#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future

You mentioned you'd just been with Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George.
He talks about non-fungible people, like N of Wands. Mike Isretel, good non-fungible person.
Who are some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across? I mean, of course, you have to go with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life. My original chess teacher, Richard Sherman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like an intelligence officer and he dropped out.
I think he faked his own death and he was kind of living like in poverty, teaching chess and was like this chess master sensei who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting, crazy people I've met over the years, you know, who really shaped my life.
Talk to me about the story of how you sought Peter out as a mentor. Well, Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review and he was, uh, he was just someone who was, I thought was just fascinating intellectual character at the time.
And, you know, honestly, what it was also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been interested in is what are the most interesting, brightest, harsh working people doing.
And a lot of the smartest people at Stanford, when I was there, were going to work at PayPal. And these are people I was really impressed by.
So I said, wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group.
I want to learn from them too. And I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and who they are today.
And that all these companies would come out of it, like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and like, you know, 16 others. But I did know it was a lot of the brightest people and I wanted to learn from them.
And, you know, I had a very strong interest, not only in computer science, but in economics, in history and philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet through the Stanford Review, I think you got along intellectually.
How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful, and it's obviously something that you need to do now you need to assess founders you need to assess businesses uh yeah how everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes well it's interesting it's interesting because you said earlier where you're off i'm gonna say who you're saying it about but you know anyone who like is the one guy we both know who's done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional and that's really impressive right it's extreme and so there's similarly when you get people who are really really bright like really off the charts mind's

working great most of those people are crazy most of those people are not functional in the real

world but you know crazy means lots of things but but not able to be to keep themselves functional

in the real world because they're just too off the charts and a little you know too wacky maybe

it's like extrematism maybe it's something else but but when you have people who are just off the

charts and able to function in the real world it it's actually a pretty small subset. And I think you can usually, it's a different type of person.
It's like a certain type of ambition, a certain type of way of functioning. I'm not saying that these are necessarily the most social, genius, normal people, but they're still able to function with that kind of intellect.
And that's a good combination. What is the advantage of being able to function in the real world i think there's a lot of glory placed on the reclusive madman genius working away in the back room on his own i you know i think no value judgment everyone can have like different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things and you know to to me to do the things that impact the future of, to build the stuff that's really hard to build, whether it's SpaceX or Palantir, which kind of broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare education, those are going to, those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization.
So that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things. Right.
So you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills, skill sets. You might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads, right? The tech lead or whatever it might be.
But, and I guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking Congress or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself. And if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not going to look right.

Well, maybe I'm a little off and stuff, you know, too, but I think I can at least still talk to the people, understand the systems, work with them. There are some people, we call them artists in our company.
Alex Karp, my co-founder of Poundcher, always refer to them as artists who are just absolute geniuses. You kind of have to protect them and put up with them.
Right. So it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like when you, when you're running a military brigade and like you have an operation, you might have like a drill sergeant where you yell at them and you have to do this and do the pushups and run and do this and get this done by this time.
And that's not at all how you deal with these like super genius, like slightly different technical people. Maybe some days they're a hundred times more productive and some days they're just, you know, they're working on something weird and they don't want to come into the office and you just whatever you kind of have to tolerate a little bit and you have to protect them because most big corporations they will spit these people out right a big corporation standard corporation they want you to fit in a box those artists will come in they won't fit they'll be gone even and it's stupid because you're getting rid of someone who could have made you win in this whole category if you just could figure out how to morph the org around them and use them so so we definitely do work with these people but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the organization right what do you learn from your time with peter what are the things that have stuck with you oh gosh so many things he's always he's always approaching the world from some kind of like orthogonal perspective and finding new ways to pick apart the most important reasons for things every time i see him i learn something uh you know i i wrote this piece online a while ago, to my team, about 15 years ago.
It's like main lessons from Peter Thiel. So I won't repeat all of them here, but there were nine key lessons.
I think one of them was to really value intelligence really highly. I think that was absolutely key.
And so it just turns out the very brightest people matter a lot. One of them was you have to break down their actual reasons for things and their core components.
And usually the number one reason should be like much bigger than everything else. So if you tell me I have four reasons for doing this business thing, that means you haven't really thought about it enough.
There's probably like one thing that's dominant. Those were really big.
One thing that you always talked about was that effort on any project is convex. And what convex means, it's a shape of a curve where if you spend like 80% of your time focused on something's maybe half as good as spending 90 of your time focus on something because that last bit of effort and like it's one of those things where like i think being 99 percentile is worth so much more than being 90th percentile also because that means you're number one and being number one is worth a lot so there's a lot of things like that that you just kind of gave me all these concepts that we all kind of learn when we work with them do Do you find it difficult to not divide your attention in that way? It's very, very hard.
And I think the most important things I've accomplished has been when I've been able to really focus on something for a while. And whether it's Palantir, whether it's Adapar, whether that's spending months on a thesis at 8VC and a framework at 8VC that we're going to work on for our investing.
It is really important to focus. And, you know, you get to a certain point where I have obviously a lot of financial resources now, a lot of influence in the world.
And so I'm able to help others who are focusing, but anything I invest in or do, it has to be someone really amazing is making it their main thing. And so someone, the CEO has to be all in, you know, for, for the things I do.
Right. So an advice for talent is to not divide your focus at all you really just need to like be courageous i think i think the a lot of people in our culture nowadays a lot of them want to do incubators or they just want to do a fun whenever having built something or they just want to say i'm going to help five different projects and that that's actually kind of like a form it's a it's a type of cowardice it's a type of saying i'm afraid hed I'm afraid to go all in.
I'm afraid to say this is the best, and I'm going to crush it. And like 99.9% of the people who are crushing it and who are changing the world and who are really, you know, building the future of our civilization, they're focusing on something.
How do you come to think about risk? It's sort of built into the conversation around courage is fear and uncertainty and risk and dealing with risk and stuff like that. How do you assess it? You know, I think we're all really lucky today versus the past.
I think it is true that the conditions under which all of us evolved, if you go all in on something and you fail, you might've starved to death. You might've been eaten by lions or some kind of giant old cave bear.
You might've been crushed by the local tribes. So I think we all evolved to have existential risk and to be really afraid.
And it's not that it's great not to have money in our society. I can't speak to that.
Obviously it's not great, but come on. It's not like 3000 years ago where you might just die if you don't succeed.
So I think there is enough of a safety net. And listen, it's easier for me to say that coming from a middle-class family when I grew up that I knew my parents would be able to take care of me if something didn't work out.
So obviously I had some privilege, but I think a lot of people with that privilege still aren't willing to take the risk they should be. What about obsessing over perfection? Something else that I think Pete is very big on.
That's like 100%. That really ties into the 99.9 percentile thing is like getting something just to be the absolute best.
I remember working with him when I was 21 years old and there was some speech that was going to go on in new york the next day and we were like basically pulling an all-nighter with a few of the guys in the office to be ready to like have this thing was about inflation versus deflation and the risk for both of those and it was just it was just a natural thing to do to just try to make it like absolutely perfect before we're going to go present to the investors and it was really funny actually it was with ken howry who's an ambassador now to denmark he was ambassador to sweden last time he's a good friend who's our agent very successful guy in the background we were just like going back and forth with him and a few others just like working hard and jumping on the plane and sleeping on the plane on the way over and it's just like everything has to be as good as possible and pushes you push as hard as possible which and if something was wrong it would be like this is totally unacceptable how do you avoid that from holding you back because perfectionism can procrastination, sort of masquerading as quality control. It's true.
You know, the classic West Coast move, fast break things mentality. Is there a tension between these? 100%.
I think if you have really tight, fast deadlines, it's probably good. So it had to be as perfect as possible, given that it was coming due in the next day.
We weren't't going to be able to work on it for five weeks. So I think there is something about really making things as strong as possible, but sprinting and having really tight deadlines and getting it done right away.
I think if you use perfection as procrastination, then it becomes a problem. Yeah.
Well, I'm still interested in this sense of not getting distracted and trying to keep the main thing, the main thing, especially if your main thing becomes a varied thing, right? Like built into a lot of people's lives, especially as they end up getting to the kind of place that they want to is where you don't have to do things you don't want to do that much anymore. No one tells you what to do.
So you end up in a world where you think, well, I get to choose, but with that comes a lot of responsibility because I have to choose now, as opposed to before where I just on the set of train tracks it's god do i want to go left or want to go right the same for yourself do i want to invest in or should i sit down and spend six months working on a thesis um what about the skill set of learning to sort of let go of what was there of how you operated previously the sort of courage to to do something uh new even as you've got something that's given you success in the past. No, that's totally right.
You do have to constantly keep adjusting for what makes sense today. And it's, it's interesting.
There's different versions of this. One version is as you're successful, something you would have been really excited about before you have to be like, I don't have time for that now.
And because all of a sudden you could just have things you were really excited about before 10 times a day. And I do fall into this myself sometimes, cause there's lots of really exciting things to do when you have to.
So it's like really hard to say no enough. When you go through periods where you don't say no enough, you might be, feel like you're getting stuff done, but not actually getting things done.
And that's, it's really tough. And, but you know what you said, what you said earlier about like things you don't want to do to me, that's like one of the most important things that we focus on is what do you like to do and as you're successful you should probably mostly only do things you like to do because what like to do means to me anyway is that it's like stimulating your entire brain right so if you look at like a grandmaster chess player and the very best chess players when you map out their brains when they're playing there's all these emotions they're turned on there's all these full parts of their brains are turned on and it lets them be a a lot better at what they're doing and I think this is true in anything we do if you really love it then your whole mind is engaged and you're just able to bring like this this power to bear on things that if it's something you don't really like you're probably never going to have just that top top ability there you know it's almost matching up with what you said about being sort of the 99th percentile within an industry accumulating the 99 of your brain power onto this you have to you have to be obsessed and love something and like this is not to say that like everyone should only do things they love to be successful because you got to do all the grunt work too but then once you have a certain level of where you are you should structure your company and structure your life where you do the parts that you love and you're good at and other people could do the parts you know that you're not as good at that you don't love joe hudson uh who has just become the head of human performance at open ai uh he's like kind of an underground hero coach type person i'm aware that coach has got a lot of icky uh associations with it but this guy's fucking legit really really great and he says enjoyment is efficiency and that's kind of yeah i think referencing what you're talking about here which is if you absolutely love something it takes fewer inputs to get more outputs 100 you can get into the flow you could just be great if you love it and so that's that's how you should structure your life as much as possible is what are the things that you love that you're good at that are worth doing and that's gonna to do more of those and do less of the things you don't like but have someone else do them if they're necessary how do you avoid cynicism it's a very easy trap in the modern world this is uh this is the debate i was having with peter teal earlier about stuff he tells me i'm too naively optimistic and he's like you want to be kind of optimistic in general but you don't want to be you don't want to be like overly so.
And, you know, in general, I think it's easier to be pessimistic and cynical. I think it's like an easier thing to be.
I think it's like, you can just always say why things won't work. And it actually takes, it's a little bit of a challenge to say, okay, this is really broken.
The system is really broken. Other people haven't been able to do it.
How are we going to make it work despite that? It's kind of like a, it's kind of like being like the hero warrior champion to say, even though, even though this is a mess, what are we going to make it work despite that? It's kind of like being like the hero warrior champion to say, even though this is a mess, what are we going to do to make it work? And it's a leadership quality that I think if you bias towards that it can be figured out, I've just found oftentimes things can be. Have you ever read Endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about Sir Ernest Shackleton's Crossing of the Antarctic.
Oh, very cool. So it's the the best i think the best retelling of that and um it's really interesting because all of the guys had their their own individual journals or diaries that they were writing in and what you hear from everybody else except for shackleton is what shackleton's saying but what you read in shackleton's diary is what shackleton was thinking and it's this really interesting dichotomy between what he says and how he needs to show up as a leader yeah and what he's thinking privately and it's almost like a bruce wayne batman type split personality what was he thinking privately he is just swimming in self-doubt and uncertainty and fear he has no idea if it's going to work.
He doesn't even know if this is the right, but he goes out there and he needs to say to the guys, this is exactly the way that we're going to go. And we know that this is going to work and we're getting such and such.
And it was the first time that I'd ever really thought, because obviously the consequences are so dire, but it really made me think about, about huh there are prices that leaders pay that nobody else pays and that you can't share the burden of and everybody everybody has main character energy in their own life right everybody is the lead star they're the front man woman of their own existence um and i think that a lot of the time we want to port that across onto the teams that we work in the organizations that we're a part of okay there's going to be some prices that you're going to have to pay for that as a leader you have to suffer things that no one else suffers and you have to deal with the things no one else deals with and it's actually really interesting because i i invest in a lot of great leaders now and try to help them and try to mentor them and it's very funny because you end up sometimes having to be their therapist a little bit because there's no one else they could talk to. I imagine so.
The company what's going on. And yeah, we didn't really grow up with therapy in my house.
It's not something I do at all. But I think I imagine it's something similar when people are dealing with struggling through something really hard like this.
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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What are the most common challenges, aggregated challenges that the leaders that you work with are suffering with? Oh it's just there's all sorts of different versions of this i think i think one of the most common challenges is the hardest to diagnose because they don't come to you is is this like excess is excess pride and and like not not in like just like having so much money thrown at them because right now there's just so much money for the very best people in the stuff in ai that's starting to work and so you get you get this like i think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges is like this over inflated ego and sense of it's like a i think all of us who are entrepreneurs have some narcissism i think that's like a natural thing but when it gets to a real extreme that's really dangerous and you stop questioning and you and you stop admitting when things are not going quite right because you can paper over it money you raised.
So that's why, that's probably the biggest challenge is that side. I think the, the other, the other side of things is just this, like, even the best people will have a lot of doubt about what's actually going to work and self doubt.
And then, and then when things are just about to work and they've had to push really hard, there's almost always this thing that happens where like a bunch of people are going to quit because you're, cause like there's not quite working and then you got to convince them to stay a little bit longer i mean you have to like find that like belief in yourself to push to those other people right to get it over the long you're shackleton coming out and saying we know this is the direction don't worry don't fear i mean a palantir about three years in like a few of the really key people were just like this is taking too long we don't have any major contracts like this is just ridiculous we're pretending we're like these kids we're going to like run the global intelligence you know framework like what is even going on here i can't do this anymore all these other offers to pay me a lot more money and you know these shares are not clear they're worth anything and it was like really hard to convince them to stay and then when they did of course it worked and then they're you know a couple of them are still running their company there now so which is great so it's like these things that are really hard to push across the line sometimes how do you advise uh the guys that need to keep their feet on the ground you say going to hang out with some of your friends from school and tell them to shit talk you a little bit like yeah sometimes i'm a good person for it because usually i'm a lot more successful than them and i can make fun of myself having similar narcissistic tendencies and and then you kind of like can bring them down a little bit by seeing like maybe themselves themselves and you and like you can like if you can like if you can like respect them by attacking what's wrong with them by attacking it in me maybe they at least listen now because it like cuts the pride down a little bit but it's so like there's sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle having having been there myself and been sure i could conquer the world and like you know especially in your early 20s and you get late 20s you get this energy that's just like nothing can stop me and that's that's like it's both healthy but also has to be really careful how it's filtered you know speaking of mentors university boston yeah a new place came from their new place of residence what motivated you to co-found that well uh we thought it'd be great to have a world-class university here there's no top private university in aust Austin. We wanted to compete with Stanford, Harvard, MIT, these others.
We think there's some things that are still good about those universities, but there's a lot that's gone wrong. There's a lot that's broken.
I'm personally deeply concerned about just like, you know, you used to have these young people would go to these places, you go to Harvard and it's like this like pathway to a functional elite and it's elite that's like has a sense of duty and that has a sense of excellence and it's like it's clear where they're going when they're there and and i think i think we taught just implicitly in our civilization we taught courage right we taught we taught like like pride in our civilization and the duty we have like that we've built this upon hundreds of years of progress from the enlightenmentenment and from our classical values. And here's what the classical values were and the virtues in Rome.
And here's what the Geo-Christian wisdom was. And here's all stuff that came from that.
And this is all stuff you kind of like, you kind of built the great men of our civilization with these values. And nowadays you go to a top university and there's no sense of duty.
There's no sense of pride in civilization. I think most of these kids couldn't even tell you what the classical virtues are anymore or have any idea about about why they were important most of them if anything probably are dismissive of like wisdom from judeo-christianity as opposed to appreciating how that shaped our civilization in positive ways right with the radical equal dignity of human life and most of them they've lost the lessons of the enlightenment and how that was filtered into our government and what that means for the West and why America has been an example, right? If anything, I think we're taught about why America is terrible.
And so, and then on top of that, I think the worst of all, so you miss all the wisdom, but then the worst of all is you're basically taught the opposite of courage. You're taught to shut up and go along.
You're taught that if you speak out, there's something wrong with you, right? You're taught that everyone's supposed to virtue signal. And so if you have a whole generation of our supposed elite that are all taught to be like beta and wimpy and scared, that's terrible for our civilization.
That means we're going to give up everything. And so I think even having one university that starts to teach the wisdom, but try to create people who speak up, who debate, who have the intellectual humility, not to say, this is just my way of thinking of it, but to have actual debates where they listen and they learn.
And to go out in the world and to model that culture and model that courage for others, that's a really big deal for our civilization. What do you think other institutions are getting right at the moment? I think that some of these institutions are very good at teaching very narrow, advanced topics, right? I think if you want to be really, really good at certain types of physics or chemical engineering or computer science, there are other top universities with other really smart people there, first of all.
So there's a great network of smart people, and there's professors who are very these certain very certain narrow fields and that's that's positive but i think there's like so much that's gone wrong with science so much that's gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology that there's just there's this and you know the other thing that's crazy the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average so you have more more administrators at Harvard and Yale than you have students.

No way.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's like you think it's fake. What are they doing?

They're doing like lots of policy

for virtue signaling

and for making sure

that they can hire other bureaucrats

and making sure these bureaucrats

like put out all sorts of like,

you know, like stuff about

whatever the woke topic of the day is

and whatever programming

they need for the students

to make sure the students are,

you know, feel guilty

about their race or whatever.

I don't know.

The whole thing is crazy.

Is that still going?

I don't know. The whole thing is crazy.
Is that still going? I'm aware that it was a hot topic to be spoken about either as a virtue signal or push back against as, you know, sort of a flag that you plant in the ground to say no further than this. And that seems to have died at least a little bit.
There's always a sense that those sorts of news stories catch fire when the rebellious outer party is the one that's pushing against it. And I think that, you know, if you're inside of the tent pissing out, as opposed to outside of the tent pissing in, it does give a different dynamic.
But I kind of got the sense that how can these, after Yale scandals, after Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw over the last 18 months, forget going back further. Like, is this really still continuing to ramp up? What's your perspective on this? I don't know if ramp up is the right word, but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions, right, as the famous communists discussed.
And these institutions were conquered by extreme ideologues, right? There's been multiple studies of this where like the administrators are pretty much universally to the hard left of the professors and they're activists. And so these activists have conquered these institutions.
It's not like it's active conquer, right? And so now are they going to be virtue signaling as much about things like DEI in today's culture? Of course, they're going to be a little quieter about that because they don't want to get pissed off the donors and get fired. Wave the flag.
So they're not going to, but are they going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they going to like all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up to someone else? No way.
So there's a lot of naivety in our culture. Just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves were fixed, right? And these things are still completely conquered.
And I think people are, they think of it the wrong way. They're like, oh, well, it'll probably just fix itself.
Like, no, these people are in charge. The layer of administrators are in charge.
The professors run their departments. The lawyers at the university set the rules.
And then the board of trustees has been completely stacked with people who are either terrified of being controversial in public or on the side of the administrators.

And so none of them are going to get fixed, which is why you've got to build new ones.

I mean, that's fine.

You know what?

These are somewhat broken.

It's sad.

Let's build new ones.

You know?

Let's build new great ones.

That's what we're trying to do.

Yeah, just because you can say the word retard on Twitter without getting banned now.

That's the word of the year. It doesn't mean.

I know.

It is.

We're so back.

Someone has to buy Merriam-Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year because they're not going to do it themselves ah very good uh i learned about sullivan's law earlier today have you encountered sullivan's law remind me i think i know which one we're gonna have i'm gonna have to outsource it here what's sullivan's law well there's conquest law and there's harding's law which is all yeah so yeah there's a that's sullivan there's everyone's ways of bringing it basically this is really interesting and so another way of putting it for some people they say if you don't explicitly make an institution right wing it will get conquered by the left wing that's what a lot of people believe and that tends to be what happens but i think it doesn't have to be quite so partisan is that like the goal of ua tex is be a partisan institution. And by the way, it'd be a failure if it was a right-wing institution in the sense that there weren't, I mean, you want to have the smartest and best

people there. You want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with

professors, right? It's not a healthy intellectual environment if only one side dominates. What you

can do, and this is a little bit more controversial, I guess, but what you can do at the administrative

level, you could say, we don't want to be conquered by illiberal forces what are illiberal forces illiberal is stuff that's against kind of the the values of freedom in our society against free speech so illiberalism is communism that's specifically an illiberal force other authoritarian things are identity politics and that whole culture that does seek to impose a lot of those things top down is very broken it's's a kind of a morphed new form of communism. And frankly, things like Islamism, like the implied authoritarian framework of that is also something that's an authoritarian for us.
So those are the types of things you say, we're not going to let those conquer our institution. We're going to be explicit about it, but it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views.
So what are the, other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you try to fix? Well, you know, so when you have an institution like this, you want to bring in the top entrepreneurs in our country, the top innovators in our country, and you want to expose them to the students in a way where they're helping shape the courses. But you also want to have all the top academics on the humanity side.
So we have what's called intellectual foundations on one side, where we think every top college student going to a top university should be given the intellectual foundations of our civilization with history and economics and philosophy and the great books and just have that foundation, right? But then you also want to have courses that are shaped, not only STEM, but stuff that's shaped by, you know, I have over a hundred friends who are founders of billion dollar companies who've signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare.
Right. So I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education.
Exactly. I think having both in it, and this is a dialectic, I'm obsessed with these dialectics, but there's, there's, there's like truth for why both of those extremes are important and you need to merge them and have them there.
And by the way, when you merge them properly, it's really fun because you can get different debates about what's going on in the innovation world at a startup. And you could argue about that from a philosophical perspective and you could apply some of the old, you know, debates from a long time ago and old wisdom from a long time ago.
Like imagine applying Xenophon, you know, who was, this is a guy who was writing in 300 BC and he wrote about Cyrus the Great and his values and his principles and why he became so successful. And all the young European princes for like 1500 years were trained, were read Xenophon and read about Cyrus to train like, here's the values of who you should be to be a great prince and a great leader and what that meant and be able to have that and then talk about that in the context of a startup leader we're arguing about and the principles it's fun you can mix these things together what else is there to say on dialectics give me a 30 000 foot view of how you use them you know just in general a lot of things are not simple truths that are either on one side or the other most of the time in the world when there's there's actually deep truth on both sides.
So if you want to apply it to the innovation world, I always love the dialectic in the product organization where on one hand, you have like Steve Jobs, or you have like the guy around SOTY in the eighties, Steve Jobs basically said, I don't care what the consumers tell me they want. I'm going to figure out what's best.
I'm going to show them a breakthrough and then they're going to love it. Right.
And there's some really deep wisdom in that. It's not what they're asking for.
Right. They didn't know to ask for a car.
Right. It's like, you know, they would ask for something with horses.
So, so what's the breakthrough we're going to give them. But then there's another thing that's actually really true.
Even at Apple, which is that once you have a product, there's like a hundred things that consumers want to bug them, especially an enterprise. There's like ways they're not able to use it for some reasons.
They have like product needs. So you need someone like 14 hours a day, like mapping out all these needs and understanding them or prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it.
So it's as good as possible. So how do you, you know, if you, if you only have the Steve's job genius thing, it's going to end up being something that's like too clunky and people aren't happy with it and won't get better.
If you, but then if you have these guys over here, iterating, taking over, then you never get the next burst of genius. And and it's really terrible so how do you keep that genius like i'm going to tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing and i'm i'm slightly better i've done a lot of products where i create them i usually have someone else who's better than me at the 14 hours a day iterating process which is really important they're two separate things so you're holding both of these in your mind at the same time no yeah you have to know they're both important and then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to make it mix them together and usually with dialectics the truth is on the extreme it's not in the middle it's not like some sloppy middle it's like say more it's like you you want you want to have you want to have like like the really crisp reasoning of like just pure invention with like nothing interfering and you want to to have the really crisp reasoning of iteration, you know, and pushing it back.
So, so, so in general, you know, I'll, I'll give it like, there's other one. There's the whole Nietzschean, there's a whole Nietzschean perspective versus the geo-Christian perspective.
And so, you know, I'm a dad's Catholic. My mom's Jewish.
I grew up Jewish. And yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole Nietzsche framework.
Cause a 14 year old, I thought it was really cool. I know if you've read Frederick Nietzsche and the will to power and all this stuff.
And you, if you get too into it and the one thing he talks about is how, is how the most, the world's mostly driven forward by like the top 1% of like talented people in Uber mentioned, they're the ones that kind of build the future and that they're the ones that matter in a sense of what the future is going to look like because they're creating it. And if you, and there's lots of truth that the very, very most successful people and most talented people, you know, Thomas Jefferson called them the natural aristocracy.
They do run things and drive things forward. And that's really key.
Now, if you only have that side of the dialectic, it's really dangerous. It turns out by the way, that Hitler was very obsessed with that too.
And, and, too. And that's dangerous, right? And so what's the other side? Well, one of the great insights of Judaism that became a great insight of Judeo-Christianity is a radical equal dignity of all human life.
This is something that Rome did not have, right? Rome celebrated watching people kill each other and whatever, and they're not us and they're slaves and there's all sorts of kind of pretty nasty stuff. And a big breakthrough with Christianity,

with Judaism and then Christianity,

which spread it all around,

was that actually every human life matters

and every human life has equal dignity

and that our whole civilization

is based on that respect for everyone and for every life.

And that's a dialectic, right?

Because on one hand, it's true,

the top 1% are driving forward the future,

but it's also true that like every life matters

and that you're not a good person under the geo-Christianristian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone and so and so does that mean that all of our money should go towards helping disabled kids and nothing should go towards like the most best gifted kids that's what they've done in a lot of blue cities now which is which is that they fail they've got just only one side of dialectic right they've only helped the the bottom but but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either you got to help both it's

like a you right so there's things like this that i think if you understand okay there is a dialectic

these both matter how are we going to keep both of these in mind as people running a society as

leaders in society it becomes a helpful framework to understand and is the middle way you go to die

yeah it's like oh we're not yeah if you don't if you exactly you don't want it's just sloppy

thinking we're gonna you know you don't want sloppy thinking.

You actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive. And it's the right thing to do.
It's an ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and that we're investing a lot more in them. But you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years from now if you're not also accelerating the very top very aggressively, which is something we've stopped doing in a lot of parts of our country.
because he's really bright as kids.

By being able to pick him out

and then push him further ahead,

they do create the future

and giving them an edge. It's not that it's, it's not that it's inequity.
It's that we, I want there to be like a hundred thousand extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future.
They're going to cure diseases when I'm an old man, they're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone.
Right's like you kind of want both yeah i suppose uh you need to be that the product needs to be as good as it can be it needs to be perfect you need to obsess over perfection and quality and also you need to ship at a rate that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and that's a great dialectic like how do you do perfection and how do you do not not procrastinating and taking too long as these and these these are and it's tough dialectics are hard because there's no perfect answer but you have to you have to play with both extremes you're right yeah i you need to narrow your focus but also be open to new opportunities at the same time yeah this is why it's so hard in the world is that there are these conflicting truths it's like a i guess they call it like a cone i guess in japanese wisdom right there's always different there's two of it. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it.
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My friend Alex and his wife talk about this is

a problem to be managed, not a paradox to be solved. And I think that that's kind of like

an interesting frame where you go, Scott Alexander refers to it as thinking in super positions. So, you know, you have sort of these two positions that exist at the same time.
Cat is both alive and dead. And people try to collapse them down into a single position, but that's actually where stuff often goes wrong because these two things don't exist together.
Exactly. And then there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate what else what are what are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life re-read my piece online before i can't this is a this is a tough one what are some of you know i apologize nothing like right away is coming to mind i wrote this long piece about this like 12 years ago no no well there might be something that pops up in a bit anyway um ai in education so the party that we were both at during South by Southwest, we went to that big dinner party.
And I was sat next to this fascinating guy. And he was giving this what might as well have been a 90 minute long fucking TED talk.
It's probably Joe Lamont. Correct.
I was keeping it. I was keeping it.
Sorry. Keeping it.

I mean, you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want.

He's great.

I really appreciate it as well that Keeping it quite bad. I mean, you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want.

He's great.

I really appreciate it as well

that he wants to sort of be

doing the thing behind the scenes

without putting himself in front of the scenes,

no matter how much I try and bring him on the podcast.

Yeah, I shouldn't talk about it.

No, he likes it.

I mean, it was a fucking dinner party,

but me and the sort of four people

that were within earshot

before the next, you know,

whatever territory of conversation bubble that took over each one, each person had a territory grab. This is such a key thing to push education forward this way.
And the only reason it's not happening at greater scale is because there's no market mechanism right now of competition in education. Just because you have the best thing doesn't mean people are allowed to go to it.
So we're trying to put market mechanisms. Can you explain what it is that he's trying to do? Yeah.
And, you know, in general, it turns out that if you personalize the app and personalize the learning where you can map out like an ontology or a schema of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area, you can, and you can have something interacting with them. You could see where they're good and where they're not good.
And a lot of times what happens, for example, is a kid will get like way behind in one area, like two grades behind and they never get caught up because they never no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills but if you have an app that's really good at like measuring and teaching then it turns out with two hours a day you're actually able to get kids way way ahead and i think you can get the majority of the kids you know in in in alpha school for example i think are a 99 percentile and some of them are are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead and this with this personalized AI learning that like teaches you know to how they need to learn and it's what they need to know and it's it's amazing because in two hours a day they do the academics and then they have time for projects and for life skills and I think there's going to be schools they're doing where like kids get to play video games because these young men aren't studying otherwise being designed by the guys that did fortnight I think he's doing some really cool things with that there's there's other schools for sports and for kids who want to get way ahead in sports you're going to stay ahead in academics for two hours then you're going to train and you're going to be the best of the sport you want to play so i think there's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and we could try out an education and it's it's awesome to see successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this you know for our country it's really amazing yeah i found it very interesting. He was talking about the massively reduced prevalence of ADHD in these schools, because if you're running around for four hours a day and you're only strapped to something, which is probably a bit more engaging and is at your level of, of education and is helping you to a hundred percent, all these kids are just being tortured.
I think a lot of the way we teach school right now is just like this torturous daycare. That's terrible for kids.
And to actually exactly two hours a day of your level, you need to know you're going to be more focused, more interested than being able to run around, be in charge. I think the Alpha School model is built on top of what's called the Acton School model.
And Acton Academy is this really cool breakthrough where they just basically gave the kids a lot more control of the school and then got to build their own constitution, their own frameworks, give them a lot more responsibility, which I think is a very cool kind of libertarian model. The inmates are running the asylum.
That's what you're telling me. It's awesome.
And it creates this like responsibility. It works.
It works if it's done right. You still have guides and adults there, but it works.
And then I think on top of that, he's put like competitions. He's put like really good AI.
And listen, it's just like smart people getting together and building. And this is what education clearly to me should look like, you know, in 10, 20 years in America.
And the real question at this point is how do we roll it out to other places? And unfortunately, we have some really powerful special interests that don't exist for our kids. They exist for their own employment and the school administrations right now.
And so that's going to be a big battle in our country. Is this Department of Education stuff? a little bit.
It's much more just like the, just the teachers unions in general and the administrations locally in the school districts. Texas, for example, has something like 1,200 school districts and they're not accountable and they're overpaid.
And it's just like, in terms of these administrators and stuff, and I don't even know what they're doing. It's just, the whole thing is just like very sloppy.
And there's a big war right now for school choice in Texas, but we're only fighting over putting $1 billion towards school choice, which is not big enough anyway. so it's just the whole thing is just like very sloppy and there's a big war right now for school choice in texas but we're only fighting over putting one billion dollars towards school choice which is not big enough anyway so it's like hopefully we make that a lot bigger next time and just get a lot more parents able to send their kids like the ideal situation is the middle class can afford to reallocate the money the government's giving them for education to go to one of alpha schools or another school of their choice and not be stuck on something that's not as good.
Is there a place for AI in higher ed? Yeah, you know, in general, in general, I think a lot of like any kind of learning of math and science and any of that like can be driven forward with AI and you're going to start seeing a lot more of that too. You know, and there's probably lots of ways in which I think people already are learning in higher ed, like what would Plato think of this based on this? Where can't it interject? What will it struggle at? You know, you've thought a lot about the

university experience. You guys are trying to give a more classical sort of approach, I suppose.

Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the university experience is about being around other young

adults who are exploring the world and learning and interesting professors and having an intellectual

environment where you're socializing with and you're exploring ideas with other people. And I think it's really important to have this in-person experience.
I think that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing. And so I think that's not going to be something you just have with AI.
You have to have people around you. You have to be learning.
You have to be debating things in a classroom. Can AI make some of that better and augment it? Certainly.
I mentioned university for me was kind of like Navy SEAL boot camp for socialization, but it lasted five years. It is.
It's the people skills for the most part. I was in the dorky fraternity at Stanford.
I have friends who are in the cool fraternity, so sometimes they would still be my friend back then, which was nice. They ended up working for me later, so it's good.
But we were in the dorky fraternity, and I remember going to spring break, and back then, my friends were like, Joe, you can't tell the girls that you're a computer scientist. It's not cool.
You have to pretend you're like American Studies or something, and I have some bad stories. We figured it out, actually.
Have you seen what Jordan Peterson's doing with Peterson Academy?

A little bit. Tell me about it.
He's trying to give a university level education online and he's got some really, really interesting lecturers, teachers, I suppose. And they're trying to get certification and they're trying to sort of assess whether or not people have gone through the course and all the rest of it and i think it's great but kind of like the realization that maybe many businesses have come to understand post-covid that there are many intangibles that are born out from water cooler talk and and from being around other people for me if at least at least if you're trying to do something that's like the high-end Western civilization university experience, like that's Oxford, that's Cambridge, that's Harvard, that's Stanford.
And these places now are more broken than they were, but there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs. And whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of group or whatever, I think having these things in your life are tough.
So I think Jordan's a really talented guy. I'm a fan of his.
i think he's going to have something that's very interesting to learn online i think by the way i think i think we may do things we learn online too i think it's a very positive part of that but it's not the full experience can you explain to me what the fuck's going on with these tariffs joe well this is always a dangerous thing to talk about for many reasons because i'm helping the administration and like i'm like advising people in the dod and hhs which is the health care part with you know all these different areas and i'm helping friends in doge and i'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on and tariffs tariffs are very complicated topics so that the kind of typical like libertarian framework is just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage right and you have people who could specialize who could specialize and there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all. For example, if you have like tribes people making you vanilla or coffee they're growing and they're very poor, but they're making a little more money now because they're selling it to you.
And then you say, oh, we have a trade deficit with you. Like the guys growing the vanilla aren't going to start buying all of our products, right? So it's okay to have some trade deficits.
Now, the part where I think the administration, frankly, is completely correct is there's a lot of really unfair barriers everyone's put up against U.S. companies all over the world.
And it's not just tariffs, right? So tariffs is one problem. But the other problem is they just make all sorts of crazy rules that effectively mean no one other than their companies could sell in certain sectors.
And every country does this. But like like like just like the fruits have to be grown here or have to only be sold within a certain amount of time or certain amount of distance from where they're for where they're grown or or the cars have to have like all these exact specifications and it's designed specifically ahead of time where someone whispers it to all their companies and they no one else passes the test other than them or but there's all there's always like different ways you can kind of cheat and make rules to keep people out and like all these countries do this and it kind of made sense america was so dominant after world war ii and it kind of made sense for how we were like building a global order with allies that we kind of gave them an advantage a little bit to work with us and and they did take away a lot of our manufacturing you know in certain areas and then and then like we had this naive view that like if you just give china this like wto entrance and you trade with them and make them rich they're not going to be communists anymore and that naive view was shown to be totally wrong about 10 years ago you had this crazy communist in charge he's murdered a bunch of people he's like he's like completely in charge he's not he's not he's not a pro market guy he's not a freedom guy he's he's clearly like he's you know if in his youth he would sing poems about hardening your heart to destruction of america he's clearly doing things to hurt america and and and so and so these people have taken advantage of us around the world china's definitely not become free it's definitely stolen away a lot of manufacturing base and so what are the tariffs that are going i'll give you a few examples one tariff is definitely good let's say's say it's cheaper to manufacture something in like Indonesia or China because they're polluting and because the pollution to not pollute costs a lot of money.
So that's obvious. First, tariff that right away, right? Because you don't want to just let them pollute, right? I don't think anyone would disagree with that no matter what your view is.
I think another one that's good is that we need something for our defense industrial base where we need to be able to make it here in order to our defense, you know, department or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever.

Like, like obviously tariff some of that supply chain we need it we need it here we need to build it here right and subsidize it here i think those are obvious and then you get into more complicated things you know i'm generally pro free trade but if you look at what happened margaret thatcher in 1979 she was very pro free trade and she opened it up to the eu and in 1989 she said it was one of her biggest mistakes she ever made because what she didn't realize is that when she opened up uk to the eu market they basically put brussels as a bureaucracy in charge of everything which was terrible it's a total mess and so so you gotta be very careful what you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge effectively now of your rules you give up sovereignty so that's the reason it's bad and then and then i mean finally and this is where it gets like everyone really argues but like in general i don't think small consumption taxes are bad i think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes so i think a small one probably makes sense so i mean so listen there's and there's and then and then i guess the very last one of course is yes we went from 30 manufacturing to to 10 you know over the last 30 years should all of that be in the u.s probably. Some of those jobs are just not things we want.
Should more of it probably be in the US for more of what we do? Probably. So listen, it's not totally insane.
There's dumb tariffs, which is like tariffing coffee or vanilla. And there's tariffs that are too high to break things with our allies.
But there are tariffs that let us take away these barriers I talked about and put put things back here so it's not it's not as crazy as people think i think the way they implemented it was maybe a little too aggressive at first but the reason they did that is to get everyone's attention so we'll see yeah i can't work out it feels like i'm in a i don't know opposites day meets groundhog day back to back to back i'm like is this a 7d chess move is this an error? And I'm unable to fucking decipher what's going on, which maybe says everything you need to know about me and mine. Well, let's be honest.
President Trump, I think he has very good intuition in general. I think he also, in general, loves to be the center of attention and have to have everyone come to him.
So I think maybe my personality would not have been to do as quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, ah, I'm going to freak out everyone.
Printed off on a piece of PVC. But A, that's his personality.
And B, now they're all going to come make a deal. So you know what? There's different ways of doing things.
And this is who this guy is. And if you make some great deals over the next few months, it could actually end up being a great thing.
So I think you have to say that there's logic in what J.D. Vance and President Trump think they're're doing and and also in the jury still out is my view how important is this to u.s-led global order continuing stuff like that well i they've definitely they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which on which we're engaging america has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world uh and that way we've been subsidizing it they would argue has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of things around the world.
And that way we've been subsidizing it, they would argue has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of capital and are able to invest here and around the world and partner has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that have got hollowed out. And I think they want to change those dynamics a bit.
Like I am concerned to have America still be a very important, powerful force of the world for good. I don't like the fact that even today, thanks to the Biden administration's actions, if you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the Horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough to enforce freedom of navigation on the Red Sea.
If you look at a graph, like a Flexport graph, you can get, it's just a company that tracks all these containers. It's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world order is starting to break down because of how we're handling things so there are things like that that aren't good and i think we should be stronger on them um but there is going to be a changing relationship for sure let's think about the intersection between two of your worlds uh one being maintaining some u.s-led, and the other one being war, and sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us over here, I guess just because there's two really fucking big oceans on either side.
What concerns you and what do you think is overblown when it comes to people's worries about sort of global stability and stuff like that? What concerns me the most right now is the regime in Iran. Um, this is a regime that was actively promoting lots of different terror organizations.
They were, we've now find uncomfortable evidence that they funded the October 7th, you know, attacks and rapes and murders. They've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about.
And this is- Oh, that's the doing. That's why I can't get to the Red Sea is the thing.
And so for me, and it's actually really sad because I work with a lot of Iranians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, just the people, others, and they're the most talented people in our companies. There's some amazing people.
And it's what's really interesting is like the Iranian people themselves love America and even love Jews and Israel. But the people, it's like this country was conquered.
It was communists and Islamists together. And then the Islamists killed off the communists and they just took charge.
And it's like a modern day country country conquered by crazy theocrats, right, who then whip people and execute 16-year-old girls for being raped because it's your fault if you're raped under Islamism. And the whole thing is just crazy.
You can't make it up. It's like these are insane people who've conquered a country and are taking the money and sending it out to terrorists.
And we're at a really interesting point now where we've basically cut off some of their most powerful crazy terror people. And then there's these people in the country who desperately want to be free.
So for me, and yet they're working as hard as they can to getting a nuclear bomb. And so for me, this is very scary.
And they walk over American flags every day at their government, they walk over, you know, and so they talk about death to America. They're trying to build a nuclear bomb.
I think these people truly are crazy. And I think that's, to me, that's a really big danger and we could end it for a long time.
So I'm hoping we do. That's, that's that.
In terms of, in terms of overblown, I actually, listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts in Africa. I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa by Islamists.
That's a separate problem. But also when I, maybe there's something to do about, I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time.
Obviously we're all very worried about China. The Russia-Ukraine thing is a mess.
But I think overall, it's not like Europe's in tons of conflicts right now. I think overall, we're a pretty good place if we can take care of these few crazy people.
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functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. What does the future of warfare look like on the ground?

I'm hearing all manner of different stories about, you know, it's just going to be drone drone versus drone it's going to be magic bullet versus magic bullets what's your perspective on this well you know after founding palantir for a while i didn't do defense because it's so annoying to have to work with the government i built companies in other areas and then i went back into defense about 10 or 11 years ago because really what happened is we saw xi jinping again take over china we saw him forcing a lot of our friends to have their best engineers in China

working on things with the PLA.

And it was clear he was becoming very militaristic.

And then it was also clear that they were innovating

and doing things that were ahead of some

of what we do here. What like?

Well, they had better hypersonics in certain

areas. They were trying to do

swarms of drones that could attack in different ways.

And it was just

none of our defense hardware companies, none of the big primes, you know, have. So what a prime is, is that in the 1990s, the Cold War ended and we had all the best companies in defense, but we weren't going to spend as much on defense anymore.
So they all merged and they formed these like nine giant companies. These companies started to become very bureaucratic, almost like they're arms of the government.
And then in the late 90s, all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating. And so these big companies just fell way behind in software, way behind in all these new possibilities.
And so China had this like new dynamic sector. And we had this like kind of old sclerotic legacy failing things.
We're like, oh my God, we got to get our best people to work on this. And so my friend Palmer Lucky, who we'd backed at Oculus before, he partnered with three Palantir guys to form Andrel, which is a very famous company now.
It raised a 30 billion plus valuation. And then shortly after that, I'm like, you know, as we back that, we went all in and now we started Epirus.
Epirus is named after the bow of Theseus, which had infinite arrows, but it's the best EMP company. So we could shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation, right? So it's just really cool at turning off swarms of drones.
And so what's happening now is you have swarms of drones in the air. You have swarms on the water here in Austin.
We're building hundreds of smaller ships. We're teaching the Navy how to use AI to weaponize autonomous vessels.
And then you have things under the water that are new. You have things in space that are fighting.
And so you have all these new possibilities, new missiles, new ways of turning off bad guys. And it all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control.
And so there's a lot of stuff going on is this the quickest moving that sort of warfare technology has ever gone you know warfare's changed a lot over the years one of my favorite books was the shield of achilles which is like this thousand page book on constitutional government in europe and it shows how every time there's like a new form of warfare that's best it changes the government's's, the structure of governments as well, because the structure of government has to be able to support that form of warfare. So for example, if you need like, if like a knight who's fully armored with modern technology could take on like 50 peasants, everyone needs to make knights, which means you have this very feudal society that forms and the feudal societies conquer Europe.
And then another example of this is like, if you have all these aristocracies that came out of the feudal societies and run certain ways, and then suddenly you're able to like mass produce rifles and give everyone a rifle, uh, the aristocracies have to sort of become republics of some sort because you can't give everyone a rifle and have them fight if they're the kind of your, you know, your slaves or your serfs or whatever you have to kind of, so Napoleon goes after Europe and it forces the aristocrats to basically like give up a lot of their power and arm everyone to fight back. And so totally changes the form of government and and and there's and it's and so you have had warfare change a lot over the years and you you have this concept which is interesting to me is defensive versus offensive warfare so so the question is what's better so used to be defense was much easier it's really hard to take a town right when the ottoman empire at its height you know even even even even century, you know, September 11th, 1683, the height of the empire, the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and save the town because it was taking them too long to take it before the Polish and French knights could get there.
And, and, and then of course the cannon becomes stronger and all of a sudden with the cannon, it's just much easier to build like, just like massive empires all over Europe. And, and, you know, I, I think right now we're going're going through interesting change right i do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before thanks to emp thanks to the way swarms can can cover shorter short distances and they kind of block things and so so i do think this does favor asymmetrically uh city city states and small countries once again to be very very powerful it's you know for the cost of one aircraft carrier you could have a hundred thousand missiles in space they can land on anything effectively with these these rods so there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard uh to break through defenses and i hope that's where it goes because in some sense it used to be at all these free city states all around europe that was a good thing then you had the kind of jerks build the umpires and like take away their rights and maybe we can have like small states to get with because when you have lots of small states you can you can kind of if someone gets to be too annoying you just go to another one so so as i hope that's where things are going is the defense is stronger but that's an important question we'll see what was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against what happened over the last 40 you know four decades or so what was it that were the innovations there that we're now trying to push back against? Oh gosh, there's all sorts of these things in different ways.
You know, I mean, there's all this like smart bombs I think were like the big thing for Desert Storm that we hadn't had before where we were able to basically target everything and take it out really precisely and just like just like completely like surprise and wipe out you know so i was saying it's army in a way that was just it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air and and and you know i think i think the new thing today that we're seeing in ukraine of course is that is that it's like you can all of a sudden have like 20 000 or 100 000 things at once in a semi-coordinated way actually move and attack and and swarm and it's just just really really really hard to beat and so so you're you are seeing things just change entirely so the emp solution is a way to stop using million dollar bombs to take down 500 drones we have this video for epirus where there's like these like thousand drones coming at you and then these like old-fashioned people are trying to fire the missiles at them and you can take out a few like what are you going to do like it's and it's crazy even people who only have like five drones attacking our ships we're spending these super expensive missiles exactly million dollars to shoot down something that's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars and yeah so if you can get it turns out that you want to have all the power uh hit the gallium nitride the emitter at about the same time so you have these ai chips that control power on very small time scales and you get all the power hit the gallium nitride at once which means the what gallium nitride is an emissive material it's the most efficient emissive material okay or for like for like sitting out like a real like a ten thousandth of a second burst of microwave radiation and and if you do it with enough power the micro radiation is so strong that it can like even turn things off you know miles away depending how you do it so and so basically you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming in it's like a star trek shield and you turn them off uh-huh yeah that's fascinating yeah i mean i had uh i've had a bunch of conversations eric prince was on and he was was explaining to me about sort of what's happening in Ukraine at the moment.

And it's so funny how we've got a sort of evolutionary mimesis

happening in warfare where you have tanks,

the tanks have some vulnerabilities and weaknesses,

the drones are created so that they can be flown

into the particular weaknesses on the tanks, the tanks' weaknesses get patched up, the drones get a little bit bigger, a little bit more sophisticated. They can fly further.
The tanks put netting up. The drones have sharp things on them that can cut through netting.
I'm not bullish tanks five years from now because there's too many things coming at them. We can try to put EPRS on the tanks.
We could defend some of them. We we have a company called overland ai and they've won all these darpa challenges we're the best in the country just driving over complex terrain and so everyone's using them for that but the vehicle of some kind any vehicle driving over terrain is what we're realizing it's just similar to how saronic here in austin's building thousands of smaller vessels for the navy and we're gonna start building larger ones too and having them Navy that are, you know, armed and autonomous, we want to build thousands of overland vehicles.

And it's really interesting doing these things because when you spec out the

vehicle, the traditional defense solution is like,

it needs to have these 37 capabilities and needs to have this armor and needs

to do this, needs to do that. And you're like, wait a second,

you could give it all 37 of those capabilities,

or you could build a thousand of them for the same cost with like 10

capabilities. Right.

And so it becomes this like fascinating problem where this is a really

important point in warfare. Like warfare has this engineering aspect to it.

Like if you want to build a bridge and you want the bridge to never fall down, if you give me a billion dollars, I could build you a bridge that will never fall down. It might be ugly, but it'll be like so much metal, so many supports, it'll never fall down.
But the point of engineering is not to build a billion dollars. It's how do you build it for $50 million and never fall down just as much, right? And it's a similar's a similar thing in warfare.
You always have scarcity. So it's not, it's not about what are all the really cool specs on your jet or on your tank or whatever.
It's okay. If you're going to spend a certain amount of resources, I'm going to spend a certain amount of resources that we're going to, we're going to fight.
Let's, let's do something that just overwhelms. Even if the tank has better in all these ways.
I have, you know, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just going to swarm you and crush you and keep going.
Right. So there's things like this now where it, and this is why advanced manufacturing, going back to the tariffs, is so important to be good at.
Because if we're not good at that here and the other guys are good at it, that's scary. What is the likelihood that in five or ten years there's that many troops on the ground as well? Are human personnel going to be that important? I think people are still very important in a lot of different things i think the way warfare is morphing is it it goes towards a special forces model so i think i think elon musk has been really clear like obviously you don't want like tons of troops like running forward and then there's like tons of drones coming that's a terrible i don't want to be that guy this is like the really sad thing in world war one where like the british aristocrats have been treated like crap for 30 years and they the aristocracy, your role was a warrior who defends society.

That was like kind of how you were taught.

And so they were so excited when World War I came to them.

They'd get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their society and be proud.

And they all jumped on their horses and they all charged and they were all mowed down by machine guns.

Like the whole generation was killed.

It was terrible, right?

So even like a hundred years ago, you didn't want people charging that way.

Now it's insane.

But what you do have is you have a special forces model where there's like you probably have everyone have like multiple robots around them and they're controlling them in different ways and commenting them you probably have them calling in airstrikes calling in drone strikes like figuring out what's going on using the tools but you are going to want people on the battlefield or near the battlefield they're just going to be like using a lot of stuff around them but you're probably still going to want them there for quite a long time is my view. What were you saying about rods from space? What are rods from space? Yeah, this is one of those things that it's always like not clear how much one should talk about.
I don't have clearance these days, which is good because I can not get myself in trouble. But it's just pretty obvious that, you know, a fighter jet is a missile delivery system.
And if you can have the missiles be in space and be extraordinarily accurate what they're going to hit and, you know, for any kind of ground target or even other things, then it's like, that's probably a better way of doing it, right? It's just much cheaper. It's much cheaper now thanks to Starship, right? It would be very, very cheap to get, I mean, right now, I think it costs as much as an aircraft carrier to get 100,000 of these in space.
That could, I don't know what the ratio is, could go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier. some point it's just like obvious how you want to be spending that money it's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers like it's just in many cases some degree of intermediary whether it's the thing that the carries the missiles takes off from whether it's the thing that carries the missiles whether it's the missile it's a huge part of it i mean when we doaronic ships with the Navy and they're- Saronic? Saronic is a company that just raised $600 million at a $4 billion valuation that we helped some of the amazing talented guys start.
Dino Maroukas is a Navy sailor who started it here in Austin. And so it's an Austin-based company.
It's building like hundreds of these weaponized vessels. And, you know, I think the current ones are mostly 24 footers and they could do certain things.
And, you know, I think if you build unmanned, all unmanned for now, and if you have 130 footer, mostly unmanned, but maybe you make people go on if they want, that lets you shoot things to take 80 foot of ship to fire. Otherwise you couldn't fire from 24 feet.
So, so yeah, it does become like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels. What's the world of autonomous submarines looking like? That to me seems like the most obvious place to and again it's it's about the scarcity the scarcity question as well right because it's like what does it cost versus having a swarm of things on top of the water you want both i think so yeah andrel which again i'm a big investor in with palmer and my friends are running uh they have i think a facility in rhode island is pumping out a couple hundred of these a year and there's these very advanced submarines they've also just i think last week introduced these like new underground center new underwater sentries that can like detect certain things and do certain things underwater too i think you can use them as mines and stuff as well and all sorts of possibilities so so yeah you definitely want complicated things underwater and it's interesting that becomes again a game how do you detect things underwater it's very hard to detect things underwater but there's a lot of new technologies where if you for example string fiber optics along the along the bottom of the water uh then based on the gravmetric distortions you can detect whales you can detect all sorts of other things moving around so so i always wonder like how advanced is china in this area how advanced you know are we in these areas you actually it's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear try try out too easily right now oh yeah well i wonder i kind of have this sense in my mind of um people not wanting to show their hand and people different nations understanding that if you have that you almost have this trade-off in fact this this actually happened i think in world war ii once the enigma code had been cracked there was a um value judgment that needed to be made.
We know that they are going to try and attack these three ships. But if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked, they're going to know that something's up.
So you're tolerating how much of this do we decide to use? How much do we show of our knowledge? And I kind of get the sense when it's China does something in Taiwan at some point and you go, okay, how, how, if 10 is unleash everything, how far of that can we go? Because yes, maybe it's really, really good in pushing back this particular assault or defending yourself or whatever it is, but also completely shows your hand in this is the technology and this is the capability that we've got. So that, I mean, you can talk as much as you want about the introduction of AI, the sort of retreat of physical soldiers from the battlefield.
That is a value judgment that really just, it's done by committee, hopefully very smart committee, but it's done by people that go, fuck, go to town or go to eight or go to whatever. And there are certain things we work on, even at some of these companies I mentioned, that they aren't putting into Ukraine, for example, because they don't want Russia and China to learn about them and learn how to respond to them, which is not my judgment, by the way.
I'm not in charge. So, you're doing more to defend Ukraine, whatever.
Palantir and Andrew are doing a lot, but it's not up to me. We have leaders.
These are the technologies that are available. You choose which ones you go.
And they're going to be rational by the decision. And you're right.
I mean, when it comes to nuclear deterrence, this is a very scary topic and you actually probably don't want perfect knowledge on either side because it makes, it makes things more likely to happen and you actually don't want anything to happen. Say more on that.
Well, the whole point is like you have the nuclear, nuclear triad and the different ways you could respond and you know, in nuclear, in nuclear war and you want them not to know everything and to be unsure they know everything and to be worried because if they get to be very very confident they know exactly what it is and they could potentially be confident with some strategy that they found a way to take it out and stop it and then they could strike and then they know they could strike and so it's actually good for both sides to be a little bit unsure about these things that's so interesting yeah what do you know about us and what do you know about what we know about you and the the vacuum of information the uncertainty is a deterrent in and of itself exactly which is probably healthy none of us want nuclear war like the reason i work in defense probably 20 of hvc my firm is a defense we're doing things in bio to save lives and health care and other areas uh and i work in defense to deter the bad guys and to have the make sure that we have the best technology there so they're afraid to fight us i don't want there to be lots of work like i said i do think freeing the iranian people is a good thing but in general i don't think what we did in afghanistan for that so long was right i think we've wasted a lot of money on crazy adventures in general i want less war is my bias but that's the goal with the better technology yeah it's just a very big very smart deterrent yeah traveling should be about the pleasure of the trip and not the stress of packing which is why i am such a huge fan of nomadic this travel pack the 14 liter travel pack is what i wear every single day it is the biggest game changer and it genuinely makes spending your day lugging your possessions around infinitely more enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses, so well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important.
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What you sort of identified before, the primes, is that like the Raytheons and so on? Yeah, Lockheed, Northrop. And by the way, there's good people, these places in some departments, there's some great things they do.
There's some things where it's, I think, crony and corrupt and broken too. That, that's, I'd never, I didn't know much about sort of the background and how they work, but that's such a fascinating situation to get yourself into where you're the preferred partner, the preferred supplier or whatever.
But that if you have a vacuum of talent that gets sucked out of you to a place that's able to be more exciting, more sexy, pay you better. And then what happens is they try to lobby and block the other people.
And they mostly succeed at doing that because, so they become these bureaucracies whose main job is to do innovation theater, pretend they're innovating and then to keep new things out. And so both Palantir and SpaceX were the first two companies to like break through and become new primes.
And in both cases, they had to sue the government because they were being treated totally unfairly and they were destroyed records. They were people ordering not to tell people that something was better because they're going in and out working at these primes.
Like you work for the government, you work for the prime, and they're all friends. And so they're just like, don't let any of these like obnoxious, weird tech guys in.
Like I didn't know how to play golf with the right people or anything. We're like the weird outsiders.
And so even now we're the outsiders, but we've broken in enough that we're in some parts. Undeniable.
And I mean, what is it? The percentage of payloads being put into space by SpaceX. It's 80% or 90% or something.
SpaceX just dominates that now. Palantir dominates certain other areas but if you look at the overall revenue the government spends with companies in defense we're still tiny we're tiny.
No way. I think Palantir is like still well under two billion dollars of revenue of like you know a couple few hundred billion in the same areas and it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus.
And so they're- What's that? What's cost plus? That means you get, say, you go and you say, I spent $10 million on this. So pay me $11 million for delivering it to you.
And so it becomes this really weird incentive where you purposely get all these expenses and spend way too much money on something so you can have a little profit so that your profit's bigger from the government. And so there's this weird model where- Oh, you're incentivized to be inefficient.
Exactly. This is how we've built this for 50 years.
and so you can have a little profit for the three for the profits bigger from the government and so and so there's this weird model where oh you're incentivized to be inefficient exactly this is how we've built this for 50 years and so you have things where palantir or andrel as an example will come in and do something like a tenth the cost better it's just like crazy it just it sounds like i'm lying they do something like they'll have a drone versus lockheed and their thing will be literally a tenth the cost to make and it'll have like you know 60 more battery life it'll be like twice as fast it'll carry 50 more weight and then it'll literally be like a tiny fraction of the cost and still you'll lose it first because lockheed or whoever it was raytheon does this really well is they'll write the request for proposal with like a 300 page document specifying all these requirements that no one actually needs but they actually make it so it has to be their solution and and so this is the same game this is the same as the uh foreign country that says the exactly the headlights need to be this height so the same game being played by germany and even israel and other countries with their internal trade barriers against outsiders everyone plays is a game being played by the prime stopping anyone from breaking in and so these this is what happens what we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats and the complexity of the bureaucracy is a game being played by their prime, stopping anyone from breaking in. And so this is what happens.
What we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats and the complexity of their bureaucracy is a feature, not a bug, because they could use that feature to control it for themselves and control access. Yeah.
It kind of blows my mind that there's a couple of areas that I think about this in. The first one being medicine, anything that's with regards to keeping people alive.
Like there's literally no more important job than keeping people alive. And in warfare, it has to be bureaucracy because if it wasn't cutting the Gordian knot of all of the issues, if there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, okay, this has been a nice LARP for a while.
The pantomime's fucking over, all right? Like it's time for us to... And this is what happens in wars.
And one of my favorite books on this is The First World War by Winston Churchill, where he's appointed the First Lord of the Admiralty. And his job is basically to go in and just like knock heads in the British Navy and get rid of all the old fuddy-duddies.
He was super unpopular unpopular as hell that's why they framed him at gallipoli in world war one and then threw him out and he was out of his career for a while because by virtue of having to fight the proxy to fix it everyone hated him and wanted to like make him look really bad and then he goes through this like really tough part of his career for a long time and then shockingly comes back and saves the west but but it was it really is interesting if you are one of those people who's just really bold and smart and just push through and fix things, yeah, it pisses a lot of people off, but it's necessary to win the war. What's your opinion around the sort of great men of history in the modern world now? Is that something that can still exist or the bureaucracies and the red tape and the complexity? It's even more important now.
Of course, come on. It's even more important now.
But here's the thing. this is a dialectic again if you're gonna go back you wanted another the dialectic is there's two things that are true we have this like inexorably powerful system that pushes history and pushes things in certain directions it's really hard to overcome the system you can't just be a great man and just walk up to the system and like slice it all in half that's not how it works you're not just like i exist outside.
No, the way great men work of history is you understand the system deeply. And the way, you know, Peter Thiel, I was talking to earlier today, talked about it, is you see there's this big wave coming and you get in front of the wave and you surf it and you use it to cut through and fix things.
And you use it to build things and you use it to do things because you're working with the system and the direction of it. But then like fundamentally breaking through the bureaucracy, breaking through this area inspiring people with a better solution so so that so it is dialectic where it is a really hard system to change and there are certain things you can't change but then you desperately need the great men who are bold and who do study it who do like change things and make things possible and thank god we have elon musk and space actually just one example like america would be screwed from a defense perspective and from really.
Why? I mean, space is just absolutely critical to everything we're doing and knowing what's going on in the world and projecting power. It's just like certain things we can't talk about with space warfare, but you can imagine.
It's just critical. We now dominate that globally.
And there's no way. We'd be way behind.
We'd have nothing. Have you got any idea of China's space capability? They're trying really hard.
I mean, you've seen those videos where they try to do the thing where they landed they haven't figured it out yet but they're trying i mean they're they tried to do the chopstick i haven't tried the chopstick that i saw but they definitely try to land because the smaller ones are self-ending without the chopstick the chopstick's for the really heavy big one so they're still they're still back they haven't got falcon figured out yet but they're trying then the biggest starship they're not even close but but listen i mean the chinese are really good at copying stuff it's actually extraordinary he's that far ahead of them and there's some really smart people there so it's the fact that we're this far ahead that's just an amazing fact it's when you think about intellectual property and this is one of the things that trump's been bringing up with regards to tariffs right that it's not just the difficulty in getting products there it's the uh replication and the copying of our products over there which means it we don't even need to ship them like every time you do something they're so fast at copying it's actually amazing how good they are have you got any idea what that system is what it is that they're doing they got some team of crack i think it's the culture i think it's the culture of their education system to take something and to learn it and regurgitate it tends to be how they teach there so i think there's something about the smartest people being forced to do that and it's and then and they take things and it's really funny because they copy and they iterate on it and they do steal i mean i'm not gonna say which company but one of our companies was like training open ai and anthropic on a certain very specific area where they'd measure them every week uh give them get feedback and get it ahead and they got like certain scores and it really was open ai they were doing it the most with and they would score open ai and they they got to the point where it was really good for what they needed. And then DeepSeek came out.
This is when China had their own AI that they trained and they said, oh, it's interesting. Let's measure it.
And they measured it in the six different areas and it was exactly the same score as open AI from four months ago. And this is something they trained and iterated on to get there.
So it's clear they just exfiltrated it, which is what China's good at. The difficulty that you must face at holding on to commercial patents, not letting people get a hold of your inventions, that's one thing.
But when it comes to, oh, this is kind of the technology that keeps us safe from a national security or one of the key technologies that keeps us safe from a national security perspective. the level of security that you must be talking about when it comes to stuff like SpaceXx when it comes to raptor engines when it comes to falcon 9 heavy rocket stability all of the belly flop maneuver all of this shit that must be locked down as hard as you can get people talk about area 51 and being able to sort of keep secret secret and you go i i don't really know if the chinese would be that bothered about using aliens against us but they'd fucking sure as hell love one of those rocket rockets that can get stuff into space cheap it's really funny at palantir and i'm not funny but serious too obviously because we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and tracking all these things and i remember when i was still there a long time ago there was a phd student who was chinese uh who'd been friends with some of the people at our company and they caught him with like like in server room like with like inserting and stealing data and he and he broke down crying and he said you know i have family in china i didn't want to have to do this but i'm worried for them they kind of made me and this was quite a long time it was fully infiltrated and uh and well in that case like like they didn't didn't get it out and then he like he left the country right away and so you know and he went back to his family and and like it is interesting at that point on you had to be really careful hiring people with family in China to work in any of the government sensitive areas, of course, because they can just use the family against them.
Ironically, when Peter Thiel then spoke out at the RNC for Trump in like 2016, Obama's Justice Department, a Labor Department right away sued Palantir for not hiring enough Asians. We had 25% Asians, but it wasn't enough, which is just funny though, because we couldn't hire people who were born in China.
And so, of course, they sued us for that. But DOD agreed with us, but Laborator disagreed with us.
The government doesn't always agree with itself. Yeah, have a chat between yourselves, guys.
Work out who's going to sue us or not, and then come back. Well, isn't there all of these rumors, obviously this, I think, will have stopped now that the southern border has been tightened up significantly by the sounds of things.
But wasn't there a of sort of military-aged chinese men coming across the southern border i think what that was i'll tell you what i think that was uh this is speculation but i've talked to a bunch of people there actually were a lot of uh kind of chinese mafia operating in shenzhen which is like a area that had a lot of this historically and it's like very powerful groups and xi jinping was doing a really big crackdown in china and some of his crackdown was on stuff that was kind of messed up like i've had friends caught up in it who disappeared and died in the tech world where i don't think we're bad guys i think they just didn't just didn't agree with ccp but some of it was cracked down on actual elements i think a lot of those criminals fled and are doing criminal activities now in the u.s and across the border because they weren't safe in china so they came here. Oh, right, okay.
Imagine that. Imagine being the Chinese government and thinking, fantastic, we've actually finally got a ton of military age.
Oh, God, they're fucking, they're criminal. They're selling fentanyl.
What use is that? We need you to steal the secrets of Palantir. Well, we don't want these people in our country, and I think some of them probably came here even without China knowing it, but I'm sure they're smart enough to take advantage of it and use them too so it's very scary i met i think uh the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for spacex i love it uh at bill perkins house last year during the eclipse party and i was just listening it's similar to uh your friend that was giving the soliloquy about artificial education.
And he was just

explaining, it was such a fucking inspiring story that I think he'd been at a very big

space company previously and had moved to SpaceX. And he basically bet his entire career

on this belly flop maneuver. The fact that if you have any vehicle coming in from space, you wanted to try and accumulate as much air friction as possible and if you've got a tube there's not much air friction to play with in the first place so you try and put it parallel to the ground you bring it down and then at the very last minute you swing it and uh yeah he explained he said dude this was uh like as i'm watching this thing happening i'm basically watching my own career and legacy sort of slowly rotate by 90 degrees to see if it's going to work but i just loved it i thought it was so cool and it really sort of spoke to me about the um we spoke about fearlessness sort of courage uh earlier on it's a very unique kind of fearlessness you know to sort of back yourself to be to be innovative but i just thought just thought it was, it was such a cool story.
I loved, I loved hearing it. It's, it's, there's something really special about having a crazy idea about something that should work, how the world should work, and then like working with lots of other smart people, convincing them of it, and then like building and iterating towards it.
It's just, I love that. It's one of my favorite things.
I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things. And it's just so fun when you have these big, bold ideas.
They don't don't always work but you know with enough smart people around you to iterate on a lot of times they do space looking at that i'm fascinated by the world of astropolitics now so the politics of space who gets to own and refine things that are going past us areas on the moon bits of territory whether it's geosync above particular countries is this something that you've looked in too much think yeah you know the ownership thing it's it's fascinating this is a lot like i think you can go back and study like the 17th 16th 17th 18th centuries where there's just like infinite room and infinite space uh and you know for the new world and all these places you can get and you can fight over some big land bodies of course that people did but there's just there's just so much out there that it's much more like once you can start using it in a way that's actually helpful and you're using it for something useful it kind of becomes yours and there's so much out there that we're not gonna we're not gonna like run into scarcity for a long time so the way we think of it on earth is probably like today is probably the wrong model because we're because we have this like bias where there's a certain amount of land and a certain amount of resources and it's scarce and do i own it or do you own it and there's just so much stuff up there and so much room up there that it's not that's not really the problem for now like like we could we could we could every country could have their own moon base uh and like be like doing whatever we want to be doing on the moon and we're not going to like run out of room on the moon for now right it's just and then same thing with like there's just and there's millions of asteroids right so so so i'm not i not too concerned about that. I think the scarier thing is you probably don't want wars in space, right? At all, because A, it will screw up all the global satellite stuff we do, which is, I don't know about you, but Starlink's pretty useful for me.
It's pretty bad. And B, it's just like, there's lots of things where if you can get good at like doing things in space and then throwing things at the planet, that's really scary.
You screw a lot of things up. So I hope hope that's not something we get well there's also there's a book called seven eves by neil stevenson in the first line the moon explodes so spoiler alert the moon explodes in the first line and uh they've got it's like 500 days to get as many uh citizens off earth and to the iss and they basically build out this new habitat of the iss and they say there's going to be a hard rain as the moon breaks out from the seven pieces, seven eaves, the seven pieces that it's in.
And it's going to basically shower down on earth. Everything's going to be fucked for about 5,000 years.
And then after a while, if we can survive it, we'll come back down and we'll see, we'll see how all of this stuff goes. And, uh, they're talking about when you're in, I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if it's even correct to call it altitude when you get to something like the ISS or distance from Earth, that lots and lots of the satellites sort of sit at this particular distance away.
And it only takes, there's quite a bit of junk up there, but there's kind of well positioned. And it doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke, which broke this thing, which, and before you know it, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and entire sort of swaths of real estate and useful technology that's up there can all be damaged.
So, yeah, I think anything that involves fucking around in those areas, it seems like better. We don't want that.
There's a funny technology I saw the other day. There was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on.
Of course, there's a Japanese, which I love. This is like what you expect them to do.
Of course, there's the cleanest country. It's a dog.
It's a funny technology i saw the other day there was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on of course there's a japanese which i love this is like expect them to do of course there's the cleanest country it's a dog it's a miniature dog shaped like a miniature dog yeah no it's great but it's i mean in theory there's things like that hopefully we could do but i guess it's yeah it's you don't want a war up there you know you're talking about um our map of how land works kind of not working when we think about three dimensions, or whether you're looking at sort of the way that orbits occur. I promise this is going to, I think this is going to work.
Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, right? Hold on. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, I think about the way that their map of terrain must work, because what they see is being able to run forward to move themselves away from something that's on the other side of the tree.
So they're moving around this cylinder. And if you walk, you'll see it and it'll have its head out like that.
And as you come around, it'll scoot this way. I always been fascinated about what it must be like to have the map of terrain that a squirrel has because it's permanently thinking in spirals right it's thinking i can go up and down so it kind of is a 2d plane but this 2d plane is wrapped in a 3d way and uh when i read seven eaves and i think about that and they're talking about fucking orbital dynamics dude holy shit like trying to think about this the zenith and the apogee and the way that oh well we've got to do this two more loops in order for us to come back around at the right angle because it's not only the distance the angle the height the altitude the speed all this shit like oh yeah i just walk forward and back like even you think you know you first drive a car and you go oh my god this is so complex i'm never going to be able to do this you realize no dude this is like the simplest fucking thing you can do look at the squirrel if you play the 3d video games, you kind of get build intuition, but it's pretty fun.
It is weird up there. Yeah, it's interesting.
What is the future for you? What are you most interested, most excited about at the moment? We just had our sixth child, so that's a lot of kids. You are single-handedly, maybe in collaboration with Elon, reversing population decline, yeah.
Well, my wife Taylor and I are very traditional, but love having six kids we're probably done that's probably that's probably enough and uh so but that's that's really that's the most important thing in my life uh we're running our firm we're doing all sorts of new things in ai back and great entrepreneurs there's amazing companies in construction you know trying doing things in bio i think there's a lot of ways we could save a lot of lives with the breakthroughs in bio especially applying it to things that save the cure rare diseases and help young kids there. I think there's a lot of ways we could save a lot of lives with the breakthroughs in bio, especially applying it to things that cure rare diseases and help young kids there.
I think there's a lot of new ways of doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases that right now kill kids very young. And so I think there's tens of thousands of children we could save with stuff there.
So there's a lot of promising things there. And then on the nonprofit side, I have the university, which I'm really passionate about.
We have getting so many amazing young students there and partnering with them on things. And then I have my policy work.
We have teams in 20 States at Cicero and we're just trying to make government smarter and dynamic and less stupid. And I was waiting for you to say less something.
I was waiting for you to say less. I can't help it.
I can't help it. There are good people, but it's just like, just, I'll give you just one example.
Like, let's say we all agree we want middle class, working class people who maybe they're not going to be like the top investor entrepreneur, but they want to have a good job. They want to have a good vocational job with skills.
Like, anyone with the right teaching could get like a high-end vocational job if they're willing to work, right? And some of these jobs pay 100K, 120K, great stuff. And so all these states all have vocational schools.
And the problem is a lot of these vocational schools

are terrible.

And so what do you do?

Well, here's, you know, average politicians like,

let's give them more money.

If there's an idiot guy running it,

it's looking to not do it well.

So how do you help the 100,000 people

coming out of these schools?

Well, here's one.

I'll tell you how you do it.

You say, okay, there's 27 high-end technical

vocational schools in Texas.

We're going to only give them money in proportion

to the salaries of the students coming out.

That's not something they can gain. Take the average salary coming out for three years.
That's interesting. Average salary for three years coming out.
And we're going to rate the schools based on that. And you know what happens when you start giving them all their money tied to that? The school starts saying, wait a second, what skills we need to teach to get our kids better job? Incentives, incentives, look at the incentives.
What businesses we partner with. And I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas, over the last decade, the salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools.
It's a much more direct route to getting universities to do the thing that the customers, students of the universities want. I would wager that 99.9% of students are not going to university to get a degree that sounds interesting and is functionally useless.
Even if the degree is functionally useless, they want that functionally useless degree

to function usefully.

And this is the thing.

So I think vocational schools

are a little different from universities.

Vocational schools is 100% the profession.

There is a theoretical role for moral action

and courage and other frameworks of a university.

But you're right.

One of the things we should be doing

with our government, by the way,

the part of education and our policy thing

is only give loans to students for majors where the major is going to, on average, let them repay the loan. So stop putting people in the debt to get terrible degrees.
That's something we can do right away. So there's things like this we're working on.
We're making huge impacts on prisons, fixing technical schools. What are you fixing in prisons? Well, think about it.
How should probation and parole in prisons work? You need to have some incentives, right? You need to have some framework. Right now, if you're running a prison, a lot of the guards hate the prisoners.
The prisoners hate the guards. Everyone's miserable.
People come out. They're just let go into society.
A lot of them commit crimes again and come right back. And it's a mess.
And there's nothing, there's no incentive to fix it, right? What if you say to the people running probation and parole in prisons that part of your job is rehabilitation, that part of what you're being measured on is can you run this in a way where you're all working to like, to have a culture that like teaches skills, gives them exposure the year before they come out, figures out how to help them as they're coming out and figures out how to make them less likely to come back. Isn't that better than what we have right now? I don't care if you're on the left or the right.
Like if you're on the left, maybe you want to let all the criminals out. If you're on the right, you might want to lock them up too much because whatever, those are both extremes that I don't think, you know, they're both extremes.
Like whether you're left on the right or right, if they are coming out, let's make sure they succeed as best we can. Let's have incentives around that.
Right. There's things like this we could be doing for our society.
And we fix a lot of probation and parole programs to like start having the right incentives. And it usually impacts these communities because you all of a sudden care about people what so i saw do you know dwarkesh patel do you know who he is yeah yeah clever kid um really lovely guy yeah he had this really interesting tweet with regards to ai that i'd love to get your take on and he said if you gave any human one millionth one tenth thousandth of the corpus of information that any AI has ingested, you would have received thousands of new ideas, lots of new novel insights about ways to do things.
I don't know if this is true, but the criticism that he was repurposing was, we haven't seen much new innovation that's necessarily come from AI at the moment. Have you got any insight about whether this is a limitation of LLMs at large, whether it's a processing problem, whether it's a sophistication problem? Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like it has the conceptual structures for solving these types of interesting problems around the things I was just talking about.
These are types of things that if i really had the right intelligence it would be it'd be analyzing them and pushing them forward and taking my ideas maybe it's like the chinese and i can make them even better you know it's like but like you know it's not you're right it's not doing that yeah i guess you could say in certain mathematical situations it is doing that i think i think when you see some of the contests where it's actually solving math problems it even oh like unsolved theorems and shit like there's stuff like that where i think there's some things that it's doing new methods and like you know what the great example was the very famous go game right where it like played that leak type of move that was like move 37 and it was like everyone studied and like wow i never thought of that before and it was like really really cool that it figured it out so there are some constrained areas we're seeing that but i think reality is too unconstrained it's not it's not good enough yet to to to build the conceptual structures to do that can it do that the next five or ten years very possibly but but you're right it's not yet what would you for a muggle like me uh everybody else that's listening what should we expect do you think from ai over the next half decade? You know, it's really interesting. I have to admit is that, you know, some of my friends were involved in building open AI.
Some guys worked at Palantir Rookie there and I was watching them a little bit. I wasn't that focused on it and I thought it was pretty interesting, but I just, I didn't realize the breakthrough they were going to have.
So I have to admit, I would have loved to say I'm so smart that I knew this was coming. I didn't realize the emergent properties that would come out of gpt3 you know at that point once it happens that happened you can kind of predict gpt4 and 5.
you know it seems like it keeps getting better which is scary it's good for the world in some ways for productivity and other things but it's i don't know where you know i don't know where it asymptotes i don't know where it starts to stop getting better my intuition intuition is that it's going to asymptote and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion. I don't think for the things we were just talking about that it's like fully understood all the properties of intelligence necessary to, to do what we do.
And I think it's fundamentally a different type of intelligence. It's a difference of kind, not a difference of degree.
That's my intuition. But listen, I have people who are, I know who are geniuses who disagree with me so so this is and because i didn't predict this in the first place i was gonna say you've been wrong and ignorant before around ai so maybe exactly so it's hard it's hard for me to really know i what i do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars of industries already today we can make twice or three times as productive because that's where kind of i'm working so i'm like i'm like if you're a muggle i'm like maybe like maybe like a mid-level wizard and there is a top-level wizards who are actually pushing forward AI and I'm taking it and understand it quite well and understand how build quite well and I'm deploying it to add productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it but I'm not the guy who's like who's like pushing for the LM itself sadly that's not who I am I am.
Damn right. Joe Lonsdale, ladies and gentlemen.

Joe, you're awesome.

I really appreciate you, man.

This is fascinating.

So much cool stuff to go through.

Why should people check out

whatever it is that you've got going on?

Well, thanks for having me on.

You know, we have an American Optimist podcast myself.

You joined us.

And yeah, I'm just trying to learn

to follow in your footsteps here.

And you know, we got UATX.

We got a lot of amazing students

still applying and going there.

This is the second class. And you know, we'd love to hear from people.
Heck yeah. Joe, I appreciate you.
Thank you, man. Thank you.
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