's, that's. We're still. That's what we still feel. So I really hope this is something that can become a positive.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you think no matter what happens, it's always the Jew's fault? No matter what happens, it's always.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think you. I think you're going to blame the people who are outsiders, who are different, who are successful. I mean, I could say it comes. You wish things. Slightly annoying. Sometimes when you're like. It's like this little neurotic, like, smart person who, like, makes more money than you, you kind of want to punch him in the face, you know? I don't know. I don't know. You tell me.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I can see that. Did you hear what Thomas Sowell said? Thomas Sowell said, I love Thomas Sodi.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He said something so funny one time. He says, you know what my advice to Jews are? But for the world to start liking you a little bit. Start losing. Start losing.

[Joe Lonsdale]

His mentor was Milton Freeman, who was the old Jewish guy?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, Milton Friedman. I have a painting in my house with Milton Friedman in it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I love him. He was. You know, I got to spend lunch. I got lunch with him like 20 times because I was the editor for paper when he was there at Stanford. How was nice? He was amazing. He always had. He was always interested in new ideas and just. He really shaped a lot of my thinking on economics.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Amazing man, Milton Friedman. You spent 20 times with Milton Friedman?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. His wife was often there, too. They were in their early 90s when I was at Stanford and he was at Hoover. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know how hard I've tried to do an interview with Thomas Soldier family. He's not.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's too. It's too hard. He's. He's such a great man.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I mean, listen him, the two of them, the debates, when you would watch them do the debates. What's the one book he wrote? Is it called Reader? Things called Reader? I don't know what the. Can you type in Thomas Soul Reader? I just had my son finish this book two years ago. Is he 12 years old?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You had a conflict of visions that I love.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Click on that one, Rob.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Which one? You.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, reader. Oh, my God. It is like a must read. My son read this at 11, 12 years old and he breaks down ideas in the simplest way.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, this guy would be so much more famous if he wasn't black. Because. Because he's black. The left doesn't want anyone to know that he's conservative.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, here's what's funny though. Conservatives today are not talking about him enough. I think conservatives need to remind what Thomas Solst. But go back to, go back to that with Iran. So Iran right now, at any point. You and I are talking right now, at any point, anything could happen. It was supposed to be this weekend.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think there's a negotiation on Thursday is my understanding. I don't know, I shouldn't be, I shouldn't be saying it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I thought, I thought they said they're not going to do anything. I thought Witkoff and Kushner walked out, said, no, we're not renegot. Rob, do you have that one clip I sent you from the foreign minister where he's being, did you see this one a few hours ago? Oh, no. The foreign minister is being interviewed and he's asked about. Hey, I noticed you said that there are 40,000Americans that are in or surrounding areas of Iran and have U. S. Attacks. That's open game for you. I send it in the PBD podcast group. If you don't have it, Rob, I'll just send it to you. Do you see it? It's right there. Bottom clip right there. Yeah. And he, she says, are you, are you saying you would do something to Americans? And you should see his answer. Go ahead, Rob.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Two thousand American personnel in the Middle east right now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In Iran's letter to the UN Security Council, you seem to threaten them because

[Joe Lonsdale]

you said America will bear full responsibility. You said you don't want war, but

[Patrick Bet-David]

if that's what happens, all bases, facilities

[Joe Lonsdale]

and assets of the hostile force in

[Patrick Bet-David]

the region will be legitimate targets. Are you saying Iran will hit US

[Joe Lonsdale]

Bases in the Gulf, or will you also bomb the Gulf countries that are your neighbors? Well, I'm not going to say what we are going to do exactly. Obviously we defend ourselves. If the US Attacks us, then we have every right to defend ourselves. If the US Attacks us, that is the act of aggression. What we do in response is the act of self defense and it is justifiable and legitimate. So our missiles cannot hit the American soil. So obviously we have to do something else. We have to hit, you know, the Americans base.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You say in the region that, that

[Joe Lonsdale]

is, that is a fact. I'm not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What do you think is going to happen?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Listen, I think these guys sent someone to assassinate Donald Trump. We know this with the regime, caught him. They were told if they missed that he'd probably lose the election. So wait and try to get him again after he lost the election. This was the official instructions we found. These were the, these guys were trying to kill Trump. It means if they're still around after Trump's president, they'll probably try to get him and his, and his kids again. So if I was the president, there's no chance they'd be around after I was president. That's all I'll tell you. I mean, and by the way, I think it's very good for the world to eliminate this evil for, for your people and for all of our peoples.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, a lot of people are worried it could turn into another Iraq and we spend a few trillion dollars.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But is Iran really Iraq?

[Patrick Bet-David]

I don't think so. But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that. You know, you hear the two arguments. I think they're going to do a surgical mission the way they did Venezuela and it's going to be clean and here's what's going to happen. And then the other side is like, how do we know that for a fact?

[Joe Lonsdale]

So if I was in charge, I'd be very Roman about it. So, and I don't know, maybe this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman. So you know, the Romans would do, you'd go and you wipe out the leadership class, you're all dead. And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge, we're going to make a deal or we're going to kill all of you too. It's up to you because you'll have the irgc, which in charge again probably. Right, because those are the guys with the guns and say, okay, now here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a deal. Here's what's going to happen, here's how your public's going to work and to be free people. And if you don't do that, then we'll kill you all in six months too and they'll give you another chance. But I don't think we should be occupying ourselves as bullshit. I think Iraq was terribly run. I think trying to, trying to Go and have people over there. That's ridiculous. But should these guys who have acted like they've had, who spread terrorism around the region, who have tried to kill Trump, who have, who have killed so many people, should they be allowed to get away with that? No way. I wouldn't let them be away with it, I'll tell you that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How, how much you think the attack's going to be a collaboration with Israel or you think it's going to be?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, Israel has really good intelligence there in the region. And so obviously if you're doing something, you need to work with your allies to do as good as possible. The same thing is like, you know, we were talking earlier about, are you going to use Palantir to an operation? You're going to use whatever you can to do it as best as possible. And I think in this case that involves our, Israel's other allies too.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is Israel a customer? Palantir?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yes, actually, we started working with Israel is one of my most problems because they're kind of like the NSA where, where they don't really want to work with outsiders and they don't really buy from anyone else. And it took us several years to break in, but we did break in

[Patrick Bet-David]

to work with while you were there or it was something that happened.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was, it was something that I was working on even as an advisor, like shortly after I got it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is it recent? Like five, ten years?

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, no, it's been a while.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's been a while. So, okay, so they've been a customer for a while.

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's over 40 countries, as far as I know, who are allies who work with Palantir. Israel is not one of the first several, but it is worth the key. The key countries originally were the five eyes, right? Which is the core five allies, which is Canada, uk, New Zealand, Australia.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, I saw somewhere where you, Is there a structure where if there is, who can't you work with? Is it not like sanctions?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I mean, first of all, the company was a mission driven, is a mission driven company would never have wanted to work with, with our enemies. We're not going to work with them all. You're not going to work with Russia, we're not going to work with North Korea, not work with China.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But not because of regulation. It's a choice.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, at this point, it's definitely regulation against it too. I think early on, if we had tried to go work with those guys, maybe we somehow could have because the government wouldn't have noticed, but that would not have been ever Something we wanted to do because we had a mission driven company to fight for the good guys in the west.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But meaning even if you try to

[Joe Lonsdale]

go these days, you try to because of what it does in the Department of War. Of course it wouldn't be allowed to. And by the way, I'm not even allowed to go to China anymore right now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You're not allowed to go to China?

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, I mean, I mean China and I've had friends who are running other defense companies to their planes going for one case to Taiwan and they made the force the plan, did emergency landing in China and searched all this stuff and then they let him go because he's American citizens and they want to. But they actually did emergency landing, searched all his stuff because he was a key defense executive and then long gone Taiwan. So I'm not supposed to go there at all. Nor are a lot of other people who've worked in these areas. I've started a few big defense companies now you're not supposed to do it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. That made. That makes sense for somebody like you to go there. That would, it would be.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I wouldn't want to go there. I mean by the way I used to love to go to Shanghai. It's a great facing a fascinating part of the world. But not right now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not right now. 09. You left. Why did you leave?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I was still stayed as an advisor but I finished vesting and I was starting Add a Par. And Add a Par is a. Is a very large company in the wealth management area. So I, so I was actually going to start a third division. I'd started the government side. I helped them get going on the early commercial side and that's, you know the company is now about I think 60% commercial basically working with Fortune 500 and other companies around the world. I was thinking of starting a third division. Decided to build it separately as. As Add aar.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Add a Par.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so Add a Par. It takes the portfolio, it gives you a score, it assesses well Add a

[Joe Lonsdale]

Par is a software that you kind of work and live in if you're a wealth advisor, if you're running a big advisor.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So advisors are using it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. So there's. So there's hundreds of thousands of advisors on it serving huge number of clients. There's $10 trillion on it. So if you're like a. Running a big bank with the top wealth management arm or if you're like a big aria like iconic on the west coast would be.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Would they. Who, who else would be a customer

[Joe Lonsdale]

like Corant or Omni or all the big RAs. There's all these big family offices out here. The biggest family office.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What were RIAs?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Mostly RAs. There's. But there's, but there's tens of thousands of RAs in our country. It's a big. There. It's a. It's a very big industry.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Got it. And so as the advisor, I'm seeing this as a database tracking my clients. Is it also looking at their portfolio? Is it giving any advice?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, no. It's helping you run your whole business. Everything. It's doing everything. It's doing all your reporting, all your tax stuff, all your. Everyone logs into it to do anything. It's like, it's like the place you live when you're doing your job.

[Patrick Bet-David]

At Anthony Pompliano on the other day, I don't know if you know who he is. He's Pompliano, great with his show. Big bitcoin guy.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Very smart. Him and his brother, the whole family, all the boys. And you know, he's saying advisors will be replaced very soon. Do you agree with that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think a very high end, actually the relationship really matters to people. So I think there's ways you can do things without people in some of these areas for some people. But I think like the contours of the industry and of our humanity is that we want to talk to people, we want to work through things. You want to know who you trust.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, I do. Like, I like talking to my Goldman guy. I like talking to the Morgan guy. I like talking to the Chase guys and JP Morgan guys.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, we can help those guys serve you cheaper than they do now. We can help them serve more people more easily. But I think the relationship's going to be there. This is, this is where everyone gets things wrong on AI, by the way, because AI does allow things to work in different ways. But it's like I saw a great essay online where it was talking about a French garden is where you just like destroy everything and just build a new garden however you want it. Whereas the English garden takes the land as it already is. Right. And molds to it. I think William Itis wrote about this, and I think that's more what tends to happen in industry is you take the world as it already is and you. And you shift things and improve things and make things, but you, but you work with it as it is. It's not just going to come in and blow everything up. That's not usually what happens.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, it's a fear that that could Take place. Do you think there is a place for regulation to prevent from a bad player getting in? Do you think regulation is needed for. For.

[Joe Lonsdale]

For. For what? For what area?

[Patrick Bet-David]

I'm just wondering if there's a place on what limits of a product I produce.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I think, I think we want to have. So we already do have a lot of regulation in our world right now. Right. So, for example, in health care, there's. There's like hundreds of thousands of rules. And if anything, the hundreds of thousands of rules, some of them make sense. Some of them are actually only there to protect the existing people, to keep prices high.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, for example, in health care, I think there's. We need new rules that let you try new things that you have sandboxes, because we could bring the cost of health care way down. Like this is this existential. We have $100 trillion of debt in this space. And I'm really excited. For example, here in Florida and a couple other states right now, we're doing studies with the legislature to try to prepare laws for next year that will allow us very safely to try some use cases that we think are safe, that doctors want to try and things like that. If anything, we need new policy to allow us to try it because that would be great to bring the cost down.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. I think the part with. The one part that you could reduce a lot of cost is trademarks, how they're able to extend trademarks. So I'm able to protect myself with a patent. I get a patent for 20 years and then the patent is about to expire. The whatever I'm selling could be worth 20 cents, $2, $5, $10 to sell. I'm still selling it for $5,000. And then I go get a lobbyist, I extend the patent for another 18 years, then it goes 38 years, especially with hospitals as well. I think Trump was trying to do something, you know, a few years ago with hospital, how much the cost was.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And bottom line draws is doing a really good, good job right now trying to bring down cost of health care, Medicaid. There's a lot of smart things we got to do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It'll be interesting what happens. So 09 when you leave Palantir and you're an advisor, are you at this. Are you married at that time or you're single?

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, no, I got, I got married in. I got married in 2016.

[Patrick Bet-David]

2016. Okay, so you're a rich young bachelor at the stamp. Is that fair to say?

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's fair to say.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so how did you protect yourself because.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, actually I made a pretty dumb mistake if you read about it. I had a girlfriend who ended up suing me, suing me after I broke up with her and didn't marry her in 20, 2012, 2013. So you're right. You got. You got to protect yourself.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you do it though? Because, you know.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, I think. I think looking back on it, I was working really, really hard and I had, you know, been a very nice relationship that didn't work out. And then I had a kind of a rebound relationship with. With. I don't want. I don't want. I don't want to talk too much about this person in particular, but it was something where it was probably not someone I should have been dating. And you know, I'd met in New York and she was at. She was at Stanford, she was 21, I was 28. And. And it was like. It turns out you just got to be really careful like who you let into your life and how seriously you take relationships, because if you're not careful, then it can cause a lot of trouble, and that sucks. That's a good lesson for.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How'd you protect yourself?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, I think how you protect yourself is you should listen more to your family. I think. It's not my family. I didn't think. Didn't thought there were some issues with them and I, And I should like, oh no, she's really pretty and I'm busy and who cares? And it's like, actually it really matters to protect yourself and have it's common sense who you let into your life. I was very lucky that by the time actually I'd broken up, it had been a couple years of my time. They tried to sue. I already had a new amazing girlfriend who was really wonderful who ended up becoming my wife and is someone that my family really admired her and her family and respected her a lot. And that's. I think it's just really important to have to focus on getting a partner you really, really respect who's the right match for you, you know, Six kids. We have six. We have six beautiful young children. I'm very lucky guy. Five. Five little girls, which is. This is all.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, well, you got the money for it. It's going to be expensive.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They're. They're. They're amazing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But you know why I asked that question? Because Trevor Bauer, I don't know if you follow baseball. He's a good friend and he was playing baseball and he was doing great things. Cy young, all this stuff and Then a girl accuses him just for the accusation. He lost a few hundred million dollars over it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Probably cost me a little bit, too, for about a year. A lot of people didn't. I became controversial because being harder for about a year, obviously I'm lucky I was successful enough I could bounce back and get through it. But it's totally unfair to a guy like that to have to deal with that. And this is. Yeah, I think there was a period where you were basically guilty as soon as you were accused. I think a lot of people now have seen enough people where that's been happened unfairly that hopefully our culture is changing a little bit, but it's still very unfair how it handles these things.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you, when you're rich, single, identify if a girl is with you for you or for you because of money? How do you do that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

And I want to push back, by the way, on one thing. I think it's unfair how things work now. I think it was probably even more unfair how things worked in the 19, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. I think we have to acknowledge that because obviously, I'm not a woke guy, but I think the world was at a place where a lot of men. It was a man's world, and a lot of men were really nasty, abused women, horrible things, and just got away with it. And I think that is wrong. Right? So I think. So I think we have to realize that the pendulum was here, and now it's, like, swung too far the other way. But you know what? I'd rather. I'd rather face a little bit of a tough time as a. As a rich guy than have all these women being abused. So this is still wrong. It should be in the middle, but. But I think it's actually like. It's good that we're actually protecting these.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This weekend, my wife and I were celebrating her birthday, so we go to Bal harbor. And, you know, Bal Harbor, I couldn't walk anywhere without somebody saying hello to me who's Jewish. It's, like, filled with juice everywhere in that area. And so we decide one night we're on Game of Thrones just to kind of tell you where we're at. We're at two episodes after the Red Wedding, whatever they call. Yeah, that's kind of what we are, right? We haven't seen anything else. And then my wife, she says, babe, thank God I'm a woman born today. Because how different it was back in the days. So it was difficult, was vicious.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was a whole different. It was a crazy world. Can I tell you a funny story about that. So I mentioned that Milton Freeman I used to hang out with, his colleague who was older than him was Dr. Bichman. He was 96 when I was at Stanford. And he had been a reporter in the White House in the late 1930s. So. So he was like a window for me into, like, this, like, completely different time, right? Because that's like.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because he was showing 66, 20 years,

[Joe Lonsdale]

65 years ago from when I. From when I met him in the White House. And I thought the funniest. He told me stories. So he'd been in the FDR White House. It'd be spring break, and they'd all go on the train, and it'd be journalists, it'd be senators from both parties, and it'd be the guys in the White House. And the first two stops of the train, all the girlfriends and escorts would get on and they'd all go together. And these people would be attacking each other like crazy with the journalists for the. For the business of government, but they'd both be with their girlfriends or everywhere else getting in trouble and never would say anything about that. Isn't that. Isn't that crazy? Which is totally different. There's a. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Namaste.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. My dad taught me a lot, including

[Patrick Bet-David]

how easy it is to forget to cancel things.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big Financial Friend. Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Savings not guaranteed.

[Joe Lonsdale]

$631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and one plus cancellations.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Paid membership with connected payment account required. Seexperian.com for details. Experian.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It was a man's world. It was just a different world. But I'm not saying that's good. It's just fascinating how much the world has shifted, you know that you never imagined that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. Do you Believe it. I believe it. I believe that. Exactly.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, oh, definitely, definitely.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You read about it, you see about it. You know, it's a very different world. But going back to it. Advice. Think about it. Guys ask, you know, I read Stephen Schwarzman's book, and he's talking about how. What it takes. He says he was going through a divorce. He was worried about what to do. He had been married for 25 years. He says, I get recommended to go see this one guy who's a very successful therapist, a marriage counselor. And I said, I have four concerns. How do I, at my age, get back into the dating world? Number two, what happens with my kids? Number three, what happens with my money? Number four, what happens with my friends? Do they choose her or me? And the guy gave him very good advice. That's tough. He said, your kids are going to be okay. You're going to be fine. There's plenty of girls that going to want to be with you. Number three, do you have a prenup with your wife? He says, no. He says, you're going to lose some money. And then number four, he says about friends. He says, you're going to lose half your friends because they're going to side with her. I'm talking, like, for a guy like you, who made money, is wealthy, is single, looking for a wife, how do you tell them apart?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, you. You meet people through friends, you meet people through people you admire. And I think there's a lot of wonderful families and a lot of, you know, wonderful young women out there. And I think it's the most important to be with someone who you really respect and where you have a shared, strong base of values. And my wife couldn't. My wife converted to Judaism. And we have just a really strong base of tradition in our family that we're building together. And we talked a lot about values and what we care about. And she's someone who, you know, I think. I think if you have a really great wife, she makes you want to be a better person, to live up to her vision of things.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Good for you guys. Good for you.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Respect.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So going through somebody, you know, and trust that again, going back to the same way you recruited people, I mean, I got.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I got really lucky. I'm not sure I could find my son like my wife again. Sometimes you just gotta get lucky.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you gonna hit double digits? That's the question. Are you guys gonna reach double digits or six? Is it?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think six kids might be it, but we'll see. We'll see what we can do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I was telling you about a guy I met yesterday who has 11 kids with his wife. He's 46, no twins, no adopting all theirs, and they hit 11 kids. I think his name was Moshe, if I'm not mistaken.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Orthodox things. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you left 09 and you went and did other things. The company you started, we're talking about that. And then afterwards, you know, you guys, when did you start 8VC? When did you start making.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, so, so because Palantir had all this really top talent, when people come out similar to PayPal, they're starting great companies. I was mentoring and helping them. So a lot of my mentors, like Joe, you're basically already running a fund, but you need more money and more people helping you. So I put that together. The first One was called Formation 8. We did two big funds and then we started, if you see, with most of that team that spun out and we're on, if you see Fund six now. So we've done eight really large funds, bunch of entities around it. And it's been the last couple of years. I mean, it's gone really, really well. Obviously raised a ton of funds, but the last couple of years, things have just accelerated faster than you've ever seen before because AI is just making productivity go up. It's making, making a lot of businesses grow way faster we've ever seen. I think it's four, about four times faster on average for the median top 100 versus the median cloud companies that I was in before. So it's just amazing what's going on.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You think VC has been a net positive for capitalism? Or. Okay, tell me why.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, so, so, so what? So here, here's what VC is like the evolutionary engine of our economy, right? So whenever, whenever, whenever you have new technology come along, whenever you have new possibilities come along, the question is, how are you going to take those new possibilities and do a better job in your business? How are you going to do a better job in this area of logistics, in this area of healthcare, in this area of finance, media, whatever it is. And so what VC really is, is taking a bunch of smart, you know, smart builders who have new ideas and it's figuring out how do you empower these smart people to run really hard at creating value in these areas from the new possibilities. And so there's really two things that vc. One is the top talent and two is like what's newly possible that creates value.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So how do you, how do you do it? How do you find it?

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, so, so first of all you have to be interested in industries. You have to be interested in how things work. How does logistics work? How are these carriers working with the warehouses, working with other people? How are they getting booked? What is a brokerage worth? Like, what are all the pieces of the industry? How is this, how is health care delivery working in America? Where are all the pieces? And, and you have to, and as you start to work on companies, helping them, you get to know the leaders. And so over the last 15 years, like we'll bring, you know, 100 of the top logistics leaders, like you know, to my, to our, to our vineyard, Napa Valley. We'll hang out with them and we'll see what's going on. We'll, we'll hang out with the people who build all the, run all the hospital systems who are using our things there while, you know, I'm the Pentagon tomorrow morning, that's where I'm going up to D.C. to spend a lot of time with the guys building around things in the fence. And so you have to be very interested and enjoy these industries, get to know them. And every time you have a success, every time your company helps that industry work better. Now you've built a bunch of trust. Now you know who the good guys are. Now the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are going to be easier. So you have these big VC firms that have had a bunch of these wins and the networks get stronger and stronger. You can learn how to take talent, learn how to build these things. And it's a, it's a huge engine of innovation, as in fact, America is the best in the world at this. And it's, I think it's one of the coolest sectors that exists, you know, in the world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the business model? The business model is teaming up with somebody else and raising a billion dollar fund. And you go find the companies and then you take the 20% of the upside and then you split some of the money or put your own money in it. Give me the business.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, so, so here, here's the, I think, here's the right way to think about it, especially for, especially for our generation. People our age is like, you go off and you build a great company and you work really hard and I get Palantir to work, I get out of part of work. So now I'm one of the maybe 100 guys in our, in our country who's built a couple big successful companies. And now I know all these other builders and I'm, and I know how to build things. I've learned. So now these young guys come to me and they want advice, and so I started advising them and I realized, wait a second, I know all this talent. I have all these ideas, and then, then I raise the fund. And then I raise the fund because now I have the credibility, because I've built things. I know how to mentor, I know how to coach these guys because I've done it myself. And I bring people around me who help build these companies as well. So I have 70 people on the team who are the top designers, top tech people, you know, ways to manage it. Then you raise the money and you charge. You charge. It's a, it's a, it's an illiquid vehicle, which means people lock up their money for effectively 12 years, usually is.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How 12 years?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, it's 10. It's 10 with like three extensions. And so these funds usually last 12 to 15 years just because they do. Because it takes a while for things to go public. And so you people give you the money and you get some fee on the money to pay the team. And then, and you invest, and you invest it, and most of the money goes into the ground. The first, kind of like you, first, first you write like you call it a series A or series B. You lead rounds, you take a big piece of the company, and then you'll follow on with more money in the future rounds alongside other friends. So a big part of your job is to help them recruit talent. A big part of your jobs help them have other people put money in after you. Right? And so, because I know all the other people, you know, when I'm down here in Miami, there's a bunch of big fund managers. We work together. And, and, and you're, you're helping them learn how to build the teams, helping them learn how to work with the industry, helping them learn how to raise the money. And, and, and then, and then when you have, you know, sometimes you sell the company to someone else, sometimes you take it public. And so, so, so it's a business model of kind of helping people create these things, helping them succeed.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How, how do you find winners? How do you find winners? How much of it is, well, you want to founder the entrepreneur, and, you

[Joe Lonsdale]

know, there's no single right answer. Some people are like, it's about the markets. Some people are like, it's about the entrepreneur. So some people is about the technology culture and tech talent. Some people are just like, oh, it's just art. And I just know, you know, there's lots of ways of doing it. For, for, for me, it's a, it's a, it's a combination like you have. We spend a lot of time on technology, technology culture. I want a company that's recruiting the very, very best. Just like with a sports team, the very best athletes in the world, the best technologies, the world. I want a place where the best guys want to go there because they've heard someone else is there who's amazing. And then I want an area that we believe is a market that has new possibilities, that there is a gap there should be disrupted. And usually what I really care about is there's a mission. I really want there to be a mission that matters. Like, I'm putting most of my money into things where there's great team gap. And I, and I. And it's because with you, the mission does. The mission brings in the really best people. The mission makes the best people want to work harder on it. And, and it makes it something that can be a lot bigger. So Palantir was a, was a really big mission out of parts mission in finance. A lot of my new defense companies were trying to help the U.S. you know, scale our shipbuilding with Saronic, we're trying to, to help fix areas of health care. We're trying to save kids with rare diseases. So I think these missions really attract great talent.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So mission. The bigger the mission and what, what process of filtering? I remember when I raised my first round, you know, and I sold my insurance company, they came in, they did an extensive background check. You know, they did all this stuff on me. How do you, how do you find out in Florida?

[Joe Lonsdale]

We gotta do longer background checks.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You do, right? Yeah. You do in Florida. That's right. That's a good point. And it looks like Palantir is moving to Florida anyway.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Of course they're not involved.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, they're moving down here. But what, what do you do? Are you doing background checks? Are you?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, that's one of the, that's one of the steps in the process. It's not the most important one, but it's just good to.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the most important one?

[Joe Lonsdale]

The most important one is to know who the founders are and to, and to, and to have them be people you can verify somehow in your network are just from the network.

[Patrick Bet-David]

A little bit of credibility, a little bit of background.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I have to, this is my, my advantage is that I'm tied to hundreds of these, like, top tech networks now from things I've built, things I've invested in, we have to use and we have to Use that network. So it's not that, it's not that there's not someone in the middle of nowhere who could be great. But if you're in the middle of nowhere and you are really great, your job is to, is to find, get to know other people, impress them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What red flags do you have?

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's so many red flags for us. It's just because we have a very particular thing where we're, we're not investing in small businesses. We're investing in things that can get to be really, really big and change industries. And so one red flag is being too obsessed with patents. Usually people think patents matter a lot. For most of these things it's more about the team and the execution. It's not, I have 20 patents. Doesn't really matter. So if you talk too much about that, it shows you're not thinking about the thing that's valuable, which is the execution. It's a red flag of the person's not full time. People are always trying to do things part time that never ends up being the giant company. So you need people who are 100% all in full time. It's a red flag if they don't plan on doing this for a long time. It needs to be their obsession in their life. You know, it's a red flag if they talk a lot about work life balance because work life balance is great for some things, but this is like winning a gold in the Olympics. Do you think the Olympic gold medalists had a good balance? We're all in. We're all in. So it's like those are types. I think it's a big red flag is another one that's interesting if the, if the top first five or ten people don't own a good piece of the company. So if you're keeping it all for one founder and he's paying and giving very, very, very little bit of upside, the first five or 10 people is that's the wrong culture. And it's probably not the very best people, because the very best people in our industry, they want to own a piece of something they're doing right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So give me the, give me the opposite of red flags.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, it's, it's like it's, there's people we know mission is one mission. Superstar talent is really key. You know, early pull from, from the industry, top guys from the industry who want to be advisors, who are eager to help. You know, it's. But, but it's usually all to come down to the people and what our network thinks of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the biggest success story you've had? Best, best story so far.

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's a lot of stuff we backed Andrew early on. It's a top defense new defense company. We backed a company called Quince at the beginning and it's now you know 10 billion valuations probably gonna double next year. Cognition new backed early on. It'll you know, you know it's worth 15 billion. It's a bunch of these top guys just you know Saronics like just raising a big round is building hundreds of ships for the U S Navy. It's doing really well. We help start that actually this.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's your stuff. Your niche is national defense security.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's AI healthcare logistics too. We've done some big sale things we sold in logistics that have worked out. I I love just fixing things that are broken man and making it work better.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Do you. Do you feel the criticism open AI is getting right now Chad GPT is getting right now is fair. Which, which part of that you know revenue. You know the conversation about you know they may start adding ads in there. Even though he said that last resort

[Joe Lonsdale]

I thought that was a funn at Anthropic and I'm making fun of them for that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Listen I saw that Anthropic is very creative on some of the.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Listen I. I'm so. I'm old friends with Elon and I'm longest his company so now after you merge that I own a bunch of SpaceX that I did before too. I'm also small investor in. In Anthropic which is just an extraordinary technology and, and there's people who are attacking them for. For. For various things but I just. Anthropic has pulled way ahead in the coding area and and I 25 now I don't know what the 38380 post but that's. I think that's even cheap for where they're going because grown so fast and like all of our companies are using this and it's. It's really fun. Like a lot of my smartest friends who are already extremely wealthy and can do anything they want are staying up coding right now because it's so fun what you could do with these tools. It's this crazy time right now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you more along with anthropic than OpenAI?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, I'm most long SpaceX and X I'm second most long anthropic OpenAI I do think it could possibly have some struggles here but I don't know there's obviously it's amazing what they accomplished. And they really kind of brought a lot of this to the world. So they get, they deserve a lot of credit for that. I think Elon along with Sam both deserve credit for building that team early on. No question. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It was a non profit.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And then he turned into profit and then that's where the feud took place between the two of them.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's. It's unfortunate. I think these, I think these like, these feuds are not productive for our, for our society. But I understand where Elon's coming from and I hope, I hope they make it, you know, I hope they make it work for everyone.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I get his argument. I totally get a Elon's argument. Who else are you along with who will. What else is it that you know? I had a call with my banker. I said, listen, send me the top 10 nuclear companies out there that are finding ways to tap into the nuclear energy. And then I said, okay, we looked at some of them, made a decision. We had a call with their. And then I said, let's look into these three companies. Which we did. And it's done fairly well. But for you, you're in this world. What else are you seeing?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, no. Our friends at Founders. Fun to have a company with a really talented guy building nuclear fuel as well and making sure, making sure you have that in America. It's really important to do and we're looking into that space. It's, you know, it's interesting because Elon says all you need is solar energy. Which is, which is true at the extreme. But I think, I think we did kind of screw up the regulation on the nuclear space and that to be. I love the fact that Department of War is trying to do more of that now too. So I think that's a good thing to be doing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know the areas that I'm most bullish on. So in America right Now we have $5 trillion of wages in our services economy. That's like every type of service. And at about 40% of that and at over $2 trillion area we've already seen, you could double or triple the productivity. At least double, if not triple the productivity. So this is, this is, this is in companies that we're exposed to and it's like the back end of a law firm helping it. It's like the back end of logistics payments. It's like health, healthcare billing. Health care billing. Sounds small and boring. It's 280 billion a year spent on healthcare billing. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Healthcare billing.

[Joe Lonsdale]

280 billion. 120 of that's paid to companies. 160, that's internal health systems. It's a massive part of the economy. We already are tripling the efficiency of that. So. So what that means is a lot of this stuff's very disinflationary. It's creating a ton of value and these things are just scaling. Like my best, this healthcare billing company with a bunch of ex palantir guys, it's gonna double from like, you know, double to over 100 million revenue this year. But that's still tiny compared to where it's going. Right. And, and as that grows, it's making the whole economy more efficient. So this is why venture capital is this engine that's like taking these possibilities and fixing stuff to make it cheaper for all of us. So it's a really positive thing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why 11.8 million in a Nigerian drone company.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Okay, no, you know, there's, listen, this, the guy running it, first of all, physics, Olympia Olympian is co founder building our business. These are super talented, they're super talented young men there. As you probably saw, there's a lot of people being slaughtered in Africa, especially a lot of Christians in Nigeria being killed for the wrong reasons. A security all over Africa is a huge deal. One of the main reasons you can't build infrastructure and invest in Africa right now is there's, is there's a problem with security everywhere. There's. And you know, I happen to know a lot about the defense space. I've started multiple companies here. We felt like these guys were really talented and they could, they could scale a lot of production of doing real control cars, sentry towers, drones. And we thought that some of our U. S. Technology as well could partner with them and help them and help them secure Africa. And even if, even if we got rid of the Iranian guys, even, even if we like make the middle east somehow have peace, which I hope we do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Which way? And by the way, they're good at making drones. They sell their Russia.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Shahi drones are very good. We have to get really good. We're very good at shooting them down now. I mean, working on it. But, but, but, but basically, even if that's all peaceful, Africa is probably going to be a mess for quite a while. I think helping the good guys there is a good thing to do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why. Why is it so difficult for drone companies to excel in America? The regulation here is just intense.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, so to build the engines behind these things, you need certain rare earth elements and you need certain refining, which is very messy. And we just don't have the capacity in the US for that. So in Ukraine, unfortunately, right now, a lot of the supply. Supply chains coming through China for both sides, which is unfortunate.

[Patrick Bet-David]

A lot of the supply chain is coming from both sides through China.

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's a lot of the rare earth refining and elements and engines and things they're building, they're using. So even, like, you know, Eric Schmidt famously is building, I think, hundreds of thousands of drones to help the Ukrainians. I think it's a very cool thing he's doing there, and he built it in Mexico. But I think a lot of even that potentially would be coming. Some things are from China. So there's just. There's just a lot. And so we're trying to ramp up. And it is the regulate. It's partial regulation. It's actually interesting if Yaski, like Peter Thiel, my friends there, is like, the regulatory stuff kill these industries. If you talk to Elon, who the other night was talking about this, he's like, no, we just need more founders who are willing to build these things in America. And I think he's probably right that as we try to build these things here, you could probably convince them to change regulations to make it possible. Because we do want to be possible now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So I think we're trying to do it now. We're trying to fix it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. And you think Greenland is one of the reasons that it plays such a big role in this?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, I think Greenland is a place where if there's ever going to be an attack on America from the other side of the planet, it has to Russia or China or whatever, a lot of things have to fly over Greenland. So I think for the Golden Dome, it's important. I think there's also a lot of resources there. I think there's, like, a certain spirit of expansion that's very healthy. I think. I think you want to be growing and not shrinking. I think you want to be. I think. I think. I think. I think humanity is, like, in some ways, it's just very simple. It's very complex, but it's very simple. And the question is, are you shrinking and getting weaker and under decline, or are you growing and stronger? And in America, in its current state, where it's expanding manufacturing, it's, like, confident, it's expanding the economy, taking Greenland and building things for Greenland. If Greenland was more part of us, we could build infrastructure there. We could have ports that would then enable investment. That couldn't happen otherwise. It'd be really good for Greenland. So I think it actually would be really good for the world for us to do more in Greenland. I know where it stands.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. Where are you at with tariffs? With Supreme Court ruling against it? 6:3. You know, if you looked at the

[Joe Lonsdale]

Kavanaugh ruling, he kind of goes into depth on how you could have done it legally. So it's kind of like a playbook for how you could still do it

[Patrick Bet-David]

if you want, which I've given him a playbook on.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's very interesting reading. It was a very funny 6:3 ruling because. And by the way, I'm not a legal scholar, but from best I could tell, it was like three different rulings. It was like three here, three here, three here. And. But the six agreed, like the three left and three moderate right or whatever you want to call them, agreed that it's not legal. But then I think at least the moderate right part of the ruling is like, well, here's how it could be legal. So there probably are ways you could still go back and do it, is my impression.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. But right now, the lawsuits, you know, being in the rooms, and he was like, look, we don't have to pay the tariffs. We don't have to agree to do this. Look what your Supreme Court said to you. So it's almost like they're undermining him to say you don't have the kind of authority you thought you had. You can't do. So how does that. How do you think?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, it's unfortunate, but this is. Our system of government is. We have three separate co. Equal branches. And it's really annoying when the branches sometimes chuck you. But we. I think it's a good that we have checks on power. It doesn't mean I agree with, with the Trump shouldn't be able to.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Curtis Yarvin camp. We had him on and I don't know if you know Curtis Yarvin.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I know who he is. He doesn't. He doesn't like it when guys like me try to fix things. He's very cynical. So whenever we're like, yeah, my policy group, we're like, fixing things or making things work better. He's like, oh, you guys are all naive. Everything's broken. That's. You know, he's negative is my view.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He is negative. But he. The way he was arguing it on, you know, he's for, he's for a monarchy rather than having a democracy, and he thinks it's more effective, it could get things more done.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, he just, just, just wait until the monarch decides. Your wife's attractive man. I don't know if, I don't know if I want to live under that system. Like checks on power are very wise.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We're gonna go back to the, the train days. He's gonna, he's gonna say, I own the train and I own your wife. Give her to me. Right? Listen, all this money you're making, you know, you're one of these guys that's made billions as well yourself. What is something you, you buy? Like are you a comic cards, you know, do you collect cars?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, that's funny.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Comic books. Are you unique cars? What do you.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Game of Thrones? Early on in Game of Thrones, I, I set up the thing in my yard in California back then and we had the Game of Thrones thrown and we, and we like have the theater outside. It's fun, you know, what do I collect? I mean I have a couple planes, but they're for business really. I have, you know, we have a ski house where I host people, we have a vineyard, we host people. Most of my money on the excess money actually goes to the university, it goes to my policy work. It costs about, it only costs about a quarter million dollars to like get a mission driven piece of legislation passed that helps a lot of people. So for example, vocational schools I care a lot about and I think it's really sloppy right now because if you want to, if you want to like spend more money on vocational schools, that's fine. But if the guy running the vocational school is not very good, it's not going to be good results. So what we like in Texas, for example, there's 27 vocational schools in Texas has it so that you fund the schools in proportion to the success of the kids. So the students coming out, you see their salaries and that determines the funding. And what that did is it doubled the salaries coming out. You took hundreds of thousands of people who would have had tough lives. You may have much, much better lives. And so getting that law passed another state takes a few hundred thousand dollars. For me, that's like really, that's like, that's a really cool form of philanthropy where I could take something, make our country more functional. So I have teams in 23 states. So I spent a lot of money trying to just like fix stuff that's broken because that's for me, that's a really fun way to do it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So that's your game, that's your fun.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I love, I love, I love, I love thinking about like, how do we go in and like make healthcare cheaper and better Here, how do we make the prison system, like right now, like prison guards and prisoners? It's a mess. The cultures are broken. How do you create accountability for the prison guards? How do you create better results for rehabilitation when they come out? These things like this, to me is

[Patrick Bet-David]

interesting, that thinking, right, of solving problems makes sense. So you probably have a lot of friends in New York and California. Okay. You saw the exodus. California lost a trillion during COVID When folks left, he got some people back and now he lost another trillion with the wealth tax.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I moved in, coveted a bunch of other. My friends moved to Austin right now. Yeah, Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So how is this the worst of it? Or is California is gonna. It's just getting started.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I'll tell you what. So I've had a problem with how California's been run forever. Since I have opinions on these things and no one really wanted to listen for a long time, I'm actually pretty optimistic because right now I have like 70 or 80 acquaintances and friends in California who've made a lot of money. And they're like, joe, you were right. This is broken. I want to fight for it. And they're doing all sorts of things to fight for it. They're, they're, they're looking at building endowments to oppose the far left unions to help the moderates help pro growth strategies. They're looking at things that bring in more talent. They're looking at things to expose more of the fraud. They're, they're fighting for good candidates. You know, the mayor of San Jose, someone who's a very moderate, very, very strong mayor, he's probably moderate left, which is good because it's California, but he's someone we respect from both sides. A lot of us are backing, backing him. You know, there's a lot of good talent in California saying, wait a second, we gotta actually fight, fight for this place. So I'm a Texan and I'm doing a lot more in Texas, but I'm proud to see my friends in California waking up. And I really hope they could fight back. And so it's, there's, there's a few hundred million dollars a year, Patrick, that comes from the far left. Unions just for people work for the state automatically. They force them to fund them. So it's like a few hundred million dollars a year of like, corruption and that just like fights. But if you can get these other guys to step up, we can do more than a few hundred million dollars a year. So I hope we do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. This gerrymandering where it would Change the representatives to. Now they're gonna have control of what, 48 out of 52. It's going to be on the left. So I don't know how they're going to be moving that. That's gonna be a lot of work. Could take a couple decades.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And it's a lot, it's a lot of work to fight back. But I think it's a not, it's a. I think it's a noble thing to do. If you're going to live in California, you should have.

[Patrick Bet-David]

If you're going to do it, you have to get involved.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I live in Texas and I fight for, I fight for the good guys there too.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, it's very obvious. Last thing. Barry Weiss, Free Press. Why that investment?

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, I got to know Barry and we both agreed there's a lot of American institutions that have been conquered by the crazy ideological people that are, that are really decaying our civilization. So our media is broken, our universities are broken, there's parts of our government that are broken. And the only way we really can fix this is we build anew. And so she and I actually co founded the new university together at the time when I met her, she was also co founding a new media organ. I think I was one of the very first investors there and I'm really proud of what she's done. I think she's, she has millions and millions of people listening to her now. She had a newsroom that was probably about a third left, a third independent and a third right, which is like the most balanced newsroom in the country or. Yeah, that was a free press. I don't know what she has now at gbs, but, but that was a job. I assume she's trying to build the same thing as cbs. And yeah, I think that's really, really impressive to have a newsroom, this balance because no one else is doing it. And it's. I think it's worth trying.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So why do you think she's getting so much pushback? Why do you think she has hate left light center?

[Joe Lonsdale]

She's the only one who has both sides in her newsroom. So people say, wait a second, I thought you were on my side. But you're saying this left thing. And then people left, say, I thought you were on my side. And this. But you're saying this right thing, it's a tough place. You're attacking me on both sides. She's attacking both sides. But you know what, if she's getting attacked by both sides, that's probably a pretty Good sign that she's doing something better than most others.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, no, no question. And by the way, you got a podcast now. You gotta. You gotta.

[Joe Lonsdale]

The American Optimist.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes, I love that. Tell me about it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But you know, I. I know a lot of interesting friends who are building the future and you know, and I know a lot of friends running the government. So it's just fun. I'll sit down with them for a few hours a month and put it out and people, people like it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you're the best booker because you can get a hold of anybody.

[Joe Lonsdale]

All my friends are willing to do it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So. So who, who have you had so far on the show? I know you'd have teal. Who else have you. Have you had on?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, gosh, it's all sorts of people. It goes from Ashton Kutcher to, you know, Senator Tom Khan, a bunch of senators, a bunch of governors, you know, a bunch of. Bunch of people who built the biggest companies in Silicon Valley to during cancer running AI, you know, all sorts of. Steve's running for governor now.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I saw that.

[Joe Lonsdale]

All sorts of characters there. You know, a lot of my friends. Andreessen, Boris built Bu. You have that on the screen and now he's. He's building a company. It's the first AI for excavation. We're doing autonomous excavators. He's raised tons of money there. People get. People got angry at me for having a read on because he's on the left and like. Meanwhile, Russ, of course is running the OMB for this administration. So I try to have both sides.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You had Alex Spyro on yet or no?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I haven't had him. Haven't had anyone yet. I had Alex Carp on. I had Maria on from Venezuela before we.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, wow.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Venezuela. Which was kind of fun.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, we had her on as well on a Zoom and yeah, now it'll be interesting to see what they do. But we're going to put the link below to the podcast. This was very interesting talking to keep chicken ass. Great story. Appreciate you for making the time to come down.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Doing great work, Patrick. Appreciate you, buddy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Take care. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscaniro. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skill pants. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail. And we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the future. Looks bright collection, not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.