#934 - Joe Lonsdale - How To Win The War Of The Future
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You mentioned you'd just been with Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. He talks about non-fungible people, like N of 1s. Mike Israetel, good non-fungible person. Yes. Who are some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across your career? I mean, of course, you know, you have to go with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life.

my original chess teacher, Richard Shorman. 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 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, 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...

And he was just someone who I thought was just a fascinating intellectual character at the time. And honestly, what it was also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been interested in is what are the most interesting, brightest, harsh working people doing. And a lot of the smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal. And these are people I was really impressed by. So I said, wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want to learn from them too. And I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and who they are today and that all these companies would come out of it, like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and 16 others. But I did know it was a lot of the brightest people and I wanted to learn from them. And I had a very strong interest not only in computer science, but in economics and history and philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet through the Stanford review, I think you got along intellectually. Yeah.

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. Everyone

Everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes. Well, it's interesting because you said earlier, I'm not going to say who you're saying it about, but anyone who is the one guy we both know who's done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional and that's really impressive, right? It's extreme. And so similarly, when you get people who are really, really bright, like really off the charts, minds working great, most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world. Crazy means lots of things, but not able to keep themselves functional in the real world because they're just...

too off the charts and a little, you know, too wacky. Maybe it's like extreme autism. Maybe it's something else. But when you have people who are just off the charts and able to function in the real world, it's actually a pretty small subset. And 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

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. You know, I think no value judgment. Everyone can have different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things. And to me, to do the things that impact people

the future of civilization to build the stuff that's really hard to build, whether it's SpaceX or Palantir, which kind of broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare education. Those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization. So that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things. Right. So you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have...

those people skills skill sets you might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads right the tech lead or whatever it might be but uh

And I guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking Congress or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself. And if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not going to look right. Well, maybe I'm a little off and stuff, you know, too, but I think I can at least still talk to the people, understand the systems, work with them. There are some people, we call them artists in our company. Alex Karp, my co-founder of Palantir, I always refer to them as artists who are just adept

absolute geniuses. You kind of have to protect them and put up with them, right? So it's like when you're running a military brigade and you have an operation, you might have a drill sergeant where you yell at them and you have to do this and do the push-ups and run and do this and get this done by this time. And that's not at all how you deal with these super genius, slightly different technical people. Maybe some days they're 100 times more productive and some days they're just

you know, they're working on something weird and they don't want to come into the office and you just, whatever, you kind of have to tolerate it a little bit. And you have to protect them because most big corporations, they will spit these people out, right? A big corporation, standard corporation, they want you to fit in a box. Those artists will come in, they won't fit, they'll be gone. And it's stupid because you're getting rid of someone who could have made you win in this whole category if you just could figure out how to morph the org around them and use them. So we definitely do work with these people, but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the organization. Right. What do you learn from your time with PETA? 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. You know, I wrote this book

piece online a while ago, like it's my team about 15 years ago. It's like main lessons from Peter Thiel. So I won't repeat all of them here, but there were nine key lessons. I think one of them was to really value intelligence really highly. I think that was absolutely key. And so it just turns out the very brightest people matter a lot. One of them was you have to break down like their actual reasons for things and their core components. And usually the number one reason

should be like much bigger than everything else. So if you tell me I have four reasons for doing this business thing, that means you haven't really thought about it enough. There's probably like one thing that's dominant. Those were really big. One thing that you always talked about was that, uh,

effort on any project is convex and what convex means it's a shape of a curve where if you spend like 80% of your time focused on something that's maybe half as good as spending 90% of your time focused on something because that was that last bit of effort and like it's 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 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 that's Palantir, whether that'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 and, 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 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's actually kind of like a form of

It's a type of cowardice. It's a type of saying, 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, uh,

it's not that it's great not to have money in our society. I can't, I can't speak to that. Obviously it's not, not great, but come on. Like we're, it's not, it's not like 3000 years ago where you might just get, you might just die if you don't succeed. So I think, I think there is enough of a safety net. And this is why 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, you know, to take the risk they should be. What about obsessing over perfection? Something else that

I think Pete is very big on. 100%. That really ties into the 99.9% tile 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. It was about inflation versus deflation and the risks for both of those. And 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. He's our age and very successful guy in the background. And we were just like going back and forth with him and a few others, just like working hard and then 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 you push as hard as possible, which if something was wrong, it's totally unacceptable. How do you avoid that from holding you back?

because perfectionism can be 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 but we weren't going to be able to work on it for five weeks right so i think i think there is something about about really making things as strong as possible but but sprinting and having really tight deadlines and getting it done right away i think i think if you use perfection as procrastination then it becomes a problem

Yeah. Well, I'm still interested in this sense of not getting distracted and trying to keep the main thing the main thing, especially if your main thing becomes a varied thing, right? Like built into a lot of people's lives, especially as they end up getting to the kind of place that they want to, is where you don't have to do things you don't want to do that much anymore. No one tells you what to do. So you end up in a world where you think, well,

I get to choose, but with that comes a lot of responsibility because I have to choose now, as opposed to before where I just sat on the set of train tracks. It's got, do I want to go left? Do I want to go right? The same for yourself. Do I want to invest in it? Or should I sit down and spend six months working on a thesis? What about the skill set of learning to sort of let go of what was there, of how you operated previously, the sort of courage to

to do something new, even as you've got something that's given you success in the past. No, that's totally right. You do have to constantly keep adjusting for what makes sense today. And 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. Because all of a sudden, you could just have things you were really excited about before 10 times a day. And I do fall into this myself sometimes because there's lots of really exciting things to do. So it's 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. Cause what, what, what, what like to do means is,

to me anyway, is that it's like stimulating your entire brain, right? So if you look at like a grandmaster chess player and the very best chess players, when you map out their brains, when they're playing, there's all these emotions that are turned on. There's all these full parts of their brains that are turned on and it lets them be a lot better at what they're doing. And I think this is true in anything we do. If you really love it,

then your whole mind is engaged and you're just able to bring like this, this power to bear on things that if it's something you don't really like, you're probably never going to have that top top ability there. You know, it's almost matching up with what you said about being sort of the 99th percentile within an industry where,

accumulating the 99% of your brain power onto this. 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 that you're not as good at that you don't love.

Joe Hudson, who has just become the head of human performance at OpenAI. He's like kind of an underground hero coach type person. I'm aware that coach has got a lot of icky associations with it, but this guy's fucking legit. Really, really great. And he says, enjoyment is efficiency. And that's kind of,

I think referencing what you're talking about here, which is if you absolutely love something, it takes fewer inputs to get more outputs. 100%. You can get into the flow. You could just be great if you love it. And so 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 going 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 the debate I was having with

Peter Thiel earlier about stuff. He tells me I'm too naively optimistic and he's like, you want to be kind of optimistic in general, but you don't want to be, you don't want to be like overly so. And, you know, in general, I think it's easier to be pessimistic and cynical. I think it's like an easier thing to be. I think 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 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, uh, endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about, uh, Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic. Oh, very cool. I know. It's the best, I think the best retelling of that. And, um,

It's really interesting because all of the guys had their own individual journals or diaries that they were writing in. And what you hear from everybody else except for Shackleton is what Shackleton's saying. But what you read in Shackleton's diary is what Shackleton was thinking. And it's this really interesting dichotomy between what he wrote

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, um,

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, huh, there are prices that leaders pay

that nobody else pays and that you can't share the burden of. And everybody has main character energy in their own life, right? Everybody is the lead star. They're the front man, woman of their own existence. And I think that a lot of the time we want to port that across onto the teams that we work in, the organizations that we're a part of. You go, 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 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, yes. The company, what's going on and, you know,

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. Temperature plays a huge role in how well you sleep, but traditional bedding often falls short. Just add the brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. Plus, it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time and your sleep phases and your HRV and your snoring and your heart rate with 99%.

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Right now, you can get $350 off the brand new Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. 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 man, it's just...

there's all sorts of different versions of this. I think one of the most common challenges is the hardest to diagnose because they don't come to you is this like excess, is excess pride and like not, and 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 this like

I think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges is like this overinflated ego and sense of, it's like a, I think all of us who are entrepreneurs have some narcissism. I think that's like a natural thing, but when it gets to a real extreme, that's really dangerous. And you stop questioning and you, and you stop admitting when things are not going quite right. Cause you can paper over it with the money you raise. So 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 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 it's not quite working and then you got to convince them to stay a little bit longer. I mean, you have to like find that like belief in yourself to push to those other people, right? To get it over the line. You're shackling coming out and saying, we know this is the direction. Don't worry, don't fear. I mean, at 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.

this is just ridiculous. We're pretending we're like these kids who are going to like run the global intelligence, you know, framework, like what is even going on here? I can't do this anymore. I have all these other offers to pay me a lot more money. And, you know, these shares are not clear they're worth anything. And it was like really hard to convince them to stay. And then when they did, of course, it worked. And then they're, you know, I think a couple of them are still running their company there now, which is great. So it's like these things that are really hard to push across the line sometimes. How do you advise people

uh, the guys that need to keep their feet on the ground? Did 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 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 they're like,

cuts the pride down a little bit. So sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle having been there myself and been sure I could conquer the world. Especially in your early 20s and late 20s you get this energy that's just like, nothing can stop me. And that's like, it's both healthy but also has to be really careful how it's filtered. Speaking of mentors,

University of Boston. Yeah. Our new place of residence. What motivated you to co-found that? Well, we thought it'd be great to have a world-class university here. There's no top private university in Austin. We wanted to compete with Stanford, Harvard, MIT, these others. We think there's some things that are still good about those universities, but there's a lot that's gone wrong. There's a lot that's broken. I'm 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 in its elite that's like, has a sense of duty, and that has a sense of excellence. And it's like, it's clear where they're going when they're there.

And I think we taught just implicitly in our civilization, we taught courage, right? We taught pride in our civilization and the duty we have that we've built this upon hundreds of years of progress from the Enlightenment and from our classical values. And here's what the classical values were and the virtues in Rome. And here's what the geochristian wisdom was. And here's all stuff that came from that. And this is all stuff you kind of built the great men of our civilization with these values. And nowadays,

you go to a top university and there's no sense of duty, there's no sense of pride in civilization. I think most of these kids couldn't even tell you what the classical virtues are anymore or have any idea about why they were important. Most of them, if anything, probably are dismissive of wisdom from Judeo-Christianity as opposed to appreciating how that shaped our civilization in positive ways with a radically equal dignity of human life.

And most of them, they've lost the lessons of the Enlightenment and how that was filtered into our government and what that means for the West and why America has been an example. If anything, I think we're taught about why America is terrible. 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, you know, I think even having one university that starts to teach the wisdom, but try to create people who speak up, who debate, who have the intellectual humility not to say, this is just my way of thinking of it, but to have actual debates where they listen and they learn and to go out in the world and to model that culture and model that courage for others, that's a really big deal for our civilization. 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 good at these certain narrow fields and that's positive. But

I think there's like so much that's gone wrong with science. So much has gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology that there's just, there's this. And you know, the other thing that's crazy, the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average. So you have more administrators at Harvard and Yale than you have students. No way. Yeah. It's crazy. It's like, you think it's fake. What are they doing?

And 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 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'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 the 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's the right word, but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions, right? As the famous communist 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 their activists. And so, and these activists have conquered these institutions. It's not like

it's this, 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 going to, they're going to, so they're not going to, they're not going to, but, but are they going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they going to like all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up to someone else? No way. So, so, so there's a lot of naivety in our culture just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves are

were fixed, right? And these things are still completely conquered. And I think people are, they think of it the wrong way. They're like, oh, well, it'll probably just fix itself. Like, no, these people are in charge. The layer of administrators are in charge. The professors run their departments. The lawyers at the university set the rules. And then the board of trustees has been completely stacked with people who are either terrified of being controversial in public or on the side of the administrators. And so there's none of them are going to get fixed, which is why you got to build new ones. I mean, this is, that's fine. You know what? These are somewhat broken. It's sad. Let's build new ones.

You know, let's, let's, 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 doesn't mean I know it is. It's gay. It's we're so back. So I asked to buy Miriam Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year. Cause 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 going to have. I'm going to have to outsource it here. What's Sullivan's law?

There's conquest law and there's Harding's law, which is all. Yeah, that's all. And there's different ways of putting 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 uatex is not to be a partisan institution and by the way it'd be a failure if it was a right-wing institution in the sense that there weren't i mean you want to have the smartest and best people there you want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with professors right it's not a healthy intellectual environment if if

Only one's lie 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 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 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 force. So those are the types of things you say, we're not going to let those conquer our institution. We're going to be explicit about it. But it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views. So what are the...

Other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you're trying to fix? 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 humanities side. So we have what's called intellectual foundations on one side where we think...

every top college student going to a top university should be given the intellectual foundations of our civilization with history and economics and philosophy and the great books and just have that foundation, 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 100 friends who are founders of billion dollar companies who signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare.

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 can 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 debates, there's actually deep truth on both sides. So if you want to apply it to the innovation world, I always love the dialectic in the product organization where on one hand you have like Steve Jobs or you have like the guy around Sodi in the 80s.

Steve Jobs basically said, I don't care what the consumers tell me they want. I'm going to figure out what's best and 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 what to ask for a car. Right. So, you know, they would have asked 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

which is that once you have a product, there's like a hundred things that consumers want that bug them, especially in enterprise. There's like ways they're not able to use it for some reasons. They have like product needs. So you need someone like 14 hours a day, like mapping out all these needs and understanding them or prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it. So it's as good as possible. So how do you, you know, if you only have the Steve Jobs 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. But then if you have these guys over here iterating, taking over, then you never get the next burst of genius. And it's really terrible. So how do you keep that genius? Like I'm going to tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing. And I'm 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? You have to know they're both important, and then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to 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. Say more. It's like you want to have...

you want to have like the really crisp reasoning of like just pure invention with like nothing interfering. And you want to have the really crisp reasoning of iteration, you know, and pushing it back. So, so, so in, in, in, in general, um,

you know, I'll give it like there's other one. There's the whole Nietzschean, there's a whole Nietzschean perspective versus the Judeo-Christian perspective. And so, you know, my dad's Catholic, my mom's Jewish, I grew up Jewish. And yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole Nietzsche framework because a 14 year old, I thought it was really cool. I know if you've read Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power and all this stuff. And if you get too into it, and the one thing he talks about

is how the world's mostly driven forward by like the top 1% of like talented people in Ubermensch. And they're the ones that kind of build the future and that they're the ones that matter in a sense of what the future is going to look like because they're creating it. And there's lots of truth that the very, very most successful people and most talented people, Thomas Jefferson called them the natural aristocracy. They do run things and drive things forward. And that's really key. Now, if you only have that side of the dialectic, it's really dangerous. It turns out

By the way, Hitler was very obsessed with that too. And that's dangerous, right? And so what's the other side? Well,

One of the great insights of Judaism that became a great insight of Judeo-Christianity is the 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 pretty nasty stuff. And a big breakthrough with Christianity, with Judaism, 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 geochristian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone. 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 gift to 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 it but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either you got to help both it's like a you right so there's things like this that i think if you understand okay there is a dialectic these both matter how are we going to keep both of these in mind as people running a society as leaders in society it becomes a helpful framework to understand

And is the middle where you go to die? Yeah. Exactly. You don't want, it's just sloppy thinking. We're going to, you know, you don't want sloppy thinking. You actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive and it's right thing to do. It's an,

an ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and that we're investing a lot more in them. But you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years from now if you're not also accelerating the very top very aggressively, which is something we've stopped doing in a lot of parts of our country because these really brightest kids, by being able to

pick them out and then push them further ahead, they do create the future and giving them an edge. It's not that it's, it's not that it's inequity. It's that we, I want there to be like an, like a hundred thousand extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future. They're going to cure diseases. When I'm an old man, they're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone. Right? So it's like, it's like you kind of want both.

Yeah, I suppose you need to be, the product needs to be as good as it can be. It needs to be perfect. You need to obsess over perfection and quality. And also you need to ship at a rate that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and start to learn. That's a great dialectic. Like how do you do perfection and how do you do not procrastinating and taking too long? And it's tough. Dialectics are hard because there's no perfect answer, but you have to play with both extremes. Yeah, 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 a cone, I guess, in Japanese wisdom, right? There's always different, there's two different sides of it. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's

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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 there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate. Well,

What else? What are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life? I should have re-read my piece online before I came here. This is a tough one. What are some of... You know, I apologize. Nothing right away is coming to mind. I read this long piece about this like 12 years ago. No, no, no. Well, there might be something that pops up in a bit. Anyway, AI in education. So the party that we were both at during South by Southwest, we went to that big dinner party. And I was sat next to...

This fascinating guy, and he was giving this, what might as well have been a 90-minute long fucking TED Talk. It's probably Joe Lamont. Correct. Um...

I was keeping it, I was keeping it, uh, keeping it quite bad. I mean, you're, you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want. Um, 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, I shouldn't, I shouldn't talk about it. No, he likes it. I mean, it was a, it was a fucking dinner party, but me and the sort of four people that were within earshot before the next, uh,

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, uh,

the app and personalize the learning where you can map out like an ontology or a schema of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area. You can, and you can have something interacting with them. You could see where they're good and where they're not good. And a lot of times what happens, for example, is a kid will get like way behind in one area. They're like two grades behind and they never get caught up because they never, no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills. But if you have an app that's really good at like measuring and teaching, then it turns out with two hours a day, you're actually able to get kids way

way, way ahead. And I think you can get the majority of the kids, you know, in alpha school, for example, I think are a 99 percentile. And some of them are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead with this personalized AI learning that teaches, you know, to how they need to learn and to what they need to know. And 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 Fortnite, I think. He's doing some really cool things with that. 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 at 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 awesome to see a successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this 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 education and is helping you to... 100%. 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 I think the alpha school model is built on top of what's called the Acton school model and an 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 it's a very cool kind of libertarian model for the inmates are running the asylum. That's awesome. And it creates this like responsibility. And it's just, it works. It works if it's done right. You still have guys and adults there, but it works. And then, and then I think on top of that, he's put like competitions, he's put like really good AI and listen, it's just like a 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 policy

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 1200 school districts and they're not accountable and they're overpaid. And it's just like in terms of these administrators and stuff. And I don't even know what they're doing. It's just, it's just the whole thing. It's just like very sloppy. And there's a big war right now for school choice in Texas, but we're only fighting over putting $1 billion towards school choice, which is not big enough anyway. So it's like, hopefully we can make that a lot bigger next time and just

get a lot more parents able to send their kids. 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, 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 and and interesting professors and having an intellectual environment where you're where you're socializing with and you're and you're exploring ideas with with other people and and i think it's like it's really important to have this in-person experience i think that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing and so i think i think i think that's not going to be something you just have with ai it's it's not you know 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's skills for the most part. I was in the dorky fraternity at Stanford. I have friends who were 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 American Studies or something. I have some bad stories. We figured it out, actually. Yeah.

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 or 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

but are born out from water cooler talk and, and from being, 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, like that's Oxford, that's Cambridge, it's Harvard, it's Stanford. And these places now are more broken than they were, but, but there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs and,

whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of, you know, group or whatever. I think, I think having these, these things in your life are tough. So I think, I think what Jordan, Jordan's is really talented guy. I'm a fan of his. I think he's going to have something. It'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. Yeah.

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 I'm advising people on the DOD and HHS, which is the healthcare part with all these different areas. And I'm helping friends in Doge. And I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on. And tariffs are a very complicated topic. So the kind of typical...

libertarian framework is just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage, right? And you have people 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 like,

completely correct is there's a lot of like really unfair barriers everyone's put up against US companies all over the world and it's not just tariffs right so tariffs is one problem but the other problem is they just make all sorts of crazy rules that effectively mean no one other than their companies could sell in certain sectors and every country does this 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 their grown or or the cars have to have like all these exact specifications and it's designed specifically ahead of time where someone whispers it to all their companies and they no one else passes the test other than them or but there's all there's always like different ways you can kind of 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, uh,

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 is 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, 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 so these people have taken advantage of us around the world. China has definitely not become free. It's definitely stolen away a lot of our manufacturing base. And so what are the tariffs that are going to give you a few examples? One tariff is definitely good. Let's say it's cheaper to manufacture something in like Indonesia or China because they're polluting and because the pollution to not pollute costs a lot of money. So that's obvious. First, tariff that right away, right? Because you don't want to just let them pollute, right? 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 to be able to win 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.

free trade and she opened it up to the eu and in 1989 she said it was one of her biggest mistakes she ever made because what she didn't realize is that when she opened up uk to the eu market they basically put brussels as a bureaucracy in charge of everything which was terrible it's a total mess and so so you gotta be very careful what you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge effectively now of your rules you give up sovereignty so that's a reason it's bad and then and then i mean finally and this is where it gets like everyone really argues

But like in general, I don't think small consumption taxes are bad. I think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes. So I think a small one probably makes sense. So, I mean, so listen, there's, and there's, and then, and then I guess the very last one, of course, is yes, we went from 30% manufacturing to 10%, you know, over the last 30 years. Should all of that be in the U.S.? Probably not. Some of those jobs are just not things we want.

Should more of it probably be in the US for more of what we do? Probably. So 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 things back here. So 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 a center of attention and have to have everyone come to him. So I think making the, the, maybe my personality would not have been to do as quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, ah, 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, there's different ways of doing things. And, and this is, this is who this guy is. And, you know, if he makes some great deals over the next few months, it could, it could actually end up being a great thing. So, so I, I, I think you have to say that there's, there's logic in what,

J.D. Vance and President Trump think they're doing. And the jury's still out, is my view. How important is this to U.S.-led global order continuing, stuff like that?

Well, they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which we're engaging. America has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world. And that way we've been subsidizing it, they would argue, has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of capital and are able to invest here and around the world and partner, has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that have got hollowed out. And I think

I think they want to change those dynamics a bit. Like I am concerned to have America still be a very important, powerful force to the world for good. I don't like the fact that even today, thanks to the Biden administration's actions, if you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough to like enforce like freedom of navigation on the Red Sea. Like if you look at a graph, like a Flexport graph, you can get, you know, it's just a company that,

tracks all these containers. It's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world order started to break down because of how we're handling things. So there are things like that that aren't good and I think we should be stronger on them. But there is going to be a changing relationship for sure. Let's...

think about the intersection between two of your worlds, one being maintaining some US-led global dominance and the other one being war and sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us over here, I guess just because there's two really fucking big oceans on either side. What 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. This is a regime that was actively promoting lots of different terror organizations. We now find it in comparable evidence that they funded the October 7th attacks and rapes and murders. They've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about. Oh, that's the...

That's there. 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, the Persian people, others. And they're the most talented people in our companies. There's some amazing people. And what's really interesting is like the Iranian people themselves love America and even love Jews and Israel. But the people, it's like this country was,

conquered it was communists and islamists together and then the islamists and then islamists killed off the communists and they just took charge and this is like it's like a modern day country conquered by like crazy theocrats right who then like whip people and like execute 16 year old girls for being raped because it's your fault if you're raped under islamism and the whole thing is just like crazy you can't you can't make it up it's like these are insane people who've conquered a country and taking the money and sending it out to terrorists and

And we're at a really interesting point now where we've basically cut off some of their most powerful, like, like crazy terror people. And then there's these people in the country who desperately want to be free. So for me, and yet they're working as hard as they can to getting a nuclear bomb. And so for me, this is very scary. And they walk over American flags every day at their government, they walk over, you know, and so they talk about death to America. They're trying to build a nuclear bomb. I think these people truly are crazy. And I think that's, to me, that's a really big danger and we could end it for a long time. So I'm hoping we do. That's, that's that in terms of,

In terms of overblown, I actually, listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts in Africa. I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa by Islamists. That's a separate problem, but also one I, maybe there's something to do about. I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time. Obviously, we're all very worried about China.

the Russia-Ukraine thing is 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. A quick note, I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body.

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look like on the ground? I'm hearing all manner of different stories about, you know, it's just going to be 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 for the government. I built companies in other areas. And then I went back into defense and

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 starting 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 Luckey, who we backed at Oculus before, he partnered with three Palantir guys to form Andral, which is a very...

famous company now she raised at 30 billion plus valuation uh 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 both of these which i did for arrows but it's the best emp company so we could shoot down like

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 and we're teaching the Navy how to use AI to weaponize autonomous vessels. And then you have things under the water that are new. You have things in space that are fighting. And so you have all these new possibilities, new missiles, new ways of turning off bad guys. And it all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.

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 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, 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. 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 it totally changes the form of government.

And, and, and there's, and it's, it's like you have had a warfare change a lot over the years and you, you have this concept is interesting to me is defensive versus offensive warfare. So, so the question is what's better. So it used to be defense was much easier. It's really hard to take a town. Right. When the Ottoman empire at its height,

Even by the 17th century, 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 then of course the cannon becomes stronger and all of a sudden with the cannon, it's just much easier to build just like massive empires all over Europe.

And I think right now we're going through interesting change where I do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before, thanks to EMP, thanks to the way swarms can cover short distances and kind of block things. And so I do think this does favor asymmetrically defense.

city states in small countries, once again, to be very, very powerful. For the cost of one aircraft carrier, you could have 100,000 missiles in space that can land on anything effectively with these rods. So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard to

uh, to, to break through defenses. And I hope that's where it goes. Cause in some sense it used to be at all these free city states are all around Europe. That was a good thing. And then you had to kind of jerks build the umpires and like take away their rights. And maybe we can have like small states to get with. Cause 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, so as I hope that's where things are going is a 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, four decades or so. What was it that were the innovations that we're now trying to push back against? Oh gosh, this is all sorts of these things in different ways. You know,

it's it's i mean i i mean i mean there's all this like smart bombs i think were like the big thing for the desert storm that we hadn't had before 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 song of sands army in a way that was just it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air and and and you know i think i think the new thing today that we're seeing in ukraine of course is that is

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 swarm. And it's just really, really, really hard to beat. And so 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 gonna 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 a million dollars to shoot down something that's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars

And yeah, so if you can get, it turns out that you want to have all the power hit the gallium nitride, the emitter at about the same time. So you have these AI chips that control power on very small time scales and you get all the power, hit the gallium nitride at once, which means it's much better. Gallium nitride is an emissive material. It's the most efficient emissive material for like, for like sitting out like a real, like a 10,000th of a second burst of microwave radiation. And if you do it with enough power, the microwave radiation is so strong that it can like even turn things off, you know,

miles away depending how you do it. And so basically you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming in. It's like a Star Trek shield and you turn them off. That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean I've had a bunch of conversations Eric Prince was on and he 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

There's 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 start netting up, the...

drones have like sharp things on them that can cut through netting and you i'm not i'm not bullish i'm not bullish tanks five years from now because there's too many things coming at them and we can try to put efforts on the tanks we could defend some of them you know you know we have a company called overland ai and they want 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 going to start building larger ones too. And having them swarm for the Navy that are, you know, armed and autonomous, we want to build thousands of overland vehicles. And it's really interesting doing these things because when you spec out the vehicle, the traditional defense solution is like, it needs to have these 37 capabilities, needs to have this armor, 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.

So it becomes this fascinating problem where this is a really important point in warfare. Warfare has this engineering aspect to it. 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 never fall down just as much, right? That's, it's a similar thing in warfare. You always have scarcity. So it's not, it's not about what are all the really cool specs on your jet or on your tank or whatever. It's okay. If you're going to spend a certain amount of resources, I'm going to spend a certain amount of resources that we're going to, we're going to fight. Let's, let's do something that just overwhelms. Even the tank has better in all these ways.

I have, you know, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just going to swarm you and crush you and keep going. Right. So there's things like this now where it's, it's all, and this is why advanced manufacturing, going back to the tariffs is so important to be good at. Cause if we're not good at that here and the other guys are good at it, that's, that's scary. What is the likelihood that in five or 10 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 goes towards a special forces model. So 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 terrible. I don't want to be that guy. This is like the really sad thing in World War I where like the British aristocrats have been treated like crap for 30 years. And if 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 that they'd get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their side 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 complimenting them. You probably have them calling in airstrikes, calling in drone strikes, like figuring out what's going on, using the tools. But you are going to want people on the battlefield or near the battlefield. They're just going to be like using a lot of stuff around them. But you're probably still going to want them there for quite a long time is my view.

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 in, 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 a hundred thousand of these in space. That could, I don't know what the ratio is. It could go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier. At some point, it's just like obvious how you want to be spending that money. Hmm.

It's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers. In many cases. Some degree of intermediary, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles takes off from, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles, whether it's the missile itself. It's a huge part of it. I mean, when we do these Saronic 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-

Helps some of the amazing talented guys start. Dino Maroukas is a Navy sailor who started 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 foot or mostly unmanned, but maybe you make people go on if they want, that lets you shoot things that take 80 foot of ship to fire. Otherwise you couldn't fire from 24 feet. So, so yeah, it does become like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels. What's the world of, uh,

autonomous submarines looking like that to me seems like the most obvious place to and again it's about 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, Andral, which again, I'm a big investor in with Palmer and my friends are running. They have a facility in Rhode Island that's pumping out a couple hundred of these a year. And there's these very advanced submarines. They've also just, I think last week, introduced these new underwater sentries that can 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 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 bottom of the water, then based on the gravimetric distortions, you can detect whales, you can detect all sorts of other things moving around. So I always wonder like how advanced is China in this area? How advanced are we in these areas? It's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear triad too easily right now. Oh, yeah. Well, I wonder...

I kind of have this sense in my mind of people not wanting to show their hand and people, different nations, understanding that if you almost have this trade-off. In fact, this actually happened, I think, in World War II. Once the Enigma code had been cracked, there was a...

value judgment that needed to be made, we know that they are going to try and attack these three ships. But if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked, they're going to know that something's up. So you're tolerating how much of this do we decide to use? How much do we show of our knowledge? And I kind of get the sense when it'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 there and there are certain things we work on even at some of these companies i mentioned that they aren't putting into ukraine for example because they don't want russia and china to learn about them and learn how to respond to them which is not my judgment by the way i'm not i'm not in charge so okay we're doing more defend ukraine whatever i'm palatine and andrew are doing a lot but it's not up to me we have leaders and they these are the technologies that are available you choose which ones you're going and they're going to be rational by the decision 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 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 triad and the different ways you can respond 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've found a way to...

They could stop it and then they could strike and then they could 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 vacuum of information, the uncertainty, is it a Terran 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 healthcare and other areas. And I work in defense to deter the bad guys and to have the mixture that we have the best technology there. So they're afraid to fight us. I don't want there to be lots of war. Like I said, I do think freeing the Iranian people is a good thing, but in general, no.

I don't think what we did in Afghanistan for that so long was right. I think we've wasted a lot of money on crazy adventures. In general, I want less war is my bias. That's the goal with the better technology. Yeah, just a very big, very smart deterrent. Traveling should be about...

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They'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount of everything from Nomadic by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. And they ship internationally. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. What you sort of identified before the primes, is that like the Raytheons and so on? Yeah, Lockheed North. And by the way, there's good people at these places in some departments. There's some great things they do. There's some things where it's, I think, crony and corrupt and broken too. Mm-hmm.

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 succeeded 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 destroying records. They were people ordering not to tell people that something was better because they were 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...

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 $2 billion of revenue of like, you know, a couple, a few hundred billion in the same areas. And it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus. And so they're- But that was cost plus. That means you get, say you go and you say, I spent $2 billion

$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 for the, so that your profit's 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 built this for 50 years. And so you have things where Palantir or Andral as an example will come in and do something at like a 10th the cost better. It's just like,

Crazy. It sounds like I'm lying. They do something like they'll have a drone versus Lockheed and their thing will be literally a 10th of cost to make. And it'll have like, you know, 60% more battery life. It'll be like twice as fast. It'll carry 50% more weight. And then it'll literally be like a tiny fraction of the cost. And still you'll lose it first because Lockheed or whoever it was, Raytheon does this really well is they'll write the request for proposal with like a 300 page document specifying all these requirements that no one actually needs, but that actually make it so it has to be their solution.

And so this is the same game. This is the same as the, uh, foreign country that says the, uh,

Exactly. The headlights need to be this height from the ground and blah, blah. So the same game being played by Germany and even Israel and other countries with their internal trade barriers against outsiders that everyone plays 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 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 was...

If there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, okay, this has been a nice lap for a while. The pantomime is fucking over. All right. Like it's time for us to. 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, the British Navy and get rid of all the old fuddy duddies. He was super unpopular, right? He was 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 he's,

by virtue of having to fight the bureaucracy 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 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. Is...

What's your opinion around the sort of great men of history in the modern world now? Is that something that can still exist or the bureaucracies and the red tape and the complexity? It's even more important now. Of course, come on. It's even more important now. Here's the thing. This is a dialectic. Again, if you're going to go back, you wanted another. The dialectic is there's two things that are true. We have this like inexorably powerful system that pushes history and pushes things in certain directions. It's really hard to overcome the system. You can't just be a great man and just walk up to the system and like,

Slice it all in half. That's not how it works. You're not just like, I exist outside of history. No, the way great men work of history is you understand the system deeply. And the way, you know, Peter Thiel I was talking to earlier today talked about it is you see there's this big wave coming and you get in front of the wave and you surf it and you use it to cut through and fix things and you use it to build things and you use it to do things because you're working with the system in the direction of it. But then, but then like fundamentally,

Breaking through the bureaucracy, breaking through this other area, inspiring people with a better solution. 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 and who do like change things and make things possible. And thank God we have Elon Musk and SpaceX. It's just one example. Like America would be screwed from a defense perspective and from other perspectives. Oh yeah. Why?

I mean, space is just absolutely critical to everything we're doing and knowing what's going on in the world and projecting power. And it's just, I make certain things you can't talk about with space warfare, but you can imagine it's just critical. We now dominate that globally and there's no way we'd be way behind. We'd have nothing. 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 land and they haven't figured it out yet, but they're trying. Are they trying 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-landing without the chopstick. The chopstick's for the really heavy big one. So they're still back. They haven't got Falcon figured out yet, but they're trying. And then the biggest starship, they're not even close. But listen, I mean, the Chinese are really good at copying stuff. It's actually extraordinary he's that far ahead of them. There's some really smart people there. So it's just the fact that we're this far ahead, that's just an amazing fact. It's when you think about

intellectual property. And this was one of the things that Trump's been bringing up with regards to tariffs, right? That it's not just the difficulty in getting products there. It's the replication and the copying of our products over there, which means we don't even need to ship them. 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 do? They got some team of

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 their smartest people being forced to

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 got to the point where it's really good for what they needed and

And then DeepSeat came out. This is when China had their own AI that they trained. And they said, oh, it's interesting. Let's measure it. And they measured it in the six different areas. And it was exactly the same scores as OpenAI from four months ago. And this is something they 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 SpaceX, when it comes to Raptor engines, when it comes to Falcon 9 heavy rocket stability, all of the belly flop maneuver, all of this shit, that's

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 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 rockets that can get stuff into space cheap. It's really funny at Palantir, not funny, but serious too, obviously, because we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and tracking all these things. And I remember when I was still there a long time ago, there was a PhD student who was Chinese-

who'd been friends with some of the people at our company, and they caught him in the server room with inserting and stealing data, 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. Well, yeah.

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. Yeah.

Which is just funny, though, because we couldn't hire people who were born in China. And of course they sued us for that. But DOD agreed with us, but Labor Party 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 lot of sort of military age Chinese men coming across the southern border? I think what that was, I'll tell you what I think that was. And this is speculation, but I've talked to a bunch of people. There actually were a lot of kind of Chinese mafia operating in Shenzhen, which is like a

area that had a lot of this historically and it's a very powerful 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 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 US and across the border because they weren't safe in China anymore so they came here oh right okay imagine that imagine being the Chinese government and

And thinking, fantastic, we've actually finally got a turn of military age. 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, the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for SpaceX at Bill Perkins' house last year during the Eclipse party. And I was just listening. It's similar to your friend that was giving the soliloquy about artificial education. And he was just explaining. It was such a fucking inspiring story that I think he'd been at...

a very big space company previously and had moved to SpaceX. And he basically bet his entire career on this belly flop maneuver. The fact that if you have any vehicle coming in from space, you wanted to try and accumulate as much air friction as possible. And if you've got a tube, there's not much air friction to play with in the first place. So you try and put it parallel to the ground, you bring it down, and then at the very last minute, you swing it. And yeah, he explained, he said, dude, this was a...

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, we spoke about fearlessness sort of courage earlier on. It's a very,

kind of fearlessness, you know, to sort of back yourself to be innovative. But I just thought it was such a cool story. I loved hearing it. 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. I love that. It's one of my favorite things. I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things. And it's just so fun when you have these big, bold ideas. They don't always work, but, you know, with enough smart people around you to iterate on them, 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 into much? I think it's so interesting.

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 so much out there that it's much more like once you can start using it in a way that is 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 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 have this 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 then we're not going to like run out of room on the moon for now. Right. And then same thing with like, there's just, and there's millions of asteroids. Right. So, so, so I'm not, I'm not too concerned about that. I think the scarier thing is you probably don't want wars in space. Right. At all.

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 is 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 go you screw a lot of things up so i hope i never i hope that's not something we get well there's also there's a book called seven ebes by neil stevenson in 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 at seven eves 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 thanks and uh they're talking a

about when you're in, I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if it's even correct to call it altitude when you get to something like the ISS or distance from Earth, that lots and lots of the satellites sort of sit at this particular distance away. And it only takes, there's quite a bit of junk up there, but that's kind of well-positioned.

it doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke, which broke this thing, which, and before you know it, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and entire sort of swaths of real estate and useful technology that's up there can all be damaged. So yeah, I think anything that involves

fucking around in those areas. We don't want that. There's a funny technology I saw the other day that was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on. Of course, it'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 miniature dog. It's shaped like a miniature dog. No, it's great. But I mean, in theory, there's things like that hopefully we could do. But yeah, you don't want a war up there. You know, you're talking about our map of...

of how land works, kind of not working when we think about space, three dimensions, or whether you're looking at sort of the way that orbits occur. I promise this is 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 they're

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've always been fascinated about what it must be like

to have the map of terrain that a squirrel has because it's permanently thinking in spirals, right? It's thinking I can go up and down. So it kind of is a 2D plane, but this 2D plane is wrapped in a 3D way. And when I read Seveneves and I think about that and they're talking about

Fucking orbital dynamics, dude. Holy shit. Like trying to think about the Zenith and the Apogee and the way that, oh, well, we've got to do this two more loops in order for us to come back around at the right angle because it's not only the distance, the angle, the height, the altitude, the speed, all this shit. Like,

Oh, yeah. I just walk forward and back. Like, you 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 it. You build intuition. It's pretty fun. It is weird up there. Yeah. 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. My wife, Taylor, and I are very...

but we love having six kids. We're probably done. That's probably enough. And so, but that's brilliant. It's the most important thing in my life. We're running our firm. We're doing all sorts of new things in AI, backing great entrepreneurs. There'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, that cure rare diseases and help young kids there. I think there's a lot of new ways of, you know, doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases that right now kill kids very young. 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

you know, on the nonprofit side, I have the university, which I'm really passionate about. We have getting so many amazing young students there and partnering with them on things. And then I have my policy work. We have teams in 20 states at Cicero and we'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 and

investor entrepreneur, but they want to have a good job. They don't 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 a hundred K, a hundred 20 K, 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 at not doing well. So how do you help the a hundred thousand people going, coming out of these schools? Well, here's one, I'll tell you how you do it. You

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 do we need to teach to get our kids better? Incentives, incentives. Look at the incentives. What businesses do we partner with? And I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas over the last decade,

The salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools. 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. That even if the degree is functionally useless, they want that functionally useless degree to function usefully. And this is the thing, like, so...

I think vocational schools are a little different from universities. Vocational schools is 100% the profession. There is a theoretical role for moral action and courage and other frameworks of a university, but you're right. One of the things we should be doing with our government, by the way, the part of education and our policy thing is only give loans to students for majors where the major is going to, on average, let them repay the loan. So stop putting people in the debt

to get like terrible degrees, right? That's something we can do right away. So there's things like this we're working on. We're making huge impacts on fixing 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 and 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 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 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, clever kid. Really lovely guy. He had this really interesting tweet with regards to AI that I'd love to get your take on. And he said, if you gave any human 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 information

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 like

solving these types of interesting like problems around the things I was just talking about. Like these are types of things that if it 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 they can make them even better. You know, it's like, but like, no, it's not, you're right. It's not doing that. Yeah. I guess you could say in certain mathematical situations, it is doing that. I think, I think, I think when you see some of the contests,

where it's actually solving math problems. Oh, like unsolved theorems and shit like that? There's stuff like that where I think there's some things that it's doing new methods. And like, you know, the great example was the very famous Go game, right? Where it like played that new type of move. It was like move 37. And it was like, everyone studied it. 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 methods

we're seeing that, but I think reality is too unconstrained. It's not good enough yet to build the conceptual structures to do that. Can it do that the next five or 10 years? Very possibly, but you're right, it's not yet. What would you, for a muggle like me, everybody else that's listening, what should we expect, do you think, from AI over the next half decade? You know, it's really interesting. I have to admit is that

You know, some of my friends were involved in building OpenAI. Some guys worked at Palantiraki 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, and I didn't realize the emergent properties that would come out of GPT-3, you know, at that point. Once that happened, you can kind of predict GPT-4 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 is that it's going to asymptote and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion. Why?

I don't think for the things we were just talking about that it's like fully understood all the properties of intelligence necessary to do what we do. I just 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 this is, and because I didn't predict this in the first place. I was going to say, you've been wrong and ignorant before around AI. Exactly. So it's hard for me to really know. What I do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars of industries already today we can make twice or three times as productive. And so that's where kind of I'm working. So I'm like,

I'm like, if you're a muggle, I'm like, maybe like, maybe like a mid-level wizard. And then there's the top level wizards who are actually pushing forward AI and I'm taking it and understand it quite well and understand how to build quite well. And I'm deploying it to add productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it. But I'm not the guy who's, who's like, who's like pushing for the LM itself. Sadly, that's not who 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. Where 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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